28 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Geological and Social Impact of the Himalayas
When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth’s mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North...They scorch the Earth and scorch the societies that live there. (Note: I disagree, this is overgeneralizing and ignores social ills of societies in more temperate climates)
28 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Wonderful Factoids
1. If you condense the history of the universe to a single year, humans would appear on December 31st at 10:30 PM—99.98 percent of the history of the universe happened before humans even existed.
2. Look at a gold ring. As the core collapsed in a dying star, a gravity wave collapsed inward with it. As it did so, it slammed into the thundering sound wave heading out of the collapse. In that moment, as a star died, the gold in that ring was formed.
3. We are star material that knows it exis...To instill in a child the sense of wonder.
04 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
More Exciting Than the Supernatural
And yet there's so much in real science that's equally exciting, more mysterious, a greater intellectual challenge - as well as being a lot closer to the truth. Did he know about the molecular building blocks of life sitting out there in the cold, tenuous gas between the stars? Had he heard of the footprints of our ancestors found in 4-million-year-old volcanic ash? What about the raising of the Himalayas when India went crashing into Asia? Or how viruses, built like hypodermic syringes, slip...There are wonders in science far more amazing than the ideas presented in superstition.