Clipmarks | invictus's 'disasters' clips

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Fortunately, there are ways to go about PROOFING YOUR BRAIN.

1. Change your mindset to “postmore” by challenging culture’s ingrained assumption that “more” of everything is automatically better.

2. Grow your gratitude. Our poor, starved, frozen ancestors would cry tears of joy if they suddenly landed in our culture of abundance. Fostering our appreciation of this bounty can also block the consumerist “cool” pressure to deride so many of our fine, workable possessions as “so last year”.

3. Be enough. We’re constantly told that we aren’t rich enough, glam enough, cool enough, networked enough, etc. This has a powerful insidious effect on our primitive, socially competitive brain circuits. It’s like a toxic substance that turns rational brains into needy toddlers wanting “more, more, more!

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

It is becoming increasingly clear that widespread consumption is wrecking havoc on the planet. But, if it’s making us happier then perhaps it’s worth the compromise, some argue. Strangely, that doesn’t appear to be the case, either. The spreading westernized belief that “more” possessions equates to more happiness hasn’t panned out. In fact, statistically, the First World now has more depression, alcoholism, crime, anxiety, obesity and overall dissatisfaction with life than was reported 50 years ago. What if “more” isn’t “more” in terms of consumption? Recent research is now shedding light on the phenomenon.

Last year Bonn researchers used brain scanning to show that humans don’t want lots of stuff, so much as they want MORE stuff than others

Our primitive brains…got us down from the trees and around the world, through ice ages, famines, plagues and disasters, into our unprecedented era of abundance. But they never had to evolve an instinct that said, ‘enough’.”

Tags: consumerism, planet, brain, consumption

The Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You

Fri, 02 May 2008 09:41:45 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Despite its many flaws, I’m a big fan of human civilization. I marvel at our capacity to organize matter and information, at our ability to learn from mistakes and pass that learning down to subsequent generations. Civilization—writing, cities, trade, the whole lot of it—makes us unique on this planet and, as far as we can tell so far, in our part of the universe.

Clip Source: ieet.org

The grand myth of environmentalism is that it’s all about saving the Earth. It’s not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves.

That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central to the rhetoric, the memetics of environmentalism. Most environmental discussions focus on ecological dynamics, with references to human beings typically limited to enumerations of the various insults we’ve visited upon the planet. Given the degree of culpability we bear for the current state of the planet, this is entirely appropriate.

But the rhetorical focus of environmentalism on the planet obscures the fact that what human beings have done to the Earth pales in comparison to past disasters hitting our world, from massive asteroid strikes to super-volcano eruptions killing off 90+% of the Earth’s species

And in every case, the Earth has recovered, and life has once again flourished.

Tags: myth, environmentalism, conceptual mistakes

Top 10 Scientists Killed or Injured by Their Experiments

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:53:24 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: More details at source

Clip Source: listverse.com

Man owes a great debt to the scientists on this list; all of them died or were injured in their pursuit of knowledge. The advances they have all made to science are extraordinary and many of them paved the way for some of man’s greatest discoveries and inventions.

Karl Scheele

Died from tasting his discoveries

Scheele was a brilliant pharmaceutical chemist who discovered many chemical elements - the most notable of which were oxygen

Jean-Francois De Rozier

First victim of an air crash

Sir David Brewster

Nearly blinded

Elizabeth Ascheim

Killed by X-Rays

Alexander Bogdanov

Killed himself with blood

Robert Bunsen

Blinded himself in one eye

Sir Humphrey Davy

A catalog of disasters

Michael Faraday

Suffered chronic poisoning

Marie Curie

Died of radiation exposure

In 1898, Curie and her husband, Pierre, discovered radium.

Galileo Galilei

Blinded himself

Bonus

Louis Slotin

Killed himself with an accidental fission reaction

Tags: science

20 Ways the World Could End

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:41:10 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Scary...yet possible?

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

20 Ways the World Could End

Asteroid impact

1 Asteroid impact Once a disaster scenario gets the cheesy Hollywood treatment, it's hard to take it seriously.

2 Gamma-ray burst If you could watch the sky with gamma-ray vision, you might think you were being stalked by cosmic paparazzi.

