The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -Andrew Carnegie, industrialist (1835-1919)
A University of Houston team flying over Honduras blanketed the Mosquitia rainforest with as many as 25-50 laser pulses every square meter that totaled up as more than four billion shots during the entire project. One area looked very suspicious for a buried city, perhaps the fabled Ciudad Blanca which has played a central role in Central American mythology.
In 1939, Theodore Morde claimed to have rediscovered the site, and learned from locals that it was home to the myth of the monkey God.
Texts cite it as the birthplace of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and previous reported sightings over the years have described golden idols and elaborately carved white stones, leading to the lost city's name.
However, no confirmation of the existence of the city has ever been provided.
If confirmed, the discovery of Ciudad Blanca would be comparable to the popularisation of forgotten sites such as Machu Picchu, which lay ruined for hundreds of years until reintroduced to western eyes in 1911 by American historian Hiram Bingham.
At the UK's biggest primary school, Gascoigne Primary School in Barking, East London, only one in 10 pupils speaks English as first language - down from nine out of 10 in 1999. Now they speak no fewer than 60 different languages. The penance for empire. One only can guess at the origin of the town's name.
Priestley knew that putting a living organism in a jar and depriving it of air, the animal would die. But if he did the same thing with a plant it lived and flourished.
Who is ....Aphra Behn?
An unsigned, 1,300-word Sherlock Holmes story has just been discovered in a pamphlet printed in 1903. The 48-page booklet was published during a three-day funding bazaar to raise funds for bridge restoration in Selkirk, a Scottish Borders town. It includes stories and poetry from local residents of Selkirk. Entitled “The Book o’ The Brig,” the pamphlet also announces the arrival of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the final day of the bazaar as a celebrity guest of honor. The story, entitled “Sherlock Holmes: Discovering the Border Burghs and, By Deduction, the Brig Bazaar” features Holmes and Watson in London discussing among other things Watson’s upcoming trip to Selkirk to see the bridge.
Monica Lewinski has a TED talk this month.
In his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, Carey envisions a future in which "the idea of 'admission' to college will become an anachronism, because the University of Everywhere will be open to everyone" and "educational resources that have been scarce and expensive for centuries will be abundant and free."
According to Dr. Stephen Tinney, an associate professor of Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania, “The reason for inventing writing was the need to record the production and distribution of commodities like beer.” One of the oldest pieces of preserved writing is a clay tablet with a record of beer rations for workers.
Protagonists of equality never, it seems, make clear precisely what, other than wealth and income, should be equalized. (Simmons)
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built about 5,000 years ago by Pharaoh Khufu, a 455-foot creation, which remained the tallest man-made structure on the planet for almost 4,000 years.
It required the work of between 20,000 and 30,000 laborers working for about 23 years.
John Bunyan, a Baptist of the 17th Century, wrote numerous books and pamphlets, including A Pilgrim's Progress. It sold 100,000 copies in his lifetime, and is still reported to be the most sold book in the world, next to the Bible. In it Christian's allegorical journey from "this World to that which is to come" requires him to triumph over Obstinate, Pliable, Worldly-Wise, Ready-to-Halt and Madame Bubble; to negotiate the Slough of Despond and the town of Carnal Policy; to cross the Valley of Humiliation and the Plain of Ease; to rise above Lucre-Hill and the Delectable Mountain; and, like all who would arrive at the Celestial City, to make no purchase at Vanity Fair.
Golden oldie:
The homeless man shot by LA police was identified by the LAPD as Charley Saturmin Robinet. But he stole the identity of the real Robinet in the late-1990s. The man calling himself Robinet was convicted of a bank robbery in 2000, and Cruau said that French officials let the United States know that Robinet had assumed someone else's identity and was not a French citizen. The actual Charley Saturmin Robinet is still alive and living in France.
California is the leading wine producing state— California’s 211.9 million cases held a 61 percent share of the U.S. market. Californians enjoy nearly one in five (18 percent) of the bottles consumed in the United States. If California were a nation, it would be the fourth leading wine-producing country in the world behind France, Italy and Spain.
