Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

April 11, 1954, may have been the most boring day in the 20th century.What’s the most boring day in history — a day where truly nothing important happened? That was the question posed in 2010 to a computer program named True Knowledge. Designed by computer scientist William Tunstall-Pedoe, the program contained 300 million facts, many of them tied to dates. After scouring those facts and comparing them to their respective dates, True Knowledge decided that April 11, 1954, was the most boring day in the 20th century. Belgium held a general election, some sports events happened, a coup in India was possibly planned but not carried out until two days later, and no notable births or deaths occurred — at least as far as the computer program could figure out. 

However, scientists may have some other days to suggest when it comes to the most boring day in history ever. The period from around 1.8 billion to 800 million years ago is known to geologists as “the Boring Billion,” because very little happened on Earth in terms of evolution, atmospheric chemistry, or geologic formation. Basically, it’s like the Earth was on pause for a billion years. It wasn’t until the Cambrian Explosion some 530 million years ago, when most major animal groups started to appear in the fossil record, that things really started to get exciting. So chin up, April 11, 1954: You weren’t very interesting, but there’s at least a billion years that you easily beat. 

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

 Which way to turn? That is a question that some can answer easily and others continue to be unable to make a decision that is helpful to the nation which is the only consideration they should be concerned about. Many of the top aides to Trump during his time in office have indicated they will not vote for him as they see him as unfit for office. Being good Republicains they don’t want to vote for a Democrat and they can not vote for Trump so they are going to vote for a write in or someone they know cannot win and by doing so they are possibly going to give the country to the deranged man that is unfit to be in office. Sad as it seems to be that totally hosed about what your priorities should be you’ll let your party determine our fate.

  He is proving that he cannot keep his mouth shut or a civil tongue in his head as he sits in a courtroom controlled by a judge that is not intent on giving him his way. He has never had to take directions from anyone, probably wore a diaper and shit himself till he was 5 and learned to take care of that problem because it was uncomfortable. Being a horse’s ass is the only way he knows how to be and that is the fault of his parents and here lately it is the fault of the courts as he has been told and told yet no one has taken him to task for his behavior. Anyone else would have long ago found themselves sleeping in the crossbar hotel. He wants immunity from all his crimes and the Supreme Court as corrupt as this one may grant that. Here is a question: are the members of the Court immune from being charged with crimes such as taking bribes and selling influence?

   We are seeing more efforts to ban books and punish teachers in public schools. These efforts will cause public schools to close which is exactly the hope of republicans. Any program or action that is designed to serve the masses is bad according to them. Our society is getting closer and closer to being put in a caste system with the rich running everything and the poor doing all the work with no hope of better. Voter interference is being called by Trump every time he is told about the gag order, yet the ones doing the interference are the people he represents. Will we ever regain the control of the House and Senate that was intended by the founders? We can hope but it would be better if we had someone that actually intended to make things right.

Even if you don’t like the current administration and vote for a third party or write in vote could have the effect of returning the Mango Menace to office so choose wisely if you at all care about the democratic experiment we have maintained for nearly 250 years.

When we think of endangered animals, we generally think about elephants, tigers, and whales — but certainly not humans. Yet between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, ancestors of Homo sapiens lost 98.7% of their population, according to a 2023 studypublished in the journal Science. Before the population crash, as many as 135,000 early humans roamed the Earth, but according to the team of geneticists behind the study, that number plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals, and the population stayed that low for more than 100,000 years. (These weren’t modern humans, but earlier hominins on the genetic timeline; one species that was alive at the time was Homo erectus, and we’re still discovering new prehistoric human species.)

The population decline could have been related to the wild environmental changes happening around that time: Extreme cooling of the Earth coincided with a drought in Africa, leading to fewer sources of food. Whatever the cause, it created a genetic “bottleneck” that researchers say nearly wiped out our prehistoric ancestors. This conclusion lines up to a period of time that left few fossils behind, but the research has yet to be replicated by other studies, and many genetic scientists remain skeptical of the claim.

As a species we are not promised or guaranteed and if we aren’t diligent we may be on the verge of slipping off the tightrope.

About 80% of the Earth’s oxygen comes from plankton.

Prochlorococcus, a species of ocean-dwelling phytoplankton, only measures about 0.6 micrometers. It’s the world’s smallest organism capable of photosynthesis — so small that 20,000 or so can reside in a single water droplet. But its impacts are so huge that an estimated one out of every five breaths you take is thanks to this minuscule microbe. Prochlorococcus, along with many other types of plankton (organisms carried along by the tides and currents), create as much as 80% of the world’s oxygen. They also play a big role in sequestering carbonfrom the atmosphere, capturing about 40%of all the CO2 produced. That’s equivalent to the amount that would be captured by roughly four Amazon rainforests.

Phytoplankton such as Prochlorococcus produce oxygen through photosynthesis, the same way plants on land do, by soaking up the sun for energy and releasing oxygen into the ocean and atmosphere. Also like plants on land, phytoplankton are full of the compound chlorophyll, which gives some of the microbes their green color. The entire ocean ecosystem rests upon these vital, oxygen-burping organisms, which provide essential nutrients for beings from the smallest krill to the largest blue whale.

Dunce caps were named for a famous philosopher.

Although his name draws scant recognition from most today, John Duns Scotus was among the towering intellectual figures of medieval Europe. A Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, Scotus earned renown in the late 13th and early 14th centuries for his compelling arguments regarding the univocity of all creatures — i.e., humans are beings just as God is a being — and for his defense of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. His academic achievements earned him the prestigious post of regent master of theology at the University of Paris, while his scrupulous reasoning yielded the nickname “Doctor Subtilis” — the Subtle Doctor.

However, by the late 16th century, Europe’s rising humanist movement had taken aim at the old-fashioned rationale of the Scotists, and the Dunsmen (also known as the Duns), as his followers were known, were derided as outdated and overly pedantic. Eventually, the term “dunce” came to refer to someone who was slow or dim-witted. It’s not entirely clear exactly when dunce caps came on the scene, but they may have been modeled on the fools’ caps worn by jesters or clowns, and by 1791they were being put on the heads of British schoolchildren who had made too many mistakes in class or otherwise misbehaved. (Some accounts say the Subtle Doctor and his followers actually wore such hats themselves because they believed the conical shape would capture free-flowing knowledge, but evidence is lacking.) 

Whether adorned with a telltale “D” or other embellishments like donkey ears, the dunce cap served as a common if crude form of punishment across European and American schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although it largely disappeared from the American education system by the 1950s, the concept survives in popular culture as a visual shorthand for stupidity. But don’t feel too bad for Scotus. He was beatified by Pope John II in 1993, and renewed interest in his worksin recent years has reaffirmed the decidedly non-dunce-like essence of his brain-twisting logic.