CAROLINA NATURALLY: Mar 13, 2017

Monday, March 13, 2017

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally

That's it ...!

Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.

Cute Overload ... !

Today is - Napping Day

You want the unvarnished truth?

Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told

We wish to thank Natalie and Melissa for keeping us informed about the vile and perverted wingnut trolls we have banned from this site. They suffer the indignity of the wingnut hate sites to keep us (and others) informed on the trolls sputum.

Pedophilia and bestiality are common themes among the perverts, things they of course accuse everyone else of and almost every one of the trolls is a homosexual which is by itself not a bad thing but these perverts seek young boys for sex and THAT makes it a very bad thing.

Also their utter and total deficiency in comprehension skills is astounding.

We will continue to shine a bright spotlight in the wingnut perverts faces so that all can see what they try to hide by distraction and accusation.

But now we're taking a nap:

Don't forget to visit our sister blogs Here and Here.

Today in History

483		St. Felix begins his reign as Catholic Pope.
607		The 12th recorded passage of Halley’s Comet occurs.
1519		Hernando Cortez lands in what will become Mexico.
1660		A statute is passed limiting the sale of slaves in the colony of Virginia.
1777		Congress orders its European envoys to appeal to high-ranking foreign officers to send troops to reinforce the American army.
1781		Astronomer William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus, which he names ‘Georgium Sidus,’ in honor of King George III.
1793		Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin.
1861		Jefferson Davis signs a bill authorizing slaves to be used as soldiers for the Confederacy.
1868		The U.S. Senate begins the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.
1881		Czar Alexander II is assassinated when a bomb is thrown at him near his palace.
1915		The Germans repel a British Expeditionary Force attack at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in France.
1918		Women are scheduled to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York due to a shortage of men.
1935		A three-thousand-year-old archive is found in Jerusalem confirming biblical history.
1940		Finland capitulates conditionally to Soviet terms, but maintains its independence.
1941		Hitler issues an edict calling for an invasion of the Soviet Union.
1942		Julia Flikke of the Nurse Corps becomes the first woman colonel in the U.S. Army.
1943		The German forces liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków. Approximately 2,000 Jewish occupants were murdered, with 2,000 sent to Plaszow and another 3,000 men, women, and children sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of those sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2,450 were immediately gassed upon arrival.
1943		Japanese forces end their attack on the American troops on Hill 700 in Bougainville.
1951		Israel demands $1.5 billion in German reparations for the cost of caring for war refugees.
1957		The FBI arrests Jimmy Hoffa on bribery charges.
1963		China invites Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev to visit Beijing.
1970		Cambodia orders Hanoi and Viet Cong troops to get out.
1974		The U.S. Senate votes 54-33 to restore the death penalty.
1974		Arab nations decide to end the oil embargo on the United States.
1981		The United States plans to send 15 Green Berets to El Salvador as military advisors.
1985		Upon the death of Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the new leader of the Soviet Union.
1991		Exxon pays $1 billion in fines and costs for the clean-up of the Alaskan oil spill.

This Man Just Crossed the Entire Atlantic Ocean on a Stand-Up Paddleboard

This Man Just Crossed the Entire Atlantic Ocean on a Stand-Up Paddleboard

What did you do with your life today?

How to Clear a Path Through 60 Feet of Snow

Route 6 in Japan runs from Toyama on the coast, through a tunnel under Mt. Tateyama, and on to Nagano. Mt. Tateyama is part of the Hida Mountains, where snow falls are measured in feet instead in inches. The mountains can get 125 feet of snow in a year! That's why a part of Route 6 is called Snow Canyon. It is closed in winter, but come spring, someone has to clear all that snow off the highway. While hundreds of snowplow drivers work all winter clearing the streets of Toyama, the Snow Canyon project starts with finding where the road is under 60 feet of snow. Then it get really technical. Read about the process of uncovering Snow Canyon at Atlas Obscura.