40,000 years ago, everything began to change in what, anthropologically speaking, amounts to an eye-blink of time. Cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, mammoths, rhinos, lions, leopards, dholes … fierce as they were, they all vanished from the forests and steppes of Eurasia. And Neanderthal populations first drastically dwindled and then vanished as well, and now, in our time, for two hundred years, ever since the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossils, debate has raged as to what caused this catastrophic die-off. The debate, though, is limited to proportion: What part was climate change and what part was you and me, the Homo sapien. You, in your genes, are genocidal. (I, of course, am not.) In a new book, Pat Shipman adds an interesting twist to the destructive formula--all, regrettably speculative: The new Homo formed an alliance with a species that identified with our aggressive, predatory, family structured lives. The wolf-dog. That alliance wiped out all competitors in a slow, cataclysmic eco-change.
In 1640 Aphra Behn was born. Her Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684-7) is seen as the first epistolary novel; Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) is studied as the first anti-colonial novel and the first philosophical novel, one of its ideas being that of the 'noble savage'; her popular, fifteen-play career on the Restoration stage made her the first woman to earn a living as a writer.
South African Rashida Manjoo - UN’s special "rapporteur" --claims that “sexism in Britain was the worst she had seen in the world" (despite her visits to dangerously repressive countries such as Bangladesh, Somalia and Algeria.) Hyperbole is the lifeblood of the political bully.
The U.S. has gone nearly a decade without a Category 3 storm or higher making landfall.
Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood was published four months after his death in 1954. He finished it just before leaving for a tour of America. He said he was taking the trip for the money; his wife said he was taking the trip for "flattery, idleness and infidelity."
Adding laws onto an ethically corrupt state will not change much of anything, because the monopoly of violence goes on tempting. The mechanical rules of bribery in Stockholm are probably the same as in Delhi, and the jaywalking rules in Berlin the same as in New York. The difference is ethics. Without ethics no amount of institutional “redesign” would yield the honest government that Swedes have and that American progressives fantasize about. (Deidra McCloskey)
Brain scans have shown that personal rejection is actually experienced as physical pain, and that this pain is experienced whether those that reject us are close friends or family or total strangers, and whether the act is overt exclusion or merely looking away. Most typically, ostracism causes us to act to be included again -- to belong again -- although not necessarily with the same group.
The processing capacity of the conscious human mind is a mere 120 bits per second. We live in a world with 300 billion billion bits of information.
The main precious metal from the New World was silver, not gold. The huge silver source was in South America, called "Peru" by the Spanish, but really the area described a much larger area than present day Peru. The largest mine was in present day Bolivia, a virtual mountain of silver.
Nabob: n: Used by Europeans as meaning a man, returning very rich from Asia, particularly the Indian subcontinent. Also a rich man from the East Indian Company, wealth implied ill-gotten. From Hindi nabab, from Arabic nuwwab, honorific plural of na'ib "viceroy, deputy," "deputy governor in Mogul Empire." Anglo-Indian,.(1764).
There was a time in the last several decades that prime interest rates in the U.S. were in the mid-teens. Debt was expensive and, consequently, discouraged.
Over the past several decades we’ve gone from a nation of savers who paid cash for things including homes and cars to a nation of spenders who use debt like mortgages, car loans and credit cards to pay for things. "Corporate debt was $3.5 trillion– in 2007, arguably a period and– many would describe as bubbly. It’s 7 trillion now. So it’s gone from 3.5 trillion to 7 trillion. As you know, most of that mix has been in more highly leveraged stuff, Covenant-Lite loans– high yield, that’s where the majority of the rise has been. And if you look at corporations have been using it for, it’s all financial engineering.” -Stanley Druckenmiller. "In the past 20 to 30 years, credit has grown to such an extreme globally that debt levels and the ability to service that debt are at risk, relative to the private investment world. Why doesn’t the debt supercycle keep expanding? Because there are limits.” -Bill Gross. At one quadrillion yen, the Japanese debt level is so high that it now takes the government 43% of its central tax revenue just to pay interest this year. Back in August 2014, yield-starved bondholders were delighted to give American Eagle Energy $175 million in cash; the company promised them an 11% annual cash coupon. Now, seven months later, the company is in default.
AAAAaaaannnnnnnddddd......a graph:
