There is a 6.0 or greater earthquake somewhere on the planet on average 152 times a year (during the past 20 years). Eighteen of these are 7.0 or greater. One of these on average is 8.0 or greater.
Last year there were 159 earthquakes 6.0 or greater. Seventeen were 7.0 or greater. One was larger than 8.0.
There are about 50 earthquakes a day that are measurable. That’s 18,250 a year.
Found at dooce.
In 1849, inauguration day, March 4th, happened to be a Sunday. James Polk’s term ended at noon that Sunday, but President-elect Zachary Taylor refused to be sworn in on the Sabbath.
So who was President? Some have claimed it was Missouri senator David Rice Atchison. Atchison was President Pro-Tempore of the Senate and, as such, third in line to the presidency. Atchison must have been president for a day.
In 1821, 1877 and 1917 the inauguration was also changed because of Sunday. James Monroe’s second inauguration was on March 5, 1821. Rutherford B. Hayes took the oath of office privately on March 3. Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated for his second term on March 5.
The Constitution went into effect 221 years ago today.
The Constitution was approved on September 17, 1787, and sent to the states for ratification. The required ninth state, New Hampshire, ratified it on June 21, 1788. The Confederation Congress then approved an act that called for “the first Wednesday in March next to be the time for commencing proceedings under the Constitution.”
The first Wednesday the following March was the 4th, and so the terms of the President and Vice President and members of Congress began on March 4, 1789. As it turned out, the first Congress convened on March 4, but did not actually have a quorum in either house until early April. Washington did not take the oath of office until April 30, 1789.
But officially the Constitution went into effect on March 4, 1789.
Thirty-six times in our history March 4th was inauguration day. (Four of those times — 1821, 1849, 1877, 1917 — March 4th occurred on Sunday and the inauguration was postponed until the next day.)
The 20th Amendment changed inauguration day to January 20 effective in 1937.
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865.
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
From the First Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 4, 1933.
Hear FDR speak the first part of the famous line.
Haven’t you wondered at least a little if it isn’t more than a coincidence that once the Government took over General Motors it got all into Toyota’s grill?
Overheard TV commentary: “The question is how much is healthcare reform going to cost the taxpayers and the government.”
Is there something here I’m missing? Aren’t the taxpayers and the government pretty much the same thing? Isn’t separating the two somewhat disingenuous (or ignorant)?
Saturday’s Chile earthquake was so powerful that it likely shifted an Earth axis and shortened the length of a day, NASA announced Monday.
By speeding up Earth’s rotation, the magnitude 8.8 earthquake—the fifth strongest ever recorded, according to the USGS—should have shortened an Earth day by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to new computer-model calculations by geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The MacHeist nanoBundle has a week left to run. For $19.95 you get seven Mac software programs, each of which lists for $20 or more. And one-quarter of your money goes to a charity you designate (from among those listed).
A great deal for Mac owners; included are MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, Flow, RapidWeaver and Tales of Monkey Island.
NPR and This American Life‘s Ira Glass is 51 today.
He was 19, had just finished his freshman year of college, and was looking for a summer job with an ad agency or a TV station. He searched all over Baltimore and couldn’t find anything, but someone at a rock ‘n’ roll station knew someone at NPR’s headquarters in Washington and gave Ira a phone number and said, “They’re kind of a new organization, so call.”
He managed to talk his way into an internship despite the fact he’d never once listened to public radio. He started out as a tape cutter and as a desk assistant, graduated from Brown University, and continued working for public radio as newscast writer, editor, producer of All Things Considered, reporter, and substitute host.
Jean Harlow was born on this date in 1911. She was in 36 films before her death at age 26.
Jean displayed talent in both her sensual and comedic performances, but she initially captivated fans with her trendsetting platinum blonde hair. As she gained fame, peroxide sales in the United States skyrocketed. Botched attempts to look like Jean forced thousands of women to cut their hair. Hollywood producers of the past had consistently cast dark-haired women to play the parts of vixens, but Jean emerged as the first star to incorporate the platinum blonde look into her acting.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on this date in 1847. His family moved to Canada when he was 22 and he himself to Boston at age 24 to become a professor at Boston University. He was a teacher of the deaf and and his experiments with electrically reproducing speech lead to the telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell lived to see the telephonic instrument over which he talked a distance of twenty feet in 1876 used, with improvements, for the transmission of speech across the continent, and more than that, for the transmission of speech across the Atlantic and from Washington to Honolulu without wires. The little instrument he patented less than fifty years ago, scorned then as a joke, was when he died the basis for 13,000,000 telephones used in every civilized country in the world. The Bell basic patent, the famed No. 174,465, which he received on his twenty-ninth birthday and which was sustained in a historic court fight, has been called the most valuable patent ever issued.
