www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Archived from my main page each calendar quarter:

• According to United Nations rights chief Volker Türk, Israel had killed over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza by August, 2024. High commissioner Türk stated, "Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war."
  source: UN News, "Most of Gaza's 40,000 dead are women and children, says UN rights chief," August 15, 2024
  - 4th Quarter 2024

 

• "The Deep Space Network - or DSN - is NASA's international array of giant radio antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions, plus a few that orbit Earth. The DSN also provides radar and radio astronomy observations that improve our understanding of the solar system and the larger universe.
   
  "The DSN is operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which also operates many of the agency's interplanetary robotic space missions.
   
  "The DSN consists of three facilities spaced equidistant from each other – approximately 120 degrees apart in longitude – around the world. These sites are at Goldstone, near Barstow, California; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia. The strategic placement of these sites permits constant communication with spacecraft as our planet rotates – before a distant spacecraft sinks below the horizon at one DSN site, another site can pick up the signal and carry on communicating.."
  source: NASA, "What is the Deep Space Network?" by Heather Monaghan, March 30, 2020
  - 3rd Quarter 2024

 

• NPR Senior business editor Uri Berliner stated that his organization lacked "viewpoint diversity" and criticized it for telling listeners and readers how to think through a progressive worldview. In 2021 Berliner looked up voter registrations for the NPR newsroom and found that in the city's headquarters of Washington, D.C., there were 87 registered Democrats in NPR editorial positions and "zero Republicans." "None."
  source: Uri Berliner and The Free Press, www.thefp.com April, 2024
  - 2nd Quarter 2024

 

• "Less than four years after borrowing $465 million from the government, Tesla became the first automaker to repay its loan under the Energy Department's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program. In a statement issued after the money had been wired, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, "I would like to thank the Department of Energy and the members of Congress and their staffs that worked hard to create the ATVM program, and particularly the American taxpayer from whom these funds originate. I hope we did you proud."
  source: Phil LeBeau, CNBC.com, 22 May 2013
  - 1st Quarter 2024

• There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms in the planet Earth! No one in the history of the human species ever has (or, likely, ever will) hold the exact same arrangement of 52 cards after a proper shuffle. This is because there are about 8x10⁶⁷ ways to sort a deck of cards - That's an 8 followed by 67 zeros. For an example of how huge this number is, if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe's total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat. There are so many ways to arrange a deck of 52 cards that a repeat of randomly organized cards may not happen for billions of years! These kinds of mathematical calculations are called "factorials" and are denoted with an exclamation mark. 52!
  source: McGill University's Office for Science and Society
  - 4th Quarter 2023

• "It [Avogadro’s number] is the number of molecules found in 2.016 grams of hydrogen gas (or an equal volume of any other gas). Its value is placed at 6.022140857x10²³, which is an enormously large number. Chenistry students have long amused themselves by computing just how large a number it is, so I can report that it is equivalent to the number of popcorn kernels needed to cover the United States to a depth of nine miles, or cupfuls of water in the Pacific Ocean, or soft drink cans that would, evenly stacked, cover the Earth to a depth of 200 miles."
  source: Bill Bryson, in his book, A SHort History of Nearly Everything pp. 104-105 [footnote]
  - 3rd Quarter 2023

• "27 of America's Top 30 Crime-Ridden Cities are Run by Democrats"
  source: The Heritage Foundation 19-page report titled, "The Blue City Murder Problem," November 04, 2022
  - 2nd Quarter 2023

• "The number of undocumented immigrant crossings at the southwest border for fiscal year 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking the previous annual record by more than 1 million, according to Customs and Border Protection data." [ed note: Dispite these huge numbers, the Biden administration still refuses to protect our country's borders]
  source: Julia Ainsley, NBCnews.com, Oct. 22, 2022
  - 1st Quarter 2023

• It's estimated that the Andromeda galaxy (M31) contains 1 Trillion stars while our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains 400 Billion. NASA estimates M31 will collide with the our gallaxy in about 4 billion years from now. M31 is falling towards the Milky Way at a rate of 250,000 miles per hour (about 402,000 kph). Four billion years from now, the two galaxies will pass through each other and, 2 billion years after that, they will fall back into a permanent embrace to form a single galaxy. "Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center."
  source: NASA's Hubble Shows Milky Way is Destined for Head-On Collision (https://web.archive.org/web/20140701085917/http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html), May 10, 2012
  - 4th Quarter 2022

• "Solar energy is the most abundant energy resource on earth - 173,000 terawatts of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use."
  source: Energy On a Sphere (https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/live-programs/energy-on-a-sphere/), August 10, 2015
  - 3rd Quarter 2022

