CAROLINA NATURALLY

Monday, December 12, 2016

Showerthoughts and other things ...

Showerthought: "When you consider the size of the universe, or even the size of our galaxy, "the speed of light" is actually painfully slow."
Showerthought: "The abbreviation for down (dn) is just "up" upside-down."
Showerthought: "You know you're old when you fall down and no one laughs."
Showerthought: "When people think about traveling to the past, they worry about accidentally changing the present, but no one in the present really thinks they can radically change the future."
A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second.
"A factoid is not a small fact. It's a mistaken assumption repeated so often that it is believed to be true. At least, that was the meaning ascribed to the word by Norman Mailer, who is widely credited with coining it, in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer said factoids were "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper"."
GMO crops don’t actually reduce pesticide use or produce more food. "In fact, herbicide use, says the Times, has increased in the US by 21 percent since the introduction of GMO crops in the mid-1990s. In Europe, over the same time period, herbicide use has declined by 36 percent."
A list of U.S. Marine Corps acronyms and expressions.

‘Star of Bethlehem’

The science behind the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ reveals it was likely more than one planet

Bright stars top Xmas trees in homes around much of the world. But what was the "Star of Bethlehem?"

Jupiter's aurorae

"Jupiter has aurorae. Like Earth, the magnetic field of the gas giant funnels charged particles released from the Sun onto the poles. As these particles strike the atmosphere, electrons are temporarily knocked away from existing gas molecules. Electric force attracts these electrons back. As the electrons recombine to remake neutral molecules, auroral light is emitted. In the featured recently released composite image by the Hubble Space Telescope taken in ultraviolet light, the aurorae appear as annular sheets around the pole. Unlike Earth's aurorae, Jupiter's aurorae include several bright streaks and dots..."

We are entering the season when polar aurorae sometimes become visible at our latitude, so this seems an appropriate time to note that Jupiter also exhibits similar phenomena. Text and image via NASA'a Astronomy Photo of the Day.

Sleeping with Cheetahs

Dolph C. Volker studied the heart rate of sleeping cheetahs by sleeping with them. This takes a certain kind of dedication to science that most of us don't have. He says he couldn't sleep because Faith was having dreams. If it were me, I wouldn't get any sleep because my bedmate was an apex predator known for its lightning speed and ability to eat animals much larger than me.

(YouTube link)

This video only covers the first night, as Volker slept with Faith. You can see more of the ten-night experiment at his YouTube channel. Because nothing is more relaxing than watching a man sleeping with cats.

Animal Pictures

Sunday, December 11, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally

The 11th Xmas Tree ...!

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

Dream Mountain ... !

Today is - International Mountain Day

You want the unvarnished truth?

Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told
Some of our readers today have been in:
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Antigua - Argentina - Aruba - Bahamas - Barbados - Belize - Bolivia - Brazil - Canada - Chile Colombia - Costa Rica - Dominican Republic- Ecuador - El Salvador - French Guiana - Guatemala Haiti - Honduras - Jamaica - Mexico - Nicaragua - Paraguay - Peru - Puerto Rico
Sint Eustatius and Saba - Sint Maartin - Trinidad and Tobago - Turks and Caicos - United States Uruguay - Venezuela - Virgin Islands
Europe
Albania - Armenia - Austria - Belarus - Belgium - Bosnia and Herzegovina - Bulgaria - Croatia Cyprus - Czech Republic - Denmark - England - Estonia - Finland - France - Georgia - Germany Greece - Hungary - Iceland - Ireland - Isle of Mann - Italy - Jersey - Latvia - Lithuania - Macedonia Malta - Moldova - Monaco - Montenegro - Netherlands - Northern Ireland - Norway - Poland Portugal - Romania - Russia - San Marino - Scotland - Serbia - Slovakia - Slovenia - Spain - Sweden Switzerland - Turkey - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
Afghanistan - Azerbaijan - Bangladesh - Brunei - Burma - Cambodia - China - Hong Kong - India Indonesia Iran - Iraq - Israel - Japan - Jordan - Kazakhstan - Korea - Lebanon - Malaysia - Mauritius
Mongolia - Nepal - Oman - Pakistan - Palestine - Saudi Arabia - Singapore - Sri Lanka - Taiwan Thailand - Tibet - United Arab Emirates - Uzbekistan - Vietnam - Yemen
Africa
Algeria - Chad - Congo - Egypt - Ethiopia - Ivory Coast - Ghana - Kenya - Libya - Madagascar Morocco - Mozambique - Nigeria - South Africa - Sudan - Tunisia - Zambia - Zimbabwe
The Pacific
Australia - French Polynesia - Guam - Marshall Islands - New Zealand - Papua New Guinea Philippines

