Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Unravelling the mystery of the Chaco Canyon culture collapse




The long-held theory is that the downfall of the Chaco Canyon culture occurred because of the poor land-use and deforestation that took place to build the cities. It is popularly cited by environmentalists and others as an example and warning of how human society employs unsustainable land-use practices. However, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has drawn this perspective into question.






Ancient Origins






Popular Archaeology


Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Good Samaritan Is Actually A Total Prick or...



"Rock 'n' roll will never die. There'll always be some arrogant little brat who wants to make music with a guitar."






A good Samaritan, who helped an old lady across a busy street in Fort Lauderdale, has been revealed to be a total and utter 'prick' by family members, and not the caring passer-by who helps old people.






"When I read about this 'Good Samaritan', who stopped traffic and helped an old woman across the street I thought he sounded like a nice guy," explained Jane Broom, "but when I saw it was my husband Dave I thought 'hang on a minute', he is a lazy twat, unemployed, drunk and a petty thief. What the fuck?"






Others are also shaking their heads in disbelief. Dave's brother John told me "Oh come on, why all this fuss? What the hell is a good Samaritan anyway? Dave is a slob, I actually hate his guts, we all do, please stop the 'hero' talk. He is a tool."






Meanwhile, little old lady, Marge Shrivelhead, reported her wallet missing and her credit cards stolen and used to pay for online porn videos, beer and cigarettes.






Dave Broom refused to comment on this story as he was 'out of his head and tired from masturbating all day'.




Utah Tar Sands Resistance – Mine Shutdown





About 80 climate justice land defenders enforced a full-day work stoppage at a tar sands mine in the Book Cliffs of Utah July 21, 2014. Multiple technical and non-technical blockades were deployed to keep the peace and prevent further destruction by construction crews.




Monday, July 28, 2014

Friday, July 25, 2014

History of the Verde Valley, Arizona

“I should never be left alone with my mind for too long.”




Fractured Fairy Tales











The village sat....



...looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity.....
















Ancient Sumerian song recreated from 3,400-year-old cuneiform tablets




Known as the lexical texts, the corpus of ancient cuneiform tablets, which range in time from the third millennium to the first century BC, were first discovered in the early 1950s in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit.






Before this time, virtually nothing was known about Sumero-Babylonian music, aside from the type of musical instruments they used, as deducted from carved pictures and archaeological finds. Scholars were completely in the dark about the theory and practice of what was considered a divine art, whose patron was the god Enki/Ea, who oversaw the realms of magic, arts, and crafts.






ancient origins


Hidden away in this inaccesible mesa for centuries....



...preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert....





























The Gigantic Ebola Outbreak FAQ





There is a lot of (understandable) panic surrounding the Ebola outbreak currently ravaging West Africa, but what exactly do we know about it so far ?






The Ebola is a virus, and like most viruses it can only reproduce inside the cells of your body. Ebola comes in five flavours, and none of them are cherry.






science made easy


I'm no scientist...



...but I've see enough horror movies to know this never ends well for humanity.






What began as a pleasure cruise has turned into a crisis as Russia attempts to reestablish control of a scientific satellite carrying five geckos, which are part of an experiment to study the effects of zero-gravity on animal mating.






Less than a week after the Foton-M4 satellite was launched into space for a 60-day mission, it stopped responding to commands from Russia's mission control. Engineers are busily working to reestablish a connection with the spacecraft's operating system, which is currently on autopilot. If they fail to regain control, they won't be able to safely land the craft.






For the time being, the satellite of love is still transmitting data, allowing scientists to watch video footage of the five geckos — four females and one male — as they continue their orbit around the Earth.






As the Moscow Times reports, this is the latest in a series of embarrassments for the Russian space program:






The disruption follows a massive equipment failure aboard the Bion-M satellite last year that killed most of the gerbils, mice and fish it was carrying, and the crashing down to Earth of the Phobos-Grunt probe shortly after its launch in 2011 on an ambitious mission to collect surface samples from one of the Martian moons.






"Another off-nominal situation with a spacecraft is a sign of a systematic crisis in the industry," says Ivan Moiseyev, the research chief at the Institute for Space Politics.


Far up above me, a thousand feet or so...



set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff , I saw a little city of stone asleep. It was as still as sculpture...



























Certain things catch your eye...

...But pursue only those
that capture your heart.