"Crayola’s crayon chronology tracks their standard box, from its humble eight color beginnings in 1903 to the present day’s 120-count lineup. According to Crayola, of the precious crayons of my childhood – the seventy-two colors from the official 1975 set – sixty-one survive. Today, each is loved to nubs by kids worldwide, just like when I was a sprout."
1) I typed in "faux news"
2) I clicked the Timeline option
3) The result showed a significant increase in the term being used over time starting in 2001
This comforts me because I believe Fox News has had a profoundly negative impact on Americans. Although I believe MSNBC is also biased to some extent, it doesn't come close to the emotionally charged, fear-mongering, cynical tactics of Fox News. Most people who watch Fox News seem to not question the information they are given by their news provider. I think democrats more often take each individual story from their news providers into consideration rather than believe everything they are told whether or not their news providers lean to the left.
What do you think?It took me a simple Google search:
1) I typed in "faux news"
2) I... more
This is kind of a cheap post, but I always like to include this when I blog. You’re looking at a world map presented in Jack Kirby’s Kamandi. It’s the kind of thing that as a reader, going back into the troves of past generations, I can’t get enough of. It’s a great tie in for me as a gamer, too. But really, at the end of the day, it’s a plug for my favorite comic podcast, Funnybook Babylon. I’ll let them take it from here.
--------Its been Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay tooooooo long for me to remember,...but this is still the D.C. universe,.......but something "REALLY BAD" happened to poor ol' Gea,...the eco system has dun gone "STRANGE"......"Damn filthy apes!" are the LEAST of the problems.This is kind of a cheap post, but I always like to include this when I blog.... more
"Phantom time," Charlemagne, and a 300-year memory hole.
THE CONSPIRACY THEORY: No wonder the Dark Ages were so dark—they didn't really exist. The years between 614 and 911 never happened, yet due to some suspicious mathematical manipulation, they have been included in the Western calendar. To cover up the time shift, three centuries of fictional events and nonexistent figures like Charlemagne have been squeezed into the historical record. Reset your watches: We're actually living in the early 1700s.
THE THEORISTS: The idea of "phantom time" was first proposed in 1991 by a German historian named Heribert Illig and his colleagues. They claim that unexplained gaps in the archeological and documentary record confirm their hypothesis. So how did 297 empty years suddenly appear? The prime suspect is Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, who is commonly thought to have lived around 1000. Not so, say Illig and Co.: He actually lived around 700 but wished he lived at the time of the first millennium, so with the help of Pope Sylvester II, he added 300 years to the date. To help cover his tracks, he invented a convincing story about an eighth-century Frankish emperor named Charlemagne.
MEANWHILE, BACK ON EARTH: Needless to say, historians aren't convinced that a large chunk of the Middle Ages were faked. But if it's true, can I get a partial refund for that monster European History book I had to read in high school?"Phantom time," Charlemagne, and a 300-year memory hole.
THE CONSPIRACY... more
WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.
The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.
Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.
Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?
The only way to know is to look back into our planet's past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?
Take greenhouse warming. Climatologists' biggest worry is the possibility that global warming could push the Earth past two tipping points that would make things dramatically worse. The first would be the thawing of carbon-rich peat locked in permafrost. As the Arctic warms, the peat could decompose and release trillions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - perhaps exceeding the 3 trillion tonnes that humans could conceivably emit from fossil fuels. The second is the release of methane stored as hydrate in cold, deep ocean sediments. As the oceans warm and the methane - itself a potent greenhouse gas - enters the atmosphere, it contributes to still more warming and thus accelerates the breakdown of hydrates in a vicious circle.
"If we were to blow all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere, temperatures would go up to the point where both of these reservoirs of carbon would be released," says oceanographer David Archer of the University of Chicago. No one knows how catastrophic the resulting warming might be.
That's why climatologists are looking with increasing interest at a time 55 million years ago called the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures rose by up to 9 °C in a few thousand years - roughly equivalent to the direst forecasts for present-day warming. "It's the most recent time when there was a really rapid warming," says Peter Wilf, a palaeobotanist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "And because it was fairly recent, there are a lot of rocks still around that record the event."
By measuring ocean sediments deposited during the thermal maximum, geochemist James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found that the warming coincided with a huge spike in atmospheric CO2. Between 5 and 9 trillion tonnes of carbon entered the atmosphere in no more than 20,000 years (Nature, vol 432, p 495). Where could such a huge amount have come from?
Volcanic activity cannot account for the carbon spike, Zachos says. Instead, he blames peat decomposition, which would have happened not from melting permafrost - it was too warm for permafrost - but through climatic drying. The fossil record of plants from this time testifies to just such a drying episode.
