Volcanic eruptions wiped out ocean life 93 million years ago

University of Alberta scientists contend they have the answer to mass extinction of animals and plants 93 million years ago. The answer, research has uncovered, has been found at the bottom of the sea floor where lava fountains erupted, altering the chemistry of the sea and possibly of the atmosphere.
Undersea volcanic activity triggered a mass extinction of marine life and buried a thick mat of organic matter on the sea floor about 93 million years ago, which became a major source of oil, according to a new study.

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Not This Time: Barack Obama Speech

Obama2
by krs601

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
...
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
...
It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Full speech and video here.
UPDATE: From the Daily Kos:

That speech today? The one that has pundits--from the liberal David Corn at The Nation ("This is as sophisticated a discussion of race as any American politician has sought to present to the public") to the conservative Charles Murray, of National Review Online ("it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols."), and those inbetween--noting the brilliance, sophistication, sincerity and candor of the words spoken by Obama? That speech?

He wrote it himself.

Once more, with feeling:

He wrote it. Himself.

Barack Obama did. He wrote it.

Now, if you are like me, and I pray for your soul you are not, you had the normal reaction to finding out this piece of information. You rushed right to the Library of Congress to determine exactly the last time that a President or a presidential candidate wrote a major speech alone, by himself or herself.

And, of course, what you discover is that other than the speeches Obama has written for himself, the last time a major speech was written without the aid of a speechwriter by a president or presidential candidate was Nixon's "Great Silent Majority" speech delivered on October 13, 1969.

Death Masks of Famous People

Above: Alfred Hitchcock.
More: Ben Franklin, George Washington, Lenin, etc.

5,200 Years Old Animation Found in Iran

An Italian team of archaeologists unearthed the bowl goblet in the 1970s from a burial site in Iran’s Burnt City, but it was only recently that researchers noticed the images on the bowl tell an animated visual story.

The oldest cartoon character in the world is a goat leaping to get the leaves on a tree.

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World History as Food Fight

Walt Disney's Epcot Vision

Interesting... From Bitchin' Dave's Disney Blog.

The 5 Ballsiest Con Artists of All Time

Charles 'The Ponz' Ponzi is, quite simply, one of the greatest swindlers in American history. The originator and copyright holder of the pièce de résistance of his career, the "Ponzi Scheme," Ponzi also boasted old-timey movie star looks and a smirk that could charm the pants off of the Pope.

Much like Vito Corleone, Ponzi came to America as an impoverished Italian immigrant. Also like Vito Corleone, Ponzi decided early in the game that his many talents should not be squandered working in a opium pipe-making factory, or wherever they sent the Italians to work back then. Keep in mind that the man had already served time in Canada, hiding it from his family by telling them he had gotten a job there. Once he was out and in the states, he created his own little plan for living the good life.

The deal was, back then you could get these coupons that could be redeemed for stamps in other countries. Ponzi noticed that back in Italy these coupons cost way less than the stamps in America. So, he figured it was still 1918 and there were a lot of retarded people around, and that he could buy like a billion of those coupons in Italy and then redeem them for the stamps here. He made 400 percent profit on each transaction, and didn't produce a damned thing.

Ponzi thought, well, sh17, why isn't everybody doing this? So this smooth operator convinced thousands of people to invest in his totally legit business, the Securities Exchange Company, and by 1920 was making $250,000 a day.

Audacity Factor:

Remember those coupons Ponzi was supposed to be buying with all this investor money? Yeah, he wasn't. There wasn't even a thousandth as many of the coupons in existence as the investors had given him the money to buy. He was basically just taking the investor's money, piling it up and swimming around in it like Scrooge McDuck. It was estimated that millions of dollars had passed through his hands and he had nothing to show for them but his awesome mustache.

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Benny Hinn - Walking may have been good enough for Jesus Christ, but it's not good enough for Benny Hinn. Somebody, please, buy this man a Dove One. Better yet, go ahead and purchase him a yacht, a subway line, the Orient Express, some rickshaws and a few of those elephants domesticated for human transportation. ANYTHING to get his egregious face-slapping ministry to the people.

The Fox Sisters

Gregor MacGregor - most still couldn't believe MacGregor had lied to them, standing up for him in the papers and basically blaming the island for not being there. They simply could not comprehend that any one man could have balls that huge. They were wrong.

Frank Abagnale - Once Abagnale was imprisoned, he convinced his guards that he was actually an undercover prison inspector and that he needed the privilege of having an unsupervised meeting with his FBI agent contact. Yeah, they bought it.

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Amazingly Preserved Dinosaur Found

Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of what appears to be the world's most intact dinosaur mummy: a 67-million-year-old plant-eater that contains fossilized bones and skin tissue, and possibly muscle and organs.

Preserved by a natural fluke of time and chemistry, the four-ton mummified hadrosaur, a duck-billed herbivore common to North America, could reshape the understanding of dinosaurs and their habitat, its finders say.
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"The skin has been mineralized," said Manning. "It is an actual three-dimensional structure, backfilled with sediment."

