Friday, December 27, 2013

Stories around the net

What really happened at Easter Island.

The rats, not people, destroyed the trees, but the people adjusted and started to eat rat stew...and the depopulation was from STD related infertility, caught from visiting sailors, not famine. And the real lesson is not catastrophic collapse but (oh the horror!) that people adjusted and did fine. And NPR thinks that lesson is terrible, since it means that their utopian pristine world order under global warming dictators might not be necessary...
To prevent an ecological crisis, we must become alarmed. That's when we'll act. The new Easter Island story suggests that humans may never hit the alarm.

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Archeoblog has a report and links about the snowfall in Egypt.

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Dustbury has a link to a story about the friends of elves preventing a road being built across a lava field in Iceland.

The project has been halted until the Supreme Court of Iceland rules on a case brought by a group known as Friends of Lava, who cite both the environmental and the cultural impact — including the impact on elves — of the road project. The group has regularly brought hundreds of people out to block the bulldozers.
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EnglishHistoricalAuthor website has an article on the 5000 year old mound at Newgrange, in Ireland, and how the sun shines deep into the structure on the solstice.

The unique “Solstice effect” is created by the precise alignment of the rising sun on the shortest day of the year with the back of the chamber and the window box over the entrance to the 19 metre passage which joins the chamber to the outside world. 
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All the PC kerfuffle about St. Nicholas is nonsense, of course, but there is a new book out about him, reviewed at Medieval website. 
Most folks know he is the patron saint of children, but not why...
Click here to read a review by Charlotte Allen in the Wall Street Journal: “In one legend, Nicholas miraculously brings back to life three boys whom an evil innkeeper has murdered, chopped into pieces and thrown into a pickle barrel—hence Nicholas became the patron saint of children.”

and when I visited Yugoslavia, I found out he is the patron saint of sailors also.

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