The Single Best Thing in Every State

We've posted a lot of articles featuring the best ______ in any given state, but all of those focus on a specific subject. If you've ever wondered what the absolute best thing in any given state is, you won't wanna miss this Thrillist article. I can't attest to most other states since I haven't lived in them, but the Pacific Coast Highway might very well be the best thing in California. And from what I've seen of Arizona, the Grand Canyon is pretty up there. And Maine lobster is pretty amazing too, though you don't actually have to go to Maine to enjoy it.

So check out the best thing about each state here.

The Day St. Louis Went From Spanish to French to American in Just 24 Hours

March 10 is known as There Flags Day in St. Louis, Missouri. The city was part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which expanded the US into what later became all or part of 15 states. But see, France had just gained most of that land from Spain mere weeks before the deal with the United States, and some cities remained under Spanish administration for quite some time. A treaty ceremony was held New Orleans, but other areas didn't get the news until later. So they planned another ceremony in St. Louis for March 9, 1804.

But there was a small problem: St. Louis was one of the cities the Spanish hadn’t gotten around to giving up. Authorities soon realized that, in order to actualize the territory’s new identity, “two treaties must be put into effect at one time,” writes historian Walter Barlow Stevens in St. Louis, The Fourth City. First, the land had to be be transferred from Spain to France. Then, it had to be be transferred again, from France to the United States.

St. Louis residents were so happy to be suddenly French that the powers-that-be hesitated to tell them they were actually American. So they delayed the second ceremony until the next day! Read about the handover of St. Louis at Atlas Obscura.

Kate Warne, America's First Woman Detective

In 1856, 23-year-old widow Kate Warne answered an employment ad for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. She had to convince Allan Pinkerton that she could gain information in ways that a man couldn't, and she was right. Warne's success at gathering intelligence led Pinkerton to hire more woman detectives, and Warne was put in charge of them. During the Civil War, Pinkerton agents were charged with infiltrating Confederate society to gather information on troop movements

It was in this second role that Warne helped to prevent an assassination attempt on President Abraham Lincoln. By this time, Warne was the superintendent of all of Pinkerton’s woman detectives, but he called on her especially to pose as a Southern lady in Baltimore and help learn details of the suspected plot.
“Mrs. Warne was eminently fitted for this task. Of rather a commanding person, with clear-cut, expressive features, and with an ease of manner that was quite captivating at times, she was calculated to make a favorable impression at once,” Pinkerton wrote in his book The Spy of the Rebellion. “She was a brilliant conversationalist when so disposed, and could be quite vivacious, but she also understood that rarer quality in womankind, the art of being silent.”
Warne won over the wives of several conspirators, gaining key information to uncover their scheme to kill Lincoln while he traveled by train and destroy a section of track as well. She then aided Pinkerton himself in smuggling the president secretly aboard a train so that he could pass through Baltimore undetected.

Warne's story is only the first of 10 Trailblazing U.S. Law Women you can read about at mental_floss.

8 Surprising Things That Prove You’re Super Smart

8 Surprising Things That Prove You’re Super Smart

These subtle factors are actually signaling your brilliance

What Type of Porn User Are You?

What Type of Porn User Are You?

You may want to examine your, uh, viewing habits a bit more closely after reading this

This Patient's Brain Stayed Active for 10 Minutes After Death

This Patient's Brain Stayed Active for 10 Minutes After Death

Doctors are at a loss to explain what happened

Bacon, Soda and Not Enough Nuts May Be Killing You

Bacon, Soda and Not Enough Nuts May Be Killing You

A new study links bacon and other processed meats to half of all heart disease-related deaths in the country

Understanding the roots of homophobia around the world

Understanding the roots of homophobia around the world

Lab-Grown Diamonds Are More Ethical Than Blood Diamonds

Lab-Grown Diamonds Are More Ethical Than Blood Diamonds, but Will People Buy Them?