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

Today in History

1688		James II abdicates the throne due to William of Orange landing in England.
1816		Indiana is admitted to the Union as the 19th state.
1861		A raging fire sweeps the business district of Charleston, South Carolina, adding to an already depressed economic state.
1862		Union General Ambrose Burnside occupies Fredericksburg and prepares to attack the Confederates under Robert E. Lee.
1863		Union gunboats Restless, Bloomer and Caroline enter St. Andrew’s Bay, Fla., and begin bombardment of both Confederate quarters and saltworks.
1882		A production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe at Boston’s Bijou Theatre becomes the first performance in a theatre lit by incandescent electric lights.
1927		Nearly 400 world leaders sign a letter to President Calvin Coolidge asking the United States to join the World Court.
1930		As the economic crisis grows, the Bank of the United States closes its doors.
1933		Reports say Paraguay has captured 11,000 Bolivians in the war over Chaco.
1936		Britain’s King Edward VIII abdicates the throne to marry American Wallis Warfield Simpson.
1941		The United States declares war on Italy and Germany.
1943		U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull demands that Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria withdraw from the war.
1945		A Boeing B-29 Superfortress shatters all records by crossing the United States in five hours and 27 minutes.
1951		Joe DiMaggio announces his retirement from baseball.
1955		Israel raids Syrian positions on the Sea of Galilee.
1964		Frank Sinatra, Jr., is returned home to his parents after being kidnapped for the ransom amount of $240,000.
1967		The Concorde, a joint British-French venture and the world’s first supersonic airliner, is unveiled in Toulouse, France.
1972		Challenger, the lunar lander for Apollo 17, touches down on the moon’s surface, the last time that men visit the moon.
1978		Massive demonstrations take place in Tehran against the shah.
1981		Military forces in El Salvador kill over 800 civilians in what is known as the El Mozote massacre during the Salvadoran Civil War.
1997		The Kyoto Protocol international treaty intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses, opens for signature.
2001		People’s Republic of China joins the World Trade Organization.
2005		Riots begin in Cronulla, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
2006		President of Mexico Felipe Calderon launches a military-led offensive against drug cartel violence in the state of Michoacan.
2008		Bernard “Bernie” Madoff arrested and charged with securities fraud in what was called a $50-billion Ponzi scheme.

The Creative and Forgotten Fire Escape Designs of the 1800s

In the 19th century, cities became crowded, buildings were built higher, and there were plenty of things to cause fires, like fireplaces, boilers, stoves, and gas lamps. Inventive minds went to work on emergency devices to evacuate people from burning buildings, such as an angled chute that could be rolled out to slide people down to the ground. Too bad it was made of flammable material. But it was still more practical than the invention you see here.

...Pasquale Nigro proposed a fabric-covered set of wings that would allow a wearer to fly down to safety. He wrote: “In operation, the wearer engages the loops with his hands and is prepared to leap, the air imprisoned beneath the fabric material, serving to up-hold the wearer and break the force of his fall.”

Nigro asked for about $33,000 in 1909 to execute his invention, however, the idea never quite took off.

See a a selection of fire escape inventions from the 1800s ranging from parachutes to grappling hooks at Atlas Obscura.

Jobs Have the Highest Rates of Suicide in the United States

What Jobs Have the Highest Rates of Suicide in the United States?

Bully Bingo

Bully Bingo: 52 Signs Someone Will Say Anything to Win an Argument

Cops arrest masked man who was caught on video threatening DAPL protesters

What Real People Can Do to Fight Back Against Fake News

What Real People Can Do to Fight Back Against Fake News

The first thing is to turn off Fox 'News'.

Fox And Friends: 'Real News Is Sometimes Fake News'

Fox And Friends' Steve Doocy: 'Real News Is Sometimes Fake News'

The push is on by wingnuts to muddy the waters on what "fake news"actually is.

Non Sequitur

Wingnuts Have Economics All Wrong

Inequality Media Video: Robert Reich Explains How Wingnuts Have Economics All Wrong

How the Alt-Right Became Racist

How the Alt-Right Became Racist: A Short History of Hate

White Nationalist Gets Punched On Live Television For Incredibly Racist Remarks

White Nationalist Gets Punched On Live Television For Incredibly Racist Remarks

It’s hard to feel sorry for this guy.
So, we won't.