• "Americans' trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36%, making this year's reading the second lowest in Gallup's trend."
  source: Megan Brenan (Gallup.com), October 7, 2021
  - 2nd Quarter 2022

• "The Border Patrol made about 1.66 million arrests of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in the 2021 fiscal year, the highest annual number ever recorded, according to figures released Friday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection." [emphasis mine, also noting that the Biden administration remains completely unwilling to address the problem...]
  source: The Wallstreet Journal in an article By Michelle Hackman, updated Oct. 22, 2021
  - 1st Quarter 2022

• Over 2,000 law enforcement officers were injured during the George Floyd riots of 2020. And, 264 federal, state, military, tribal, and local law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty in 2020 - an increase of 96% from 2019 and the highest number since 1974.
  source(s): Major Cities Chiefs Association and the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund
  - 4th Quarter 2021

• Spaniards were the first to bring slaves to what is now the United States. The first African slaves in what would become present day South Carolina arrived August 9, 1526 in Winyah Bay, when Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón brought 600 people to start a colony.
  source: Peck, Douglas T. (2001). "Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón's Doomed Colony of San Miguel de Gualdape"
  - 3rd Quarter 2021

• At least 25 Americans were killed during the 2020 BLM/Antifa riots.
  source: The Guardian - October 31, 2020
  - 2nd Quarter 2021

• "All the callouses on the bottom of your feet fall off about two to three months into living on the International Space Station. That's because astronauts spend most of their time floating in a weightless environment, not walking. When astronauts pull off their clothing, they have to make sure they do it near a vent for all the dead skin cells to get sucked into; otherwise the pieces will float freely through the cabin."
  source: What Space Does to the Body Is Even Grosser Than You Think by Kelly Dickerson - May 13, 2016 at mic.com
  - 1st Quarter 2021

• In a 2015 video Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said that she and her fellow organizers are "trained Marxists" - making clear their movement's ideological foundation. Cullors was the protégé of Eric Mann, former agitator of the Weather Underground domestic terror organization, and spent years absorbing the Marxist-Leninist ideology that shaped her worldview.
  source: Breitbart.com June 24, 2020
  - 4th Quarter 2020

• The Chinese communists have sent eight hundred thousand to two million Uighurs and other Muslims, including ethnic Kazakhs and Uzbeks, to detention camps since April 2017. "Most people in the camps have never been charged with crimes and have no legal avenues to challenge their detentions. The detainees seem to have been targeted for a variety of reasons, according to media reports, including traveling to or contacting people from any of the twenty-six countries China considers sensitive, such as Turkey and Afghanistan; attending services at mosques; having more than three children; and sending texts containing Quranic verses. Often, their only crime is being Muslim, human rights groups say, adding that many Uighurs have been labeled as extremists simply for practicing their religion.
  source: Council on Foreign Relations' report, China’s Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang, updated on June 30, 2020
  - 3rd Quarter 2020

• There are a million virus particles per milliliter of seawater - for a global total of 10³⁰ virions! Lined up end to end, they would stretch 200 million light years into space
  source: Virology Blog
  - 2nd Quarter 2020

• Humans and our pets and livestock now make up 97 percent of all animals on land. Wild animals (mammals and birds) have been reduced to a mere remnant: just 3 percent. This is based on mass. Humans and our domesticated animals outweigh all terrestrial wild mammals and birds 32-to-1
  source: DarrinQualman.com
  - 1st Quarter 2020

• The FBI reported that in 2018 more people were killed with knives, hammers, clubs, and even feet than with rifles. The FBI data for this isn't just semiautomatic rifles - it's all rifles, including bolt action, pump or lever action rifles as well.
  source: FBI Uniform Crime Report
  - 4th Quarter 2019
• The light that reaches Earth takes 10,000 to 100,000 years to escape the thick plasma of the sun's core. When light reaches the solar surface, it freely streams through open space to our planet in only 8 minutes. Neutrinos provide us a penetrating view into the core, where nuclear fusion powers the sun. They take only 2.3 seconds to escape to the solar surface and 8 minutes to reach Earth.
  source: Femilab, Nine weird facts about neutrinos (Nov 6, 2014)
  - 3rd Quarter 2019
• Richard Nixon, a Republican, signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the Clean Air Extension Act of 1970, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and he proposed the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 (which was then signed by his successor President Gerald R. Ford who was also a Repbulcian).
  source: Mother Nature Network
  - 2nd Quarter 2019
• The number of solar neutrinos that reach us on the Earth is about 65 billion passing through just one square centimeter every second. Almost all of them pass right through the Earth and out the other side. That means that every second, trillions of neutrinos are passing through your body. It's estimated that about 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second. That means that over the course of your lifetime, about 10^23 neutrinos will stream through your body - that's almost a trillion trillions. Because neutrinos have so little mass they don't add up to much - about 10^-13 kilograms will stream through your body over the course of your life. It's been estimated that about 100 billion people have ever lived on planet Earth, if you added up all humans from the dawn of our species. That means that the sum total mass of all neutrinos that have passed through every single person who has ever lived, over everyone's total lifetime, is... about 0.15 grams.
  source: TimeBlimp.com
  - 1st Quarter 2019