Car Stolen Twice; Owner Tracks It

This car theft story contains so many astonishing things about our modern world that it's hard to know where to start. Ben Yu is a startup founder, living in San Francisco's Mission District, and he has a Mini Cooper. The car has suffered constant break-ins and vandalism, and then it was stolen -twice. While Yu waited hours to file a police report, he also tracked the car's movements on his GPS.

Meanwhile, his car ran out of gas a whole city away in Brisbane, CA. The thief left it on the side of the road and stole the key.
He retrieved the car with no gas and no key… Then it got jacked again on Thursday.
According to his Facebook, Yu woke up at 8:15 am on Thursday and found that his car had been stolen again from almost the exact same spot. He guessed it was the same perpetrator as Wednesday’s theft because that person would have already had a key.
How that happened: If you’re letting people rent your car through Getaround, you leave your keys in your car, and the Getaround app locks the doors and disables the engine in case of a break-in. Yu’s friend Travis Herrick had been using the Mini, and Herrick had used the normal key to lock the car instead of the Getaround app, though he still left the spare key in the car for renters. When the thief broke in for the second time, they could start the car and make away with it because the app hadn’t hobbled the engine.

First off, the modern technology involved in this story is staggering. He rents out the car, so the key must be left in it. Yet it can be tracked. And locked and unlocked without a key. And disabled remotely, under certain circumstances. This tech ran into real world low-tech problems with both police bureaucracy and life in a high crime area. Then there's the absurdity of a tech-savvy startup founder who can't afford to live in a safe neighborhood and must rent out his vehicle for extra money. Yu framed his Facebook story as a problem with law enforcement, but it can also be told in the context of the limits of technology or the insane cost of living in San Francisco. You can read the entire chronology at Buzzfeed, where you'll also see a video of Yu and Harris tracking the second theft.

Los Angeles Rejects School Choice Groups' Influence In School District Race

Will California charter schools go down the tubes like those DeVos advocates for?

'Disaster Capitalism'

'Disaster Capitalism'— How Corporations Make a Killing Out of Catastrophe

Welcome to Pleistocene Park

Sergey Zimov has a dream to take a chunk of the Siberia tundra back to the last Ice Age, to the Pleistocene era, when giant mammals roamed the earth. Zimov and his son Nikita founded Pleistocene Park twenty years ago, and since then have stocked it with bison, musk oxen, wild horses, reindeer, and other grass-eating beasts. But to really move the ecosystem back to the way it was, they need the tree-trampling talents of woolly mammoths.

Pleistocene Park is named for the geological epoch that ended only 12,000 years ago, having begun 2.6 million years earlier. Though colloquially known as the Ice Age, the Pleistocene could easily be called the Grass Age. Even during its deepest chills, when thick, blue-veined glaciers were bearing down on the Mediterranean, huge swaths of the planet were coated in grasslands. In Beringia, the Arctic belt that stretches across Siberia, all of Alaska, and much of Canada’s Yukon, these vast plains of green and gold gave rise to a new biome, a cold-weather version of the African savanna called the Mammoth Steppe. But when the Ice Age ended, many of the grasslands vanished under mysterious circumstances, along with most of the giant species with whom we once shared this Earth.
Nikita is trying to resurface Beringia with grasslands. He wants to summon the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem, complete with its extinct creatures, back from the underworld of geological layers. The park was founded in 1996, and already it has broken out of its original fences, eating its way into the surrounding tundra scrublands and small forests. If Nikita has his way, Pleistocene Park will spread across Arctic Siberia and into North America, helping to slow the thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Were that frozen underground layer to warm too quickly, it would release some of the world’s most dangerous climate-change accelerants into the atmosphere, visiting catastrophe on human beings and millions of other species.

The possibility of cloning a mammoth Jurassic Park-style has been in the news for years, but finding viable mammoth DNA still eludes us. But there's another possibility: designing a cold weather elephant species by tweaking the genes of existent elephants. Read about this research and about the development of Pleistocene Park at the Atlantic.