Wingnuts plan to reintroduce Anti-LGBT ‘religious freedom’ bill supported by Dumbass Trump

Wingnuts plan to reintroduce Anti-LGBT ‘religious freedom’ bill supported by Dumbass Trump

Citing “momentum” from the November elections, wingnuts are once against eyeing a bill that would allow anyone to deny services to LGBT people.

***

Sometimes you have to wonder at the reasoning (or lack thereof) that these closeted idiots always are pursuing things detrimental to themselves ...

Ziggy

Link Dump

Earthquakes on a sphere 2001 – 2015

Rare Photos on Pinterest

Underated movies of 2016 & where to see them

Presidential Yacht rusting away & trash filled

Insane homes from around the world

Women Goes to City Council About the McRib

How much it costs to commute in major US cities

5 Facts About Pearl Harbor and USS Arizona

Boat called ‘Nap Tyme’ collides with Ferry

Ridiculous Purchases Made By Super Rich Celebrities

Don’t let me see you in the St. Louis Evening Whirl

We Are All Made of Stars

13.8 billion years ago the universe EXPLODED into life Cutting through space time like a celestial knife Through butter and Bringing with it every permutation And combination of events that […] Continue reading this post … Read more

Going Tooth-to-Tooth with Dinosaurs

Move over, hyenas and saber-toothed cats; scientists have discovered a mammal with an even stronger bite. San Diego State University biologist Eric Ekdale was part of a team of researchers who describe in a new … Read more

Man Punches Kangaroo To Save Dog, Controversy Ensues

Kangaroo bucks can be mighty aggressive, threatening the lives of people and pets and scaring the wits out of anyone they hop after, which is why people pack heat when they're out in the wilds of AustraliaBut zookeeper Greig Tonkins clearly doesn't need a gun to handle himself, and when his dog's life was threatened by an ornery kangaroo he came to the dog's defense and boxed the 'roo right back.

(YouTube Link)

Now it's easy to judge Greig for punching the kangaroo, but consider this:
a) kangaroos have been known to kill other animals
b) Greig has worked with kangaroos for six years at the Taronga Western Plains Zoo so he knows a thing or two about dealing with kangaroo bucks
c) the roo had his dog in a headlock, so he reacted as if his dog's life were in danger.
d) many Australians would have simply shot the thing even after the dog was freed, since Australians "cull" about 5 million kangaroos a year to keep the population managable,
As you can see, there is no black and white when it comes to Greig's actions, and I don't know about you but I would have done the same thing in a heartbeat to save my dog's life.

Monkeys may technically be able to talk ...

Monkeys may technically be able to talk (but this will make you glad they don't)

They're physically capable, and boy do they sound terrifying

Animal Pictures

Saturday, December 10, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally

The 10th Xmas Tree ...!

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

Award Most Sought ... !

Today is - Nobel Prize Day

You want the unvarnished truth?

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

Today in History

1817		Mississippi is admitted as the 20th state.
1861		Kentucky is admitted to the Confederate States of America.
1862		The U.S. House of Representatives passes a bill creating the state of West Virginia.
1869		Governor John Campbell signs the bill that grants women in Wyoming Territory the right to vote as well as hold public office.
1898		The United States and Spain sign the Treaty of Paris, ceding Spanish possessions, including the Philippines, to the United States.
1917		The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the International Red Cross.
1918		U.S. troops are called to guard Berlin as a coup is feared.
1919		Captain Ross Smith becomes the first person to fly 11,500 miles from England to Australia.
1941		Japanese troops invade the Philippine island of Luzon.
1941		The siege of Tobruk in North Africa is raised.
1943		Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill that postpones a draft of pre-Pearl Harbor fathers.
1943		Allied forces bomb Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria.
1949		150,000 French troops mass at the border in Vietnam to prevent a Chinese invasion.
1950		Dr. Ralph J. Bunche becomes the first African-American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1977		On UN Human Rights Day, the Soviet Union places 20 prominent dissidents under house arrest, cutting off telephones and threatening to break up a planned silent demonstration in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. Soviet newspapers decry human rights violations elsewhere in the world.
1978		President of Egypt Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1983		Democracy is restored to Argentina with the assumption of Raul Alfonsin.
1989		Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj announces the establishment of Mongolia’s democratic movement that changes the second oldest communist country into a democracy.
1993		The Wearmouth Colliery in Sunderland, East England, closes, marking the end of the County Durham coalfield, which had been in operation since the Middle Ages.