• Role of Cerenkov radiation in the eye-flashes observed by Apollo astronauts.
  McNulty PJ1, Pease VP, Bond VP.
  Clarkson College of Technology, Potsdam, N.Y., USA.
  Abstract
  "Visual phenomena in the form of colorless flashes of light were observed by astronauts in deep space when their eyes were closed and adapted to darkness. We describe in this paper laboratory experiments and calculations which indicate that many of these flashes are the result of visible light generated within the astronauts' eyeball in the form of Cerenkov radiation when a relativistic HZE particle traverses it. The sensitivity to Cerenkov radiation measured for three subjects exposed to pulses of pions and muons and the visual phenomena observed were found to be consistent with the reports of flashes observed at rates as high as 2 per minute on Apollo missions 11 through 17."
  source: National Center for Biotechnology Information (Life Sci Space Res. 1976;14:205-17)
  - 4th Quarter 2018
• Knife Edge Diffraction Model - "Diffraction is a phenomenon where electromagnetic waves (such as light waves) bend around corners to reach places which are otherwise not reachable i.e. not in the line of sight. In technical jargon such regions are also called shadowed regions (the term again drawn from the physics of light). This phenomenon can be explained by Huygen's principle which states that as a plane wave propagates in a particular direction each new point along the wavefront is a source of secondary waves."
  "The path loss due to diffraction in the knife edge model is controlled by the Fresnel Diffraction Parameter which measures how deep the receiver is within the shadowed region. A negative value for the parameter shows that the obstruction is below the line of sight and if the value is below -1 there is hardly any loss. A value of 0 (zero) means that the transmitter, receiver and tip of the obstruction are all in line and the Electric Field Strength is reduced by half or the power is reduced to one fourth of the value without the obstruction i.e. a loss of 6dB. As the value of the Fresnel Diffraction Parameter increases on the positive side the path loss rapidly increases reaching a value of 27 dB for a parameter value of 5."
  source: http://www.raymaps.com/index.php/knife-edge-diffraction-model/ (November 6, 2016)
  - 3rd Quarter 2018
• "The arrival of new immigrants and the births of their children and grandchildren account for 55% of the U.S. population increase from 193 million in 1965 to 324 million today. The new Pew Research Center projections also show that the nation is projected to grow to 441 million in 2065 and that 88% of the increase is linked to future immigrants and their descendants."
  source: Pew Research Center, "NUMBERS, FACTS AND TRENDS SHAPING YOUR WORLD" http://www.pewhispanic.org/
  - 2nd Quarter 2018
• Gold has been known for at least 5,500 years and is a highly valued metal throughout human society. Gold is sometimes found free in nature but it is usually found in conjunction with silver, quartz (SiO2), calcite (CaCO3), lead, tellurium, zinc or copper. There is roughly 1 milligram of gold dissolved in every ton of seawater, although extracting it currently costs more than the gold is worth. It has been estimated that all of the gold that has currently been refined could be placed in a cube measuring 20 metres on a side.
   
  Gold is the most malleable and ductile of all known metals. A single ounce of gold can be beaten into a sheet measuring roughly 5 metres on a side. Thin sheets of gold, known as gold leaf, are primarily used in arts and crafts and can be as thin as 0.000127 millimetres (about 400 times thinner than a human hair).
   
