yet more piracy

Why pirates are in fact good for the world. The chart below is taken from Joshuah Bearman, who in turn got it from The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In the CotFSM's own words:

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

I should mention that the image file is named "piratesarecool4.jpg."

Otherwise, for more serious thoughts on piracy, head over to theoria.