Editorial Comment

In blog news ...
Our readership is growing and we appreciate our readers, thank you.
We have decided on a couple of minor updates to the daily postings for the new year, neither of which will be noticed by the vast majority of our readers but we're going ahead with them anyway.
One major decision was made to continue to not post comments.
There are just too many spam postings posing as comments and not enough time or inclination to wade through the morass to find the pearl(s) of legitimate comments. (That along with the trolls trying to pervert and subvert this blog just like all other blogs and websites they slither onto.)
In other words ...
Scissors and tape in hand - Today is "Xmas present wrapping day", at least according to the Mrs., it is ... so it's wrapping we go.
The fireplace is roaring and the dogs are jumping in to rolls of wrapping paper and spreading them around the room even before the first snip is snipped so you know if the presents are not wrapped just right the dogs get the credit.
Remember, as always ....

Have Fun and Be Happy

World Record Rube Goldberg Contraption Lights Up Xmas Tree

The municipal Xmas tree in Riga, Latvia, was switched on by a process that took 412 steps and ten minutes to complete. The video is much shorter because the part where they brewed coffee was condensed, and there may have been other shortcuts for the video.

(YouTube link)

You have to imagine how frustrating all the tests were for this, and how nervous the builders must have been to make it perform perfectly, not just for the waiting crowd outside, but in front of Guinness judges. The company Scandiweb sponsored the record-setting chain reaction that Guinness has enshrined as the World's Largest Rube Goldberg Machine.

How "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" Became a Holiday Staple

The most despised song from my entire radio career (1982-2006) was "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." It wasn't because there was anything inherently wrong with the song, except for the dead grandmother. What ruined the song for me was the dozens of requests for it every hour, even right after I had played it. Every hour, every December, for decades. Every year, a new cohort of children decide that's the one Xmas song they want to hear. Now it's a Xmas classic, with its own history.

It begins, like all Xmas fables should, with a blizzard. It was December 1978, and a San Francisco veterinarian named Elmo Shropshire, a.k.a. Dr. Elmo, was booked at the Hyatt in Lake Tahoe with his then-wife, Patsy. The couple had a comedy-bluegrass duo called Elmo & Patsy, and just before taking the stage, they got a visit from one Randy Brooks, a Texas singer-songwriter who’d played the hotel before them and gotten stuck there by the snow.
"I was never what I’d consider to be much of a singer," Dr. Elmo tells mental_floss from his home in California. "I always sang novelty songs, so it didn’t matter if I could sing or not. At the time, we were doing a lot of funny songs. Randy saw our show and said, 'I’ve got this song I think would be perfect for you.'"

That was the very beginning. It took years for the song to really take off, but when it did, it changed everything for Dr. Elmo. Read the story from the man who made it at mental_floss.

Why do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?

When parents tell stories to their children, we get an image of fantasy creatures that's all our own. Later we become more attuned to the pop culture depictions of them, like the elves from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the dwarves (or dwarfs) from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But in 2016, mentions of these characters are most likely to make us think of Lord of the Rings. The movie version, where hobbits, orcs, elves, dwarves, and men all have their distinctive accents.

Throughout The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the reams of related histories Tolkien wrote about Middle Earth, he established whole societies, histories, and languages for a handful of races that still inform how they are depicted today. Elves are ancient, beautiful, and have pointy ears; dwarves are short, tough, and love to use axes; orcs are filthy brutes who live for destruction.
Of course the original readers couldn’t hear what Tolkien’s creatures sounded like, but the intense focus he placed on developing their languages gave people a pretty good idea. “Tolkien was a philologist,” says Olsen.“This is what he did. He studied language and the history of language and the changing of language over time.”
Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures and histories to speak them, often taking inspiration from the sound of an existing language. In the case of the ever-present Elvish languages in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men and hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.

Tolkien was only partially responsible for the accents of his creations. He did establish that they sounded different from each other, but what those languages sound like changed over time as various interpreters added their own ideas. Did you know that Tolkien imagined dwarves sounding like Israelis? Read about the evolution of fantasy characters and how they speak at Atlas Obscura.

6 Unsettling Mysteries of the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War saw the death of a half-million people between 1936 and 1939, but outside of Spain, it gets little space in history books because of World War II. That's also why many war crimes and shady dealings did not get proper documentation or an adequate investigation at the time. In the decades since, these mysteries remain. For example, what really happened to Dick Sheepshanks?

