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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Wednesday, May 14, 2014

The Daily Drift

Well we just leveled up several levels then ...!
 
Carolina Naturally is read in 199 countries around the world daily.   

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Today is - National Chicken Dance Day

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Today in History

1264 King Henry III is captured by his brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, at the Battle of Lewes.
1509 At the Battle of Agnadello, the French defeat the Venitians in Northern Italy.
1610 French King Henri IV (Henri de Navarre) is assassinated by François Ravillac, a fanatical monk.
1796 English physician Edward Jenner gives the first successful smallpox vaccination.
1804 Explorer William Clark sets off from St. Louis, Missouri.
1853 Gail Borden applies for a patent for condensed milk.
1863 Union General Nathanial Banks heads towards Port Hudson along the Mississippi River.
1897 Guglielmo Marconi sends first communication by wireless telegraph.
1897 "Stars and Stripes Forever" by John Phillip Sousa is performed for the first time in Philadelphia.
1935 A plebiscite in the Philippines ratifies an independence agreement.
1940 Holland surrenders to Germany.
1942 The British Army, in retreat from Burma, reach India.
1948 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion establishes the State of Israel.
1961 A bus carrying black and white civil rights activists is bombed and burned in Alabama.
1969 Three companies of the 101st Airborne Division fail to push North Vietnamese forces off Hill 937 in South Vietnam.
1973 The U.S. space station Skylab is launched.
1991 In South Africa, Winnie Mandela is sentenced to six years in prison for her part in the kidnapping and beating of three black youths and the death of a fourth.

Non Sequitur

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Too Beautiful To Be Real?

16 Surreal Landscapes Found On Earth
These bizarre locations may seem like a series of elaborate movie sets, but they are real destinations that you might want to see for yourself.

Wildfires Threaten the U.S. Plains and Southwest

About 84,273 square miles are at extreme risk for more wildfires, warns the National Weather Service.

9 Droughts Dwarfed Dust Bowl in the Past 500 Years

Nine droughts in the West dwarfed the Dust Bowl of the 1930's, while extremely wet years flooded the region.

Why Are Mysterious Holes Appearing in Sand Dunes?

Sand dunes in the United States are beautiful to look at, and extremely fun to play on. However, recently these sand dunes have started swallowing people!

Random Photos

mpdrolet:

Michael Schmidt

A Bite Apart

This restaurant is built into a cliff in the Swiss Alps, offering beautiful mountain views in the area of Wasserauen, Switzerland. Once diners are through with their meals, they can catch a cable car back to the base of the valley. The pressure is off with regards to making stimulating conversation to keep tablemates on the edge of their seats when the restaurant itself is a cliff hanger!

Learn about the other restaurants with stunning surroundings pictured here and see more examples at this post on Twisted Sifter.

Apples Of Eden

Saving The Wild Ancestor Of Modern Apples
The ancient woodlands of Kyrgyzstan - and of the four neighboring former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan - are home to more than 300 wild fruit and nut trees. One of these threatened species, Malus sieversii, is one of the key ancestors of all cultivated apples grown and eaten around the world.

So rich and unique is this species that on one wild apple tree you can see more variation in apple form than you see in the entire cultivated apple crop in Britain. You can get variation in fruit size, shape, color, flavor, even within the tree, and certainly from tree to tree.

The Beauty And Strangeness Of The World's Colossal Statues

The political, religious, and ideological monuments in photographer Fabrice Fouillet's series 'Colosses' stagger with their extreme dimensions.

But Fouillet is not concerned with hugeness for its own sake. He's more interested in how oversized statues, despite their extraordinary proportions, fit in the landscape around them.

Blagaj

Procida

Phi Phi

Magical Houses From Around The World


Fish Rain Down on Sri Lankan Village

More than 100 pounds of fish recently rained upon a village in western Sri Lanka. Fish rains have occurred many times around the globe and have a natural explanation.

The Hardest Meteor Hits In History

The planet we live on is under attack by space debris all the time but since most of them are burnt and destroyed in the atmosphere, it is not usually a problem.