Although the inventor of many contrivances which he regarded with as much tenderness and to which he attached as much importance as the telephone, a business world which he confessed he was often unable to understand made it assured that he would go down in history as the man who made the telephone. He was an inventor of the gramophone, and for nearly twenty years was engaged in aeronautics. Associated with Glenn H. Curtiss and others, whose names are now known wherever airplanes fly, he pinned his faith in the efficacy for aviation of the tetrahedral cell, which never achieved the success he saw for it in aviation, but as a by-product of his study he established an important new principle in architecture.
… was authorized on this date in 1992.
Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of ten camps at which Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were interned during World War II. Located at the foot of the imposing Sierra Nevada in eastern California’s Owens Valley, Manzanar has been identified as the best preserved of these camps.
… was established 161 years ago today. It is the fifth in seniority among cabinet departments after State, Treasury, Defense and Justice.
The idea of setting up a separate department to handle domestic matters was put forward on numerous occasions. It wasn’t until March 3, 1849, the last day of the 30th Congress, that a bill was passed to create the Department of the Interior to take charge of the Nation’s internal affairs.
The Interior Department had a wide range of responsibilities entrusted to it: the construction of the national capital’s water system, the colonization of freed slaves in Haiti, exploration of western wilderness, oversight of the District of Columbia jail, regulation of territorial governments, management of hospitals and universities, management of public parks,and the basic responsibilities for Indians, public lands, patents, and pensions. In one way or another all of these had to do with the internal development of the Nation or the welfare of its people.
Interior manages 507 million acres of surface land, or about one-fifth of the land in the United States, including:
Yours truly was a senior executive with Interior from January 1999 through January 2003.
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… became the official national anthem of the United States on this date in 1931. You know what that means? For 155 years is was not the official national anthem. For just 79 years it has been. We could change it. It isn’t etched in granite. |
The first (of four) verses:
O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Who wants a national anthem that glorifies war?
And another thing singers, it’s an anthem, not a ballad, not a salsa number, not a rap. It’s an anthem, “a solemn patriotic song officially adopted by a country as an expression of national identity.”
… was authorized as a national monument on this date in 1933. It became a national park in 1999.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison’s unique and spectacular landscape was formed slowly by the action of water and rock scouring down through hard Proterozoic crystalline rock. No other canyon in North America combines the narrow opening, sheer walls, and startling depths offered by the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
“The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change.
“Rahm [Emanuel] was simply their chief of staff.”
“The Rahm Emanuel that Obama hired is the poster child for the timid, pseudo-pragmatism that is inimical to the idealistic Obama agenda so many excited voters responded to last November. And it’s a pragmatism that is absolutely killing the Democratic Party in the long run, because American voters have an intrinsic distrust of politicians they see as tacking with the polls or shying away from a fight.”
“Every reader of ‘The Cat in the Hat’ will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish?”
Louis Menand, “Cat People” in The New Yorker (2002). Today is Theodor Geisel’s — aka Dr. Seuss — 106th birthday. Menand has a nice profile of the writer. Seuss was Geisel’s mother’s maiden name.
Three days after one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded struck the South American nation of Chile, the massive extent of the damage is becoming clearer, and the number of known victims has climbed to 723 deaths so far, many thousands still missing, and nearly 2 million displaced. World governments made immediate pledges of aid after Chilean President Michelle Bachelet requested mobile bridges, field hospitals, satellite phones, electrical generators, disaster assessment teams, water purification systems, field kitchens and restaurants, UN officials said. Collected here are recent photos from areas in Chile damaged by Saturday’s 8.8-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami. (37 photos total)
Hard to imagine such force. How will Seattle or San Francisco or St. Louis act when it’s their turn?
Miles Davis began recording Kind of Blue on this date in 1959.
Author Tom Wolfe is 80 today.
“I can’t read him because he’s such a bad writer,” Irving said of Wolfe. When Solomon added that “Bonfire of the Vanities” author Wolfe is “having a war” with Updike and Mailer, Irving dismissed the notion out of hand: “I don’t think it’s a war because you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?”
Irving described Wolfe’s novels as “yak” and “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction … He’s a journalist … he can’t create a character. He can’t create a situation.”
Author John Irving is 68 today.
Reached through his publisher, Wolfe responded in writing. “Why does he sputter and foam so?” he asked about Irving. “Because he, like Updike and Mailer, has panicked. All three have seen the handwriting on the wall, and it reads: ‘A Man in Full.'”
If the literary trio don’t embrace “full-blooded realism,” Wolfe warns, “then their reputations are finished.” He also offers Irving some additional literary advice: “Irving needs to get up off his bottom and leave that farm in Vermont or wherever it is he stays and start living again. It wouldn’t be that hard. All he’d have to do is get out and take a deep breath and talk to people and see things and rediscover the fabulous and wonderfully bizarre country around him: America.”
Mikhail Gorbachev is 79.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Lou Reed is 68.