Dick Sheepshanks was a 27-year-old Reuters war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, and his life was the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster. Sheepshanks headed for Spain in 1937 with several other journalists to cover Franco’s Nationalists, but he was killed in December in the Republican shelling of the village of Cudete. When news of his death reached London, Sir Roderick Jones (who headed the Reuters News Agency and unknowingly shared a love interest with Sheepshanks) paid him all the tributes as befitted a national hero.
Then things get weird. According to some who had known him – including Jeanne Stourton, the aforementioned love interest – Sheepshanks had become suspicious of one of his fellow journalists, and the only one of the group to survive: Kim Philby. If that name sounds familiar, it’s for good reason – Philby went on to gain infamy as Britain’s most notorious traitor during the Cold War.
According to Stourton, Sheepshanks had grown increasingly suspicious of Philby’s motivations, and Philby took it upon himself to take Sheepshanks out of the picture. A comparison between eyewitness reports and photographic evidence has raised a number of unanswered questions, and it’s been suggested that Philby may have had a hand in the attack. What exactly happened to the Reuters journalists remains undetermined, and the death of Ernest Richard Sheepshanks has become a compelling Spanish Civil War mystery.

Read about five other such mysteries from the Spanish Civil War at Urban Ghosts.

The Real Story Behind The Myth Of Area 51

What exactly goes on inside of Area 51 has led to decades of wild speculation. There are, of course, the alien conspiracies that galactic visitors are tucked away somewhere inside. Well, there are no aliens at America's most famous top-secret military base, but what is there is just as interesting.

“BRAAAM!”: The Sound that Invaded the Hollywood Soundtrack

The sound is a bit reminiscent of a foghorn blast, but was actually recorded with brass instruments and piano. You heard it in the 2010 movie Inception, and in almost every movie trailer since then. It's known in the business as "BRAAAM!” How in the world did one discordant blast become so ubiquitous in Hollywood? A good bit of the credit goes to composer Hans Zimmer.

Part of it is the way his soundtracks are put together: Zimmer’s approach resembles the sampling we’re used to from pop music — themes are not simply repeated by musicians, but instead montaged by the composer. Over the last few decades Zimmer has created something of a cottage industry that churns out soundtracks at a Herculean clip: In 1989 he founded Media Ventures, which was later rechristened Remote Control Productions, a kind of soundtrack workshop where Zimmer and about forty collaborators crank out sample-based soundtracks that are largely created in-studio (their combined list of credits is too staggering to list here). If you’ve ever wondered why Batman Begins sounds like Pirates of the Caribbean, which sounds like The Da Vinci Code, Remote Control is the reason.

But that isn't the whole story. To understand, you need to know more about how Hollywood scores are designed, and how they evolved over the past few decades.

GoPro Video Footage From Inside A Dishwasher

We knew people would use GoPro cameras to film every kind of physical activity imaginable, but the GoPro is showing us so much more than extreme sports and stunts.They're letting us take a look inside stuff like never before, satisfying our curiosity with video footage from inside places where full grown adults simply won't fit- like inside a dishwasher while it runs through a full wash cycle.

(YouTube Link)

YouTuber Bito posted this video he shot with his Hero3 GoPro camera a few years back, and all I have to say is- fill that dishwasher up before you run it, Bito, or you're wasting water!

A Blueprint to Stop the Hemorrhaging of Jobs from the U.S.

A Blueprint to Stop the Hemorrhaging of Jobs from the U.S.

Dictionary.com's Word Of The Year Is ...

... xenophobia.

Victoria's Secret Catches Woman Shoplifting, So They Throw Out Two Innocent Black Customers

Victoria's Secret Catches Woman Shoplifting, So They Throw Out Two Innocent Black Customers

The Criminalization of Black Homelessness

The Criminalization of Black Homelessness

Firefighter Charged With Arson, Blames Black Lives Matter

Welcome to Dumbass Trump's AmeriKKKa!

Famed Holocaust Attorney Sues Over FBI Electioneering

Famed Holocaust Attorney Sues Over FBI Electioneering: It Could 'Lead To Impeachment'

E. Randol Schoenberg, an attorney renowned for recovering artworks stolen by Nazis during the Holocaust, filed a lawsuit against the FBI this week to get answers about why Director James Comey falsely suggested that Hillary Clinton committed a crime just days before the 2016 election.

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Monday, December 12, 2016

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