  Gold is a good conductor of heat and electricity and does not tarnish when it is exposed to the air, so it can be used to make electrical connectors and printed circuit boards. Gold is also a good reflector of infrared radiation and can be used to help shield spacecraft and skyscrapers from the sun's heat. Gold coated mirrors can be used to make telescopes that are sensitive to infrared light.
  source: Jefferson Lab's It's Elemental webpage
  - 1st Quarter 2018

• The Sun's output is 3.8 x 10³³ ergs/second, or about 5 x 10²³ horsepower. That is enough energy to melt a bridge of ice 2 miles wide, 1 mile thick, and extending the entire way from the Earth to the Sun, in one second.
  source: Dr. Louis Barbier, NASA's COSMICOPIA webpage
  - 4th Quarter 2017

• "High energy particles, such as protons and helium nuclei, are continuously raining down on the earth from space. When these so-called 'cosmic rays' collide with atoms in the atmosphere they produce a 'shower' of many kinds of particles. These showers include pions, kaons, and muons, which produce neutrinos, known as 'atmospheric neutrinos,' when they decay. Atmospheric eutrinos come in two types: electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos."
  source: Super-Kamiokande website (2017)
  - 3rd Quarter 2017

• "The oral cavity is a dark cabinet full of wonders. It comprises many and varied environments, washed by healing fluid, lined by shining purple mucosa. It is inhabited by organisms as numerous as the citizens of earth. More than six hundred species of bacteria live there, some as yet to be named. The mouth sustains life. The digestive process beings there. Its glands and ducts produce disease-fighting saliva and lymph."

  Scientists are pondering the riddles of the teeth, the mysteries of the mouth, the correspondences between oral health and overall health. The super-organism known as the human body is inhabited by 100 trillion microbes. Within it, the mouth has its own intricate ecological niches: the pockets of the gums, the plaque of the teeth, the soft palate, the tonsils, the saliva. These habitats are rich with microflora that flourish and die, cooperate and compete, and even travel, through subtle mechanisms that are still only beginning to be understood."
  source: Mary Otto, in her book, Teeth (The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America) p.81
  - 2nd Quarter 2017

• Calculus was developed independently by both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz during the later part of the 1600s.
   
  Newton's development of calculus probably grew out of his need to explain the acceleration of falling bodies. Newton knew that the speed of a falling object increases by a tiny amount every second that it falls. Average acceleration was easy to calculate, but there was no mathematical process available for describing the position or velocity of the object at any given point in time. Calculus gave Newton a way of describing not only derivative functions like the rate of change over time but also the curved motion caused by the force of gravity, which allowed him to explain the elliptical motion of planets as conic sections. Newton was very secretive about his discovery and us of calculus.
   
  Unlike Newton, however, Leibniz was more than happy to publish his work, and so Europe first heard about calculus from Leibniz in 1684, and not from Newton (who published nothing on the subject until 1693). When the Royal Society was asked to adjudicate between the rival claims of the two men over the development of the theory of calculus, they gave credit for the first discovery to Newton, and credit for the first publication to Leibniz. However, the Royal Society, by then under the rather biased presidency of Newton himself, later also accused Leibniz of plagiarism, a slur from which Leibniz never really recovered.
  source: University of Houston's College of Engineering Engines of our Ingenuity article
  - 1st Quarter 2017

• The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is sitting on what NASA calls "the ultimate mountaintop" - it orbits the Earth well above our atmosphere, clouds, storms, and light-polluted cities. This vantage point has provided scientists with groundbreaking observations about planets, stars, galaxies, and other parts of the Universe we didn't even know existed! HST Has made more than one million observations and astronomers have used that data in more than 12,800 scientific papers (as of 2016) - thus making HST one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built.

  The HST is about the size of a school bus and orbits the our planet about every 97 minutes at 550 kilometres (340 miles) above the surface. Recent estimates, based on the HST deep-space survey, suggest that there may be nearly 2 Trillion galaxies in the Universe - a number that's about a tenfold increase over the previous estimate!
  source: NASA
  - 4th Quarter 2016

• It was exactly one year ago that an illegal alien shot and killed 32-year-old Kathryn "Kate" Steinle at San Francisco's pier 14. The illegal immigrant, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, had been deported from the U.S. a total of five times. He was on probation in Texas during the time of the shooting and had seven felony convictions. The incident occurred at 6:30 p.m. when Sanchez fired three shots from a .40-caliber handgun in the tourist attraction area at San Francisco's Embarcadero district. One of the bullets struck Steinle in the chest and pierced her aorta. She collapsed to the floor while screaming for help to her father, Jim Steinle, who was accompanying her at the pier. Her father performed CPR on Kate before paramedics arrived and sent her to an ambulance. She died two hours later at San Francisco General Hospital. source: CNN
  - 3rd Quarter 2016
• Elliptical galaxy IC 1101 contains 100 trillion (10¹⁴) stars! It's over 5.5 million light years in diameter, making it the largest galaxy known at this time. IC 1101 is located in the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster (just over a billion light years from us) and is about 50 times the size and 2,000 times more massive than our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
  source: Futurism.com (and a number of peer review articles)
  - 2nd Quarter 2016
• The Ku Klux Klan was founded by Democrats and was considered a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party - even, in some cases, forcing people to vote for Democrats!
  source: Historians George C. Rable, Eric Foner, Wyn Craig Wade, and many others...
  - 1st Quarter 2016