3 Collapse of the vacuum In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of "ice-nine,"

4 Rogue black holes Our galaxy is full of black holes, collapsed stellar corpses just a dozen miles wide.

5 Giant solar flares Solar flares— more properly known as coronal mass ejections

6 Reversal of Earth's magnetic field Every few hundred thousand years Earth's magnetic field dwindles

7 Flood-basalt volcanism In 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted

8 Global epidemics

9 Global warming

10 Ecosystem collapse

11 Biotech disaster While we are extinguishing natural species, we're also creating new ones

12 Particle accelerator mishap Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber,

13 Nanotechnology disaster

Tags: natural disasters, human-triggered disasters, willful self-destruction, apocalypse, technology

50% chance of making it!

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:23:06 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

“Human Nature” -How Will it Affect Our Species Chances of Long-term Survival?

It’s a given that Earth cannot survive indefinitely, if for no other reason than that the sun will eventually expand and roast the planet. Of course, many scientists believe that by the time that happens, life will have long since disappeared on this planet for other reasons—many of them involving manmade disasters. Are they just being pessimistic, or realistic, or both?

Human behavior is often inexplicably bizarre, destructive and counterintuitive, and yet we’ve made it this far. However, in the past, we haven’t had the technological means to cause mass destruction to life on the planet. Now we do, says Sir Martin Rees, and he thinks we’ll get around to using it to our own detriment sooner or later. In fact, the Royal Society Research Professor at Cambridge and Britain's Astronomer Royal says he believes humans have only a 50% chance of making it through just the next century alone.

Tags: human nature, survival, earth

Rediculous Propaganda from FEMA

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:15:05 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: FEMA is a disaster all its own. The next president will need to give them a serious overhaul! Of all the people who shouldn't be afraid to face an ugly situation, it's FEMA's job to face disasters, not create them!

Scolding is not enough for this. They should all lose their jobs. Immediately.

Once again this shows that the administration only cares about pats on the back and looking out for its own interests, not in actually getting things done. Which is probably why in the last 6 years, Bush has achieved nothing except for ardent self-congratulation. These people are totally insufferable politicians!

On a side note, the state department is having trouble filling positions at the Iraqi embassy. I can't think of a better place for Bush and his cronies to serve their retirements. Maybe they might actually do something for their country!

Clip Source: www.iht.com

White House scolds agency for fake news conference

WASHINGTON: The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California.

The agency — much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago — arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency's deputy director.

The questions were predictably soft and gratuitous.

"I'm very happy with FEMA's response," Johnson said in reply to one query from an agency employee.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said it was not appropriate that the questions were posed by agency staffers instead of reporters. FEMA was responsible for the "error in judgment," she said, adding that the White House did not know about it beforehand and did not condone it.

Tags: fema, propaganda, bush

White Radical Evangelicals Get a Pass

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:14:24 GMT

clipped by: dulios
clipper's remarks: "Thus, white evangelical Ministers are free to advocate American wars based on Biblical mandates, rant hatefully against Islam, and argue that natural disasters occur because God hates gay people...By contrast, black Muslim ministers like Farrakhan, or even black Christian ministers like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are held with deep suspicion, even contempt. McCain is free to hug and praise the Rev. Hagees of the world, but Obama is required to prove over and over and over and over that he does not share the more extreme views of black Ministers."

Clip Source: www.salon.com

Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable

Yesterday, though, the equally fringe, radical and hateful (at least) Rev. John Hagee -- a white evangelical who is the pastor of a sprawling "mega-church" in Texas -- enthusiastically endorsed John McCain.

Here is just a small sampling of the belief system of this welcomed McCain supporter:

* All Muslims are programmed to kill and we can thus never negotiate with any of them.

* God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans because it had a gay pride parade the week before and was filled with sexual sin.

* The End Times -- Rapture -- is imminent and the U.S. Government must do what it can to hasten it, which at minimum requires: (a) a war with Iran and (b) undying, absolute support for a unified Israel, including all Occupied Territories

Tags: mccain, obama, farrakhan, hagee, black ministers, white ministers

10 Mistakes in Web Designs

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:03:42 GMT

clipped by: Yasir
clipper's remarks: It was written a year back but still quite useful in avoiding basic mistakes.

Clip Source: www.useit.com

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

Summary:
The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.

1. Bad Search

2. PDF Files for Online Reading

3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links

4. Non-Scannable Text

5. Fixed Font Size

6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility

7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement

8. Violating Design Conventions

9. Opening New Browser Windows

10. Not Answering Users' Questions

Tags: user interface, web design, computer

Ancient records help test climate change

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 01:07:05 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

A librarian at this 10th century monastery leads a visitor beneath the vaulted ceilings of the archive past the skulls of two former abbots.