The influence of the Velvet Underground on rock greatly exceeds their sales figures and chart numbers. They are one of the most important rock and roll bands of all time, laying the groundwork in the Sixties for many tangents rock music would take in ensuing decades. Yet just two of their four original studio albums ever even made Billboard’s Top 200, and that pair – The Velvet Underground and Nico (#171) and White Light/White Heat (#199) – only barely did so. If ever a band was “ahead of its time,” it was the Velvet Underground. Brian Eno, cofounder of Roxy Music and producer of U2 and others, put it best when he said that although the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many albums, everyone who bought one went on to form a band. The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, U2, R.E.M., Roxy Music and Sonic Youth have all cited the Velvet Underground as a major influence.
Jon Bon Jovi, New Jersey’s second most famous rock-and-roller, is 48.
Daniel Craig is 42.
Chris Martin of Coldplay is 33.
Ben Roethlisberger is 28. Reggie Bush is 25.
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) was born 106 years ago today.
A big study came out in the 1950s called “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” It was by an Austrian immigrant to the U.S., an education specialist who argued that the Dick and Jane primers being used to teach reading in grade school classrooms across America were boring and, worse, not an effective method for teaching reading. He called them “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers,” which went “through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-IQ children’s activities that offer opportunities for reading ‘Look, look’ or ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘Come, come’ or ‘See the funny, funny animal.'”
A publisher at Random House thought that maybe a guy named Dr. Seuss, who’d published a few not-well-known but very imaginative children’s books, might be able to write a book that would be really good for teaching kids how to read. A publisher invited Dr. Seuss to dinner and said, “Write me a story that first-graders can’t put down!”
Dr. Seuss spent nine months composing The Cat in the Hat. It uses just 220 different words and is 1,702 words long. He was a meticulous reviser, and he once said: “Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.”
Within a year of publication, The Cat in the Hat was selling 12,000 copies a month; within five years, it had sold a million copies. Dr. Seuss has sold more books for Random House Publishing than any other writer in its history.
When Geisel/Seuss was awarded an honorary degree from Princeton in 1985, the entire graduating class stood and recited Green Eggs and Ham.
Green Eggs and Ham is the third largest selling book in the English language — ever.
Green Eggs and Ham à la Sam-I-Am
1-2 tablespoons of butter or margarine
4 slices of ham
8 eggs
2 tablespoons of milk
1-2 drops of green food coloring
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of pepper
… who apparently scored often, did particularly well on this date in 1962, when he scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors vs. the Knicks. The game was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, before 4,124 witnesses. Wilt was 36 for 63 from the field and 28 for 32 from the line.
The Warriors won the game 169-147.
… was authorized by legislation on this date in 1899.
Mount Rainier National Park encompasses 235,625 acres on the west-side of the Cascade Range, and is located about 100 kilometers (50 miles) southeast of the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area. Mount Rainier National Park is approximately 97 percent wilderness and 3 percent National Historic Landmark District and receives approximately 2 million visitors per year.
At 14,410 feet, Mount Rainier is the most prominent peak in the Cascade Range. It dominates the landscape of a large part of western Washington State. The mountain stands nearly three miles higher than the lowlands to the west and one and one-half miles higher than the adjacent mountains. It is an active volcano that last erupted approximately 150 years ago.
The park is part of a complex ecosystem. Vegetation is diverse, reflecting the varied climatic and environmental conditions encountered across the park’s 12,800-feet elevation gradient. Approximately 58 percent of the park is forested, 23 percent is subalpine parkland, and the remainder is alpine, half of which is vegetated and the other half consists of permanent snow and ice. Forest ages range from less than 100 years old on burned areas and moraines left by receding glaciers to old-growth stands 1,000 or more years. Some alpine heather communities have persisted in the park for up to 10,000 years.
… was proclaimed on this date in 1909. It became Olympic National Park in 1938.
Glacier capped mountains, wild Pacific coast and magnificent stands of old-growth forests, including temperate rain forests — at Olympic National Park, you can find all three. About 95% of the park is designated wilderness, which further protects these diverse and spectacular ecosystems.
Olympic is also known for its biological diversity. Isolated for eons by glacial ice, and later the waters of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic Peninsula has developed its own distinct array of plants and animals. Eight kinds of plants and 15 kinds of animals are found on the peninsula but no where else on Earth.
… was authorized on this date in 1889. It was designated Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in 1918.
For over a thousand years, prehistoric farmers inhabited much of the present-day state of Arizona. When the first Europeans arrived, all that remained of this ancient culture were the ruins of villages, irrigation canals and various artifacts. Among these ruins is the Casa Grande, or “Big House,” one of the largest and most mysterious prehistoric structures ever built in North America. Casa Grande Ruins, the nation’s first archeological preserve, protects the Casa Grande and other archeological sites within its boundaries. You are invited to see the Casa Grande and to hear the story of the ancient ones the Akimel O’otham call the Hohokam, “those who are gone.”
