Do you enjoy history?  Have you seen ancient sites and artifacts?  Do you enjoy museums? Me too; I love history.

I recently watched the four-hour BBC series “A History of Ancient Britain”.  It was amazing and expanded my mind.  I had seen a variety of artifacts around the world and have been struck by the humanity of them.  I have in my hand now a worked piece of stone, it is so ancient, so carefully made, so sharp of edge and easy to hold.  Like a stone extension of my hand, a human made tearing claw.

Who were these ancient people who carefully created such things? They were us, each artifact, each ancient place has something to say to us, about ourselves, our history, and our future.  Those who lose their ancestors and their history lose themselves.  I hope you honor those who walked before, including your ancestors who lived in ancient and deep time.

Here are the programs, I recommend watching them all.  Enjoy!

If you enjoy history, you have probably very much enjoyed these.  Now let’s follow the same man as he describes what is happening when this area moves from “pre history” the Bronze and Iron ages and the Celts to the beginning of the truly historical period, the Roman period, in Britain.

These are great, enjoy!

This takes us to the collapse of Roman government in Britain.  What happened then?  The BBC has you covered, but we shift to another scientist walking us through the ancient sites.   It’s a wonderful and surprisingly unexpected series of events beautifully described.

This leads to my thinking we need more history about Scotland.  Nick has us covered with his six part “A history of Scotland” BBC series.  I found complete episodes shown by the links below,

I cannot find the youtube links to complete episode 6 for this series.  If you find it, feel free to post a comment.

The Internet is an amazing and wonderful thing.

The BBC Nature crew has done it again, filming the formation of a “brinicle” beneath an ice layer.  The results of such features are probably present in the geological record and now, for the first time, can be properly interpreted.

Be sure to watch the video and read the article.  This was wonderful.

Here is the link to BBC Nature.

Do you like music?   Who doesn’t?  If you add music to geophysics it’s all good.  It was fun times when I found a couple of sites that talk about seismographs recording rock concerts.   The first link is totally in Dutch (Wij houden om Amsterdam te bezoeken!).

Here is the link (you need to click on the video in the left center to get the seismotastic details).

The next link started my interest in this.  Down under (NZ) the actual recording from a seismic station were posted along with a blog.  Here is the blog.  The site is linked to the this page also for quick reference later.

In my own work we had recorded trains using 3D reflection arrays.  The ground roll was fierce and surprisingly large.

Enjoy the season!

 

Be sure to read this excellent article from Spiegel.

Here is the link.

Any political review from Spiegel that uses words such as “ignorance, lies and scandals” is fabulous.   Enjoy, it’s a great read.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has an excellent piece outlining the recent political attacks on the Los Alamos National Laboratory.  As the war on intellectuals heats up this  level of hysteria is fascinating.  The echo chamber of the media is revealing.  Enjoy, it’s an important article.

Please read it and pass along the link. 

This laboratory is a national treasure, it matters.

Given the heartless social equation being pushed by neocons, the deadly results were easy to predict.  In a social and political framework defined with greed as the only metric, why worry about anything else?   Who could have possibly predicted that taking money out of social programs could hurt the poorest?

So here we are,  Peak Life Expectancy.

Here is the Peak Life Expectancy blog.

As the global economy falls into depression people are hurting.  You can see this in the United States. It is shocking that when free health clinics are held in the United States, thousands of people come trying to get the most basic of health care.

Here is a free health clinic in LA–thousands come.

Here is a free health clinic in Salt Lake City–thousands come.

Here is a free health clinic in Chicago–thousands come.

Here is a free health clinic in Texas–thousands come.

As our country races to the bottom of the pile in terms of societal responsibility, compassion and civility remember, there is another way.  We are much, much better than this.

Ever been to Orange County, California?  It’s a wild place.  Lots of terrible and criminal ideas start here.

This link came from a friend and was amazing.  William K. Black is a distinguished individual and he doesn’t pull back on any punches.  It is clear that the overhang from the Financial Depression will last at least another five years.  That is a decade of pain after an amazing number of, mostly unpunished, financial crimes.  The state AGs have been mostly unsuccessful and at the federal level almost nothing has been done to call those criminals to answer for their actions.

There is a different way.  Here is William K. Black at the Occupy LA Teach-in explaining the whole mess.  His knowledge of financial fraud has not gone down the collective memory hole.  Watch it.  This is worth thinking carefully about and watching a second time.

You can learn about the way the world works by carefully listening this.  It all really got rolling with Reagan.  An amazing speech.  Want more?  Read this article he wrote about the financial crisis.

His web site can be found here.   If you get a chance, read his book “The Best Way to Rob a Bank”.

According to the US Census Bureau, as of 18:27 UTC Nov 3, 2011, there are 6,972,600,139 people on Planet Earth.  Watch the World Population Clock here.

Oh wait, at 18:29 UTC, there are 6,972,600,403 people on Planet Earth.

This is an important event.  The concepts of Peak Water and Peak Oil are strongly linked to global population increase.  This is a truly monumental event.

As usual Wiki has some of the important answers.  Refer to this page.

Oh oh, at 18:32 UTC, there are 6,972,600,828 people on Planet Earth.

World 6,976,159,630 — 15:02 UTC Nov 20, 2011

World 6,976,470,519 — 02:22 UTC  Nov 22, 2011

World 6,982,083,488 — 16:22 UTC  Dec 18, 2011

World 6,985,549,604 — 02:20 UTC  Jan 04, 2012

Enjoy the 7 billionth birthday-day.

Youtube vid 1:

Jim Kunstler–TED lecture.  Long Emergency.

Jim has an unusual mix of views. I respect his intelligence.  Worth thinking about although he gets some of it wrong.

The certainty of the Long Emergency is beyond question.

Youtube vid 2 (in eight parts):

An estimate of what we are facing in our future. Perhaps a little over the top, but here are all eight parts.  I try to avoid things in general with CAPS IN THE TITLE, but when you get 3 million hits, why not USE THE CAP KEY ONCE IN A WHILE?

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.

These topics are significant, hang in there and watch all 8 parts.  The issues are important and the presenter makes an attempt to give the listener the thinking skills needed to process and understand information.

Think these viewpoints will be reported in the media?  We have already been promised “magical $2 per gallon” gasoline by one of the political hacks.  What a joke.

The media guidelines are: 1) Ignorance rules and 2)Wait until the catastrophe, it results in better sales of useless junk during the commercial breaks.  Also, when things are really bad roll out the “who could have possibly known” throw away line and end the fact-free television segment with a heart warming moment.

Checking the NOAA NWS Climate Prediction Site shows that Texas is in extreme drought conditions.   Here is an image, (red = bad).

Extreme Drought in Texas

Check this site to make your own time series plots.

You can quickly make a graph like the one below.  (check where the green line goes).

The site also allows you to download the data and perform your own Fourier based analysis.  I’m deeply worried that we have passed a tipping point with respect to global climate.  Check the Palmer Drought Index also for your area.