• At the federal level, about one-third of outlays are matched by tax collections from illegal aliens. At the state and local level, an average of less than 5 percent of the public costs associated with illegal immigration is recouped through taxes collected from illegal aliens. Most illegal aliens do not pay income taxes. Among those who do, much of the revenues collected are refunded to the illegal aliens when they file tax returns.
  source: Federation for American Immigration Reform, July 14, 2015 - 4th Quarter 2015
• Johnny Cash began his singing career in the Air Force! He enlisted in 1950 and became a Morse Code Intercept Operator for Soviet Army transmissions in Landsberg, Germany. While most people waited to be drafted for the required two years, Cash wanted more and stayed for a total of four years. Because of his Morse code intercept work, Johnny Cash was the first American to learn about Joseph Stalin's death - even before US president Dwight Eisenhower knew! It was in Germany that he created his first band called "The Landsberg Barbarians."
  source: SavingCountryMusic.com, June 29, 2014 - 3rd Quarter 2015
• "The important point is that the effect of gravity on an object and the effect of acceleration on an object are indistinguishable. Scientists call this the Principle of Equivalence: Gravity and the acceleration of objects through spacetime can be viewed as conceptually and mathematically equivalent."
  source: Eric Chaisson from his book, Cosmic Dawn, p. 13 - 2nd Quarter 2015
• "In 2014, the Moon drifted 1.5 inches further away from the Earth."
  source: Brian Greene from his Elegant Universe blog on FaceBook
  - 1st Quarter 2015

• "Genetic testing has demonstrated that humans thrive best on starch. Human and chimpanzee DNA is roughly identical; one of the minor differences is that our genes help us to digest more starch, a crucial evolutionary adjustment. Studies of the gene coding for amylase, the enzyme that breaks down starch into simple sugars, found that humans have on average six copies of the gene compared to two copies in other, 'lesser' primates. This difference means that human saliva produces six to eight times more of the starch-digesting enzyme amylase. Their limited ability to utilize starch confined chimpanzees and other great apes to tropical jungles around the equator, where they found abundant fruits and perishable vegetables all year long to meet their caloric needs. It was our ability to digest and meet our energy needs with starch [tubers and grains] that allowed us to migrate north and south and inhabit the entire planet."
  source: John A. McDougall, M.D., in his book, The Starch Revolution, pp. 12-13
  - 4th Quarter 2014

• Three-fourths of the U.S. corn crop is bioengineered to include a gene from the natural toxin Bt to make the plant ressistant to corn rootworms. Corn rootworms are now becoming resistant to Bt.
  source: Sierra, July/August 2014, p.20
  - 3rd Quarter 2014

• It's been reasonably estimated that there were once between thirty to seventy million Bison (American Buffalo) roaming North America before the middle of the 19th century. Explorers Lewis and Clark, who encountered a large herd at South Dakota's White River in 1806 wrote, "The moving multitude...darkened the whole plains,..." Today there are about 200,000 Bison left, or less than ONE PERCENT of their original numbers...
  source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
  - 2nd Quarter 2014

• The Cosmic Microwave Background extends far into the infrared and radio spectrum with a temperature of 2.725 Kelvins. This temperature is the photon energy (converted into a temperature via Boltzmann's constant) of the peak of this radiation. The photons in the Universe come from a thermal bath, where matter, radiation and everything else from our young Universe was constantly colliding with every other particle while exchanging energy and thermalizing. This produces a very special spectrum to the radiation, known as a blackbody spectrum. Every photon in the Universe cools as the Universe expands and stretches the wavelength of each one, but the shape of this spectrum is preserved.
  source: ScienceBlogs
  - 1st Quarter 2014

• "According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined."
  source: Michael Snyder The Economic Collapse Blog, May 26, 2013
  - 4th Quarter 2013

• "40 years ago, half the children in the U.S either walked or cycled to school. Now it's 10 or 11 percent. The rest are driven or bused."
  source: Deb Hubsmith of the Safe Route to School program at Bikes Belong. (Adventure Cyclist, May 2013, p. 37)
  - 3rd Quarter 2013