Continued at link . . .WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene... more
Leland Rzepecki tries to fit the timelines of all 4 Terminator movies together with the Sarah Connor Chronicals. The results are...detailed.Leland Rzepecki tries to fit the timelines of all 4 Terminator movies together with... more
Michael Crichton, the million-selling author who made scientific research terrifying and irresistible in such thrillers as ``Jurassic Park,'' ``Timeline'' and ``The Andromeda Strain,'' has died of cancer, his family said.Michael Crichton, the million-selling author who made scientific research terrifying... more
The transformed the global financial landscape, bankrupting established names and prompting unprecedented interventions by governments and central banks to save others from collapse as they buckle under the weight of "toxic debts." This timeline charts the key moments in that process.
Feb. 7, 2007: HSBC announces losses linked to U.S. subprime mortgages
May 17: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said growing number of mortgage defaults will not seriously harm the U.S. economy.
June: Two Bear Stearns-run hedge funds with large holdings of subprime mortgages run into large losses and are forced to dump assets. The trouble spreads to major Wall Street firms such as Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs which had loaned the firms money.
Aug.: French bank BNP Paribas freezes withdrawals in three investment funds.
Sept.: Crisis-hit UK bank Northern Rock admits financial difficulties as it asks Bank of England for assistance. Share prices fall as customers queue up to withdraw their money.
Oct. 1: Swiss bank UBS announces losses liked to U.S. subprime mortgages
Oct. 5: Investment bank Merrill Lynch reports losses of $5.5 billion
Oct. 15: Cititgroup announces $6.5 billion third quarter losses
Oct. 24: Merrill Lynch announces losses to be over $8 billion
Jan., 2008: Swiss bank UBS announces fourth quarter losses at $14 billion.
Jan. 11: Bank of America pays $4 billion for Countryside Financial.
Jan. 15: Citigroup reports $18.1 billion loss in fourth quarter
Jan. 17: Merrill Lynch reports $11.5 billion loss in fourth quarter. Washington Mutual posts losses
Feb. 13: U.K. bank Northern Rock is nationalized.
March: UK hedge fund Peloton Partners and U.S. fund Carlyle Capital fail
March 16: Bear Stearns, the U.S.'s fifth largest investment bank collapses and is taken over by JP Morgan.
April 1: German Deutsche Bank credit losses of $3.9 billion in first quarter.
April 13: U.S. bank Wachovia Corp. reports big loss for quarter.
May 12: HSBC writes off $3.2 billion in the first quarter linked to exposure to the U.S. subprime market.
July 22: WaMu reports $3.3 billion loss for second quarter.
Aug. 31: German Commerzbank AG takes over Dresdner Kleinwort investment bank.
Sept 7: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac effectively nationalized by the U.S. Treasury which places them into "conservatorship."
Sept. 9: Lehman Brothers shares plummet to lowest level on Wall Street in more than a decade.
Sept 14: Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy. Stock markets plummet; Central banks inject billions of dollars into money markets. Bank of America agrees to buy Merrill Lynch.
Sept. 16: AIG Corp, the world's biggest insurer bailed out by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Morgan Stanley and Wachovia enter merger talks.
Sept. 17: Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) merges with UK bank Lloyds TSB in an emergency rescue plan representing one-third of the UK's savings and mortgage market.
Sept. 18: Fed and other central banks inject billions into global markets to help ease the crunch.
Sept. 22: Japan's Nomura Holdings buys Lehman's Asian operations for up to $525 million.
Sept. 29: UK's Bradford & Bingley nationalized. Spanish banking giant Santander to buy deposits for $38.2 billion. U.S. House of Representatives rejects a $700 billion plan to bail out the U.S. financial system. German bank Hypo Real Estate is bailed out by a consortium of banks. Citigroup, the world's largest bank, buys Wachovia. Irish government moves to safeguard all bonds, debts and deposits for two years in six banks and building societies. Belgian insurance giant Fortis is bailed out by the governments of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Iceland's third largest bank Glitnir nationalized.
Sept 30: Belgian bank Dexia bailed out by France, Belgium and Luxembourg. Swiss bank UBS expected to annouce losses before Oct. 2 shareholder meeting.The transformed the global financial landscape, bankrupting established names and... more
With the premiere of VH1’s “New York Goes to Hollywood,” Dominique takes us back in time to explain how the hell it came to this.
infoMania is a half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV. The show puts a comedic spin on the 24-hour chaos and information overload brought about by the constant bombardment of the media. Hosted by Conor Knighton and co-starring Brett Erlich, Sarah Haskins, Ben Hoffman, and Sergio Cilli, the show airs on Thursdays at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific Times and can be found online at current.com/infomania.
With the premiere of VH1’s “New York Goes to Hollywood,” Dominique... more
Chewing up the week's media so we can regurgitate it, half-digested, into your mouth.
infoMania is a half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV. The show puts a comedic spin on the 24-hour chaos and information overload brought about by the constant bombardment of the media. Hosted by Conor Knighton and co-starring Brett Erlich, Sarah Haskins, Ben Hoffman, and Sergio Cilli, the show airs on Thursdays at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific Times and can be found online at current.com/infomania.Chewing up the week's media so we can regurgitate it, half-digested, into your... more