He pushes aside medieval ledgers of indulgences and absolutions, pulls out one of 13 bound diaries inscribed from 1671 to 1704 and starts to read about the weather.

"Jan. 11 was so frightfully cold that all of the communion wine froze," says an entry from 1684 by Brother Josef Dietrich, governor and "weatherman" of the once-powerful Einsiedeln Monastery.

"But on Jan. 13 it got even worse and one could say it has never been so cold in human memory,"

Diaries of day-to-day weather details from the age before 19th-century standardized thermometers are proving of great value to scientists who study today's climate.

The accounts dispel any lingering doubts that the Earth is heating up more dramatically than ever before

Most historians and scientists delving deep into archives seek accounts of disasters and extreme weather events.

Tags: climate change, history, weather

The wave that may have destroyed Crete

Fri, 11 May 2007 16:30:11 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Finally, more evidence comes about the disasters that caused the Minoan civilization to collapse (and many more to be shaken in the Old World) more than 3500 years ago.

Clip Source: www.stonepages.com

The legend of Atlantis may be more than just a myth. Research on the Greek island of Crete suggests Europe's earliest civilisation was destroyed by a giant tsunami. Until about 3,500 years ago, the Minoan civilisation was flourishing in the Eastern Mediterranean. But around 1500 BCE the people who spawned the myths of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth abruptly disappeared. Now the mystery of their cataclysmic end may finally have been solved. A group of scientists have uncovered new evidence that the island of Crete was hit by a massive tsunami at the same time that Minoan culture disappeared.

Tags: archaeology, aegean, minos, minoan, disasters, tsunami, ancient history, minoan collapse, crete, earthquake

Five Brain Hacks That Will Help You Survive a Disaster

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:02:07 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: io9.com

We all like to fantasize about how awesomely we'd perform in the face of a disaster like a plane crash or zombie invasion. While you may imagine yourself pulling off Chuck Norris spin kicks and living off the land, a Ka-Bar knife and survival training will only get you so far. To get through a disaster alive, you need to react properly under horrible circumstances. Luckily, you can reprogram your brain to do it, but you have to start now. The August, 2008 issue of National Geographic Adventure focused on "Everyday lessons for making it out alive." Author Laurence Gonzales offered a bunch of ways to cope better in a disaster simply by changing your way of thinking. Here are some highlights.

Use a Mantra

Don't Be a Victim

Learn New Things

Stay Emotionally Cool

One Step at a Time

Decide which one thing is the most efficient and important thing for you to do right now, then do it. Then do the next thing

Tags: disasters, humor, irony, still true

Quake aftermath in Dujiangyan, Sichuan -pics

Tue, 13 May 2008 16:15:27 GMT

clipped by: righthand
clipper's remarks: Remember, for the vast majority these are ONE CHILD parents. The loss of any child is unbearable but to lose your only one is imaginable.

Let us judge the Chinese government on how they deal with the aftermath of this disaster that diminishes the scale of Katrina. Yet we still remember the aftermath of Katrina and how the Bush government didn't deal with its largely man-made disaster.

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Rescuers search the remains of the Long Tai Wan complex

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

The remains of a block of flats

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Residents shelter under an umbrella in front of rubble

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Rescuers help a victim from the ruins of the Xin Jian elementary school

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Anxious parents wait for news outside the Xin Jian school

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Security forces struggle to hold back desperate parents at the school

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

A mother collapses in grief as the body of her child is driven away from the remains of the school

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Grieving parents outside the remains of the Long Tai Wan housing compound, where their one and a half year old daughter Xi Xi has been buried by rubble

Tags: china, photos, disasters

Popular Science Myths

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 14:11:31 GMT

clipped by: CrazyRedHead

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

It takes seven years to digest gum

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Adults don't grow new brain cells

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Water drains backwards in the Southern Hemisphere due to the Earth's rotation

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Animals can predict natural disasters

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

A penny dropped from the top of a tall building could kill a pedestrian

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Men think about sex every seven seconds

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Lightning never strikes the same place twice

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

A falling cat will always land on its feet

Studies have demonstrated that, when dropped from most heights, cats will land gracefully on their feet. Results change only with cats dropped upside-down from a height of one foot or less. We're not suggesting you try this at home.

Tags: science