• "There are 8.7 million eukaryotic species on our planet - give or take 1.3 million. The latest biodiversity estimate, based on a new method of prediction, dramatically narrows the range of 'best guesses', which was previously between 3 million and 100 million. It means that a staggering 86% of land species and 91% of marine species remain undiscovered."
  source: Nature.com, by Lee Sweetlove, published online August 23, 2011
  - 2nd Quarter 2013

• In 1964, the House voted 373 to 1 to pass the Wilderness Act on July 30, 1964.
  President Ronald Reagan signed more wilderness protection laws than any other president (10,600,000 acres designated, affecting 31 states).
  President Jimmy Carter designated the most Wilderness acres of any other president, totaling 66,300,000 acres.
  source: NOLS Wilderness Facts (The Leader, 40 Years of Wilderness)
  - 1st Quarter 2013

 

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• Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy
  Worldwide, the digital warehouses (FaceBook, Amazon, Google, etc.) use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants - with data centers in the United States accounting for one-quarter to one-third of that load.
  source: James Glanz, The New York Times News Service, Sunday, September 23, 2012
  - 4th Quarter 2012
• Globally, April 2012 marked the fifth warmest April since temperature records began in 1880.
  It was the 326th straight month with a global temperature above the average for the 20th century.

  The 2011 average annual concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (Mauna Loa Observatory) is 391.57
  parts per million (ppm). The 2010 average is 389.78 ppm. For the past decade (2002-2011) the average
  annual increase is 2.07 ppm per year. The average for the prior decade (1992-2001) is 1.6 ppm per
  year. Annual data for 2011 was first posted January 5, 2012, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
  Administration (NOAA) in the United States. Since the 1958 start of precision CO2 measurements in
  the atmosphere, the annual mean concentration of CO2 has increased from one year to the next.
  source: co2now.org (July 2012)
  - 3rd Quarter 2012

• On the day the Civil War ended (April 9, 1865) President Lincoln asked the White House band to strike up the southern anthem "Dixie" saying, "I have always thought "Dixie" was one of the best tunes I have ever heard." A 5 Dollar Confederate note was found in Lincoln's pocket when he was assassinated six days later...
  - 2nd Quarter 2012
• Lost in a data crash - hope to recover for the Wayback machine or similar service...
  - 1st Quarter 2012

• People living in the vicinity of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility have radioactive urine.
  Source: Sierra Magazine Sept/Oct 2011, p. 16
  - 4th Quarter 2011

• Divorce rates among conservative Christians are significantly higher than for other faith groups, and much higher than Atheists and Agnostics experience.
  Source: Religious Tolerance
  - 3rd Quarter 2011
• The Hubble telescope's Ultra Deep Field survey took place over a four month period between September 2003 and January 2004. Hubble's advanced camera snapped 800 exposurers during 400 orbits. Those 800 exposurers amounted to about 1 million seconds or 11.3 days of viewing time - each exposure veraging 21 minutes. The images from Hubble revealed about 10,000 galaxies in what's called a "pencil beam" survey because the observations encompass a narrow, yet "deep" piece of the sky - its keen vision, of 0.085 arc seconds, is equivalent to standing at the U.S. Capitol and seeing the date on a quarter a mile away at the Washington monument. The whole sky contains 12.7 million times more area than the Ultra Deep Field. To observe the entire sky would take almost 1 million years of uninterrupted observing.
  Source: HubbleSite
  - 2nd Quarter 2011
• Hartford Institute estimates there are roughly 335,000 religious congregations in the United States. Of those, about 300,000 are Protestant and other Christian churches, and 22,000 are Catholic and Orthodox churches. Non-Christian religious congregations are estimated at about 12,000.
  Source: Hartford Institute for Religion Research www.hartsem.edu
  - 1st Quarter 2011

• "And then I looked at the research and was amazed to discover there were two years, in the twentieth century, in which income concentrated to such an extent it actually centralized a great deal of the nation's income right at the top. One year was 2007, when the richest Americans took home, or got I should say, about 23 and a half percent of total income, and the other year was 1928." - Robert Reich in an interview with Fresh Air guest host Dave Davies - September 29, 2010 [click Here for more of the transcript...]
  - 4th Quarter 2010
• "The amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface is 6,000 times the amount of energy used by all human beings worldwide. The total amount of fossil fuel used by humans since the start of civilization is equivalent to less than 30 days of sunshine." - EinsteinYear.org - "a year celebrating physics" (2005)
  - 3rd Quarter 2010
• "In a comprehensive new study by the U.S. Geological Survey, every fish from 291 streams across the nation tested positive for mercury contamination. By EPA standards, one out of four of the thousand fish tested was unsafe to eat, particularly for children, pregnant women, and nursing mothers. Thanks in large part to emissions from coal-burning power plants, mercury contamination is now ubiquitous." - Sierra Magazine November/December 2009 (Volume 94, Issue 6)
  - 2nd Quarter 2010
• The 5,800,000 BTUs in one barrel of oil is the equivalent of 23,200 hours of human work output (That's over 10 years of physical labor, without vacation or holidays, at a 9-to-5 job). One gallon of gasoline is the equivalent of 500 hours of human work output, or almost one calendar quarter at that same job...
  Source: Based on Kcal, KWH, and BTU calculations found at www.lifeaftertheoildcrash.net
  - 1st Quarter 2010