And when one meteor manages to penetrate the destructive power of the Earth's atmosphere, reaching the ground in the size of a small stone, the damage it can do is minimized decisively. Of course, once in a while some huge meteorites manage to reach Earth almost intact and then do a lot of damage.

Satellite Swarm Maps Earth's Magnetic Field

Three satellites -- dubbed the Swarm -- are mapping the Earth's magnetic field in record time.

Ziggy

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Multiple Alaskan Tsunamis Over Thousands of Years

New evidence reveals that many tsunamis have flooded Alaska's islands and fjords in the past several thousand years

Weather and Climate

Weather refers to the state of the atmosphere at a particular time or over a few weeks and months. Climate refers to the average weather for a place over a period of many years.

Dire Outlook for Climate Impacts

Climate change is already hitting the nation hard and will really clobber us down the road if we don't act now, the study says.

Climate Change or Global Warming?

What do these terms really mean? And how did science and politics shape them?

Polar Scientists Drill 2,000-year-old Ice Core

Polar scientists said they had successfully drilled a 2,000-year-old ice core in the heart of Antarctica in a bid to retrieve a frozen record of how the plane's climate has evolved.

Daily Comic Relief

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World Under Water

The effects of climate change are well documented, but it's widely agreed that not enough is being done to combat the problem. To promote World Environment Day on June 5, CarbonStory - a crowdfunding platform for environmental projects - partnered with marketing agencies BDDO and Proximity Singapore to create an interactive site called World Under Water.
World Under Water is powered by Google Maps Street View. Type in your home address and see what it will look like after sea levels have risen. It works best in Chrome and Firefox.

Antarctic ice really is collapsing, oceans' rise unstoppable

Two groups of scientists report that large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica have started to collapse. Global warming is accelerating the pace, they said at a NASA press conference today. They believe the rise of sea levels is unstoppable. NASA's Thomas P. Wagner: "This is really happening. There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

Maps Of What the Earth Would Look Like If All Ice Melted

Though it may be hard to tell right now while we still have polar ice caps, National Geographic recently created a series of maps that illustrate how visually different the Earth would look if all the ice on the planet melted.

The maps reveal a world with far fewer land masses that are above sea level. With all the glacial bodies thawing, it would lead to a rise in water levels by 216 feet. As a result, many of the continents' current coastal areas would be submerged.

There is water in the core of the earth

And it comes out from volcanoes.  This is hard for me to grasp conceptually; I'll just transcribe an excerpt -
The journal Nature announced a diamond discovery that helped settle a dispute about the Earth’s composition. The dispute concerned whether there is water in the transition zone — the portion of the Earth’s mantle 250 to 410 miles underground. Skeptics have argued that water cannot exist at that depth...
At around 310 miles underground, wadsleyite is pressed into ringwoodite. Both substances can hold water. Now, geophysicists working in Brazil have uncovered a diamond containing ringwoodite that came steaming out of a volcano...
The paper emphasized the volume of water likely to be present in the transition zone — possibly more than all of the oceans combined. But it’s at least 250 miles underground, and we’ve never drilled deeper than seven.
The subject is covered in greater detail at Scientific American, where they indicate that the water in these minerals is carried to the mantle via plate tectonics:
Plate tectonics recycles Earth's crust by pushing and pulling slabs of oceanic crust into subduction zones, where it sinks into the mantle. This crust, soaked by the ocean, ferries water into the mantle. Many of these slabs end up stuck in the mantle transition zone. "We think that a significant portion of the water in the mantle transition zone is from the emplacement of these slabs," Pearson said. "The transition zone seems to be a graveyard of subducted slabs."
The Nature article is here.

Coming Tomorrow


Coming Tomorrow
  • Did Coconut Crabs Really Hide Amelia Earhart's Remains?
  • The mystery of the pandemic flu virus of 1918 solved.
  • Over 1,000 Mayan Codices found in Yucatan Ruins
  • How World War 1 shaped the Evolution/creationism debate
And more ...
This puppy is our Animal Picture, for today.