The fidelity of the envelope, he said, raises the possibility that Dakota could contain other soft-tissue remnants, including muscles and organs.
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In North Dakota, the researchers used Light Detection and Ranging equipment (LiDAR) to develop a three-dimensional topographical map of the area where Dakota died. Manning speculated that the dinosaur collapsed in a riverbed during the late Cretaceous Period and was rapidly buried in mineral-rich wet sand, preventing bacteria from devouring all of its tissue. "There was active-enough chemistry in the sediments that the decay process didn't occur as quickly as the mineralization process," he said. "It was a perfect chemical soup."
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The first significant findings from the dinosaur, currently under review at a major scientific journal, will describe the unique chemical balance that preserved the fossil. The body, meanwhile, remains on the Boeing scanner, as Manning and his colleagues sift through terabytes of data. So far, they have determined that the hadrosaur's hindquarters are 25 percent larger than previously thought for the species, meaning that it could run up to 28 mph -- faster than previously estimated. They have also discovered that the specimen's vertebrae, which museums commonly stack together, are actually spaced 10 millimeters apart. The result, Manning said, implies that scientists may have been underestimating the size of hadrosaurs and other dinosaurs.

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Banned Album Covers

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More album covers here. Ah, the good ole' days.

New York Times Archive - Now Free

The NY Times now has made their on-line archive available for free. Here's a cool list of .http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif, including, for example the first mention of the sinking of the Titanic (pdf):

CAPE RACE, N.F., Sunday night, April 14. -- At 10:25 o'clock to-night the White Star line steamship Titanic called "C.Q.D." to the Marconic wireless station here, and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate assistance was required

Woz, Jobs and Apple ][... Legos!

Awesome!

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Party Like it's Your Birthday!

What was the #1 song on ...
- the day you were born?
- the day you graduated from high school?
- the day you were married?
- the day your child was born?
- the approximate date you were conceived?

Click here to find out.

Thanks to Kitty M.

Was Cleopatra Ugly?

She was the legendary queen of Egypt who seduced two of the most powerful men in the ancient world.

But a silver coin that went on display at a British university yesterday suggests Cleopatra's beauty may be Hollywood fiction.

On one side the coin shows the Egyptian ruler with a shallow forehead, long nose, narrow lips, and a sharply pointed chin (at left above). On the other, her longtime lover, the powerful Roman general and politician Mark Antony, is depicted with a large hooked nose and thick neck (right).

The unflattering images suggest that fictional accounts—from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to the HBO TV series Rome—overplay the attractiveness of the doomed couple.

"The image on the coin is far from being that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton," said Lindsay Allason-Jones, director of archaeological museums at Newcastle University, in a statement.

"Roman writers tell us that Cleopatra was intelligent and charismatic, and that she had a seductive voice but, tellingly, they do not mention her beauty. The image of Cleopatra as a beautiful seductress is a more recent image."

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Predictions -- Hindsight is 20/20

• "The end of the world will surely come in eighteen hundred and eighty one."- Mother Shipton, English prophet, c.1600.
• "The telephone may be appropriate for our American cousins, but not here, because we have an adequate supply of messenger boys." - group of British experts, c.1900.
• "Aircraft are interesting toys, but of no military value." - Marshal Foch, France, 1912.
• "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - Associates of David Sarnoff, manager of an early US radio network, 1920s.
• "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossiblity, a development on which we need waste little time dreaming." - Lee de Forest, "father of radio", 1926.
• "I think there is a world market for as many as 5 computers." - Thomas Watson, head of IBM,1943.
• Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons - Popular Mechanics, 1949.
• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 (who was wrong, even then, as the first Apple was already available. Maybe he had a very narrow idea of what people did at home.)
• The first cars were called horseless carriages, and the first radio was called a wireless. What else could be renamed whatlessly? Is an egg the headless chook?) And what might be the next thing to drop an association we now take for granted? The pageless book? The computerless internet?

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2,000+ Year Old Computer Hacked

It was sunk with a wrecked ship in 80BC, found by divers in 1900 and until now has baffled scientists.

The device is a complex arrangement of more than 30 bronze gears, wheels and dials, and is at least 1,000 years ahead of its time.

Now, after painstaking reconstruction, physicists say it could track astronomical movements with remarkable precision.

It was also able to follow the movements of the Moon and the Sun, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the Moon.

It may have predicted the positions of some of the planets. Lead researcher Prof Mike Edmunds, from Cardiff University, said: 'The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed makes your jaw drop. Whoever has done this has done it extremely well.'

The findings, published in Nature, suggest Greek technology was far more advanced than previously thought. No other civilisation created anything as complicated for another 1,000 years.

Other marvels from the past...

- A 14cm clay battery was found near the Iraqi capital Baghdad. It appears to be 2,000 years old

More and here too.

Thanks to Mr. Battle.

The Original '96 Google Storage

The development of the Google algorithms was carried on on a variety of Computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford. Click to see the equipment in its laboratory setting on the basement floor of Gates Information Sciences. Crawling the web to obtain its link structure required an enormous amount of storage in comparison with typical student projects at that time. We show here the original storage assembly, containing 10 4 Gigabyte disk drives, giving 40 Gbytes total.

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