• Jonas Salk, discoverer of the first safe and effective polio vaccine, refused to patent it for his personal profit! He wished to see it disseminated as quickly and as widely as possible and patenting would have hampered this. When asked who owned the patent, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
  - 4th Quarter 2009
• After E. coli 0157:H7 from bagged spinach killed three people and sickened nearly 200 in 2006, some producers of bagged leafy greens, among them Dole and the Chiquita subsidiary Fresh Express, developed proprietary standards known as "supermetrics" that require farmers to keep their fields totally free of wildlife. Less than one percent of wildlife carries E. coli, but up to 50 percent of cows do, and denuded soil allows dust from tained manure to blow onto cropland.
  Source: Sierra, March/April 2009, p. 27
  - 3rd Quarter 2009
• Americans use two and a half million plastic bottles every hour.
  Source: 2007 Movie documentry, Trashed, chapter 5
  - 2nd Quarter 2009
• "In all of history only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic pools. More than half has been extracted in the past 50 years."
  Source: National Geographic, January 2009, p. 52
  - 1st Quarter 2009

• "In the last 70 years, the global population has tripled and is now over 6.2 billion. The demand on water resources has grown at double that rate. Though our numbers continue to grow, renewable freshwater resources are finite. We consume 54 percent of Earth's annual available freshwater. If current consumption rates remain the same, this number could rise to 70 percent by 2025 due to population growth alone. If consumption rates grow globally to the current level of developed countries, senior researcher Stan Bernstein of the United Nations Population Fund estimates that up to 90 percent of our available water may be used every year."
  Source: Population, health, and environment fellow Buffy Baumann at the Population Reference Bureau, August 2002
  - 4th Quarter 2008
• Agricultural and urban development, as well as dam building, have destroyed more than half the nation's original wetlands: More than 113 million acres of wetlands have been lost in the lower 48 states, and in some states wetland losses have been as high as 90 percent.
  Source: Nature Conservancy, Summer 2008, p. 49
  - 3rd Quarter 2008
• The word "God" can not be found anywhere in our Constitution yet impeachment is mentioned six times!
  Source: The United States Constitution
  - 2nd Quarter 2008
• Nearly six times as much water is held for storage behind dams and in reservoirs than runs in free-flowing rivers. And, humans have converted about 50 percent of the Earth's terrestrial surface to either pasture or cropland.
  Source: Nature Conservancy, End of the Wild, Winter 2007, p. 13
  - 1st Quarter 2008

• American Debt:
  • In 1957 Total American debt (defined as all debt from government, business and households) was $693 Billion - or about $4,000 for every man, woman and child in our country.
  • Today's debt has grown to over $48 trillion - 63 times higer to an amount of over $161,000 for every man, woman and child.
  • 72% ($35 trillion) of today's debt has been created since 1990.
  • Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson recently asked Congress to increase the government debt ceiling by $850 billion from $8.965 trillion to $9.82 trillion, the fifth increase since Bush took office in 2001. It took this country 205 years (1776 to 1981) to accumulate $1 trillion in government debt. It has taken only 26 years to exceed $9 trillion, an 800 percent increase. At a 5 percent rate, the interest expense is $450 billion.
  - 4th Quarter 2007
• Although Rush Limbaugh was a very strong supporter of the Iraq invasion he, himself, never served in the military! Rush Limbaugh was able to avoid the Vietnam war through educational and medical deferments - even though he dropped out of college and never did admit to any serious physical ailments (except maybe his drug addiction at about age 50...)...
  - 3rd Quarter 2007
• John Wayne (born Marion Michael Morrison) was a strong supporter of the Vietnam war but never served in the military himself. Other actors like Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and Clark Gable served during World War II, when John Wayne was of draft age, yet Wayne was able to obtain deferments to continue his movie career.
  - 2nd Quarter 2007
• Overweight Americans coast airlines an extra 350 million gallons in jet fuel! (The Centers for Disease Control said the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds during the 1990s, requiring an extra 350 million gallons of jet fuel to fly them around during 2000 - that's about 2.4 percent of the total volume of jet fuel used domestically that year, and it cost airlines an extra $275 million to transport what the CDC called "this additional adiposity.")
  - 1st Quarter 2007

• It is estimated that there are an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic debris floating on or near the surface of every square mile of ocean on Earth. Seventy percent of that litter will sink to the bottom while the rest will float indefinitely...
  - United Nations Environmental Program report, June 2006
  - 4th Quarter 2006
• The Bible is the most ofen shoplifed book worldwide. This, according to "1001 Surprising things you should know about the Bible" as reported in O The Oprah Magazine "O-Zone" section, p. 37 - July, 2006 [Note: The 8th Old Testement Commandment states; "Thou Shalt Not Steal"]
  - 3rd Quarter 2006
• In a 1980 study in Boston, researchers measured the IQs of vegetarian children. Some of the children were following a macrobiotic diet, a few were Seventh-day Adventists (many of whom follow a plant-based diet), and the rest were from families that had simply decided to go vegetarian. On intelligence testing, the kids were considerably above average, with a mean IQ of 116. Now, the diet may have had nothing to do with their intelligence. Rather, these vegetarian families were better educated than the average meat-eating family, and it is probably the parental education, rather than a dietary effect, that was reflected in their children's measured intelligence. However, this study should reassure vegetarian parents who wonder whether animal products contain something necessary for brain development. Clearly, they do not. - Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
  - 2nd Quarter 2006
• Domestic cats kill, across the United States, hundreds of millions of birds and more than a billion small mammals (rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, and shrews - not to mention endagered species along with countless reptiles and insects) each year. Cats are not natural to North America and continue to kill wildlife even if well fed or wearing bells.
  - 1st Quarter 2006

• The chemicals indole and skatole, which help to account for the particular smell of human feces, are used as ingredients in perfume.
  - 4th Quarter 2005
• "All the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans."
  Source: WIlliam McDonough, architect and designer - Sierra, p. 76 July/August 2005
  - 3rd Quarter 2005
• "The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the enrgy of a single snowflake striking the ground."
  Source: Dr. Carl Sagan - Cosmos, p. 261
  - 2nd Quarter 2005
• Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes.
  Source: Dr.Stephen Zunes - The Strategic Functions of U.S. Aid to Israel (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs)
  - 1st Quarter 2005

• The world has used 24 billion barrels of oil a year, since 1995, but has found an average of only 9.6 billion barrles of new oil annually.
  Source: Paul Roberts in his book, The End of Oil p. 51
  - 4th Quarter 2004
• Each year humans dump eight billion metric tons of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere
  Source: National Geographic - February, 2004 page 89.
  - 3rd Quarter 2004
• 95% of America's original forests were logged during the past 200 years!
  Source: (Save America's Forests)
  - 2nd Quarter 2004
• During the Inquisition the Church (with the assistance of civil authorities) burned over 100,000 women, at the stake, for being "Witches," "Pagans," and "Servants of the Devil."
  Source: (Burning Times)
  - 1st Quarter 2004

• Between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civillians died during this year's invasion of their country...
  Source: (Christian Science Monitor) May 22, 2003
  - 4th Quarter 2003
• The income of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers grew steadily in the years 1992 to 2000, while their tax burden plummeted!
  Source: Today's Headlines: (New York Times) Thursday, June 26, 2003
  - 3rd Quarter 2003
• The United States spends more on its military than the next 12 nations combined!!
  Source: Weekly Defense Monitor, Volume 5, Issue No. 11, center for Defense Information, March 15, 2001
  - 2nd Quarter 2003
• 3.7 Pounds of fossil fuel and chemicals are needed to create a single 2-gram microchip.
  Source: Environmental Science & Technology, a journal of the American Chemical Society.
  - 1st Quarter 2003

• 260 Million acres of United States forest have been cleared to create crop-land to produce a meat-centered diet.
  Source: John Robbins, Diet for a New America.
  - 4th Quarter 2002
• In the year 2000, 9,713 million (9.713 Billion) animals were killed for food in the United States.
  Source: United Poultry Concerns, Inc.
  - 3rd Quarter 2002
• It takes 23 gallons of water to produce a pound of lettuce and 5,200 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef.
  - 2nd Quarter 2002
• Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula" and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size, "L.A."
  - 1st Quarter 2002

• Cézanne told his female sitters to do their best to look like apples!
  - 4th Quarter 2001

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