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in title, tags, annotations or urlFor Big History, The Past Begins At the Beginning - The New York Times - 0 views
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But many historians remain skeptical. ''I strongly doubt that plate tectonics and the Big Bang might contribute to our understanding of history,'' Mr. Revel said after listening to Mr. Christian's talk at the convention.
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''Unfortunately,'' he wrote, ''historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.''
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To understand the last few thousand years of human history, he insisted, scholars need to understand the rest of the past as well, up to and including the Big Bang -- in short, the whole 14-billion-year span of time itself.
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The latest maps of the world's eighth continent - BBC Future - 0 views
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in 2017, the story took an unexpected turn – the seven-continent model has been a mistake all along. Enter Zealandia, a long-lost land to the southeast of Australia, otherwise known as the planet's forgotten eighth continent. Scientists had long predicted the existence of this bonus southern landmass, but it remained missing for 375 years – largely because it’s almost entirely submerged under 1-2 km (0.6-1.2 miles) of water. Now they are beginning to unravel its secrets.
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This month, an international team of researchers released the most detailed maps of Zealandia to date – incorporating all five million square kilometres (two million sq miles) of this underwater region and its geology. In the process, they have uncovered hints as to how this mysterious continent formed – and why it has been obscured beneath the waves for the last 25 million years.
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Zealandia is thought to have formed around 83 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous. However, its journey began up to 100 million years before that, when the supercontinent of Gondwana – which congealed much of today's land into one giant lump – started to break up. As it disintegrated, the world's smallest, thinnest and youngest continent struck out on its own, while the regions of Gondwana that had once laid directly to its north west and south west became Australia and Antarctica, respectively.
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China to Be No. 1 Economy Before 2030, Study Says - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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To assess the validity of this study, the research and analysis team graded their past work on global trends, an effort undertaken every four years since 1996. Past studies, they found, had underestimated the speed with which changes arrived on the global scene.
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The risk of conflict within a state — like a civil war or an insurgency — is expected to decline in Latin America, but will remain high in sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, as well as in some Asia-Pacific island hot spots, the study warns.
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“the health of the global economy increasingly will be linked to how well the developing world does — more so than the traditional West.” In addition to China, the developing nations that “will become especially important to the global economy” include India, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey.
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China to Be No. 1 Economy Before 2030, Study Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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A new intelligence assessment of global trends projects that China will outstrip the United States as the leading economic power before 2030, but that America will remain an indispensable world leader, bolstered in part by an era of energy independence.
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“The growth of the global middle class constitutes a tectonic shift,” the study states, saying that billions of people will gain new individual power as they climb out of poverty. “For the first time, a majority of the world’s population will not be impoverished, and the middle classes will be the most important social and economic sector in the vast majority of countries around the world.”
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half of the world’s population probably will be living in areas that suffer severe shortages of fresh water, meaning that management of natural resources will be a key component of global national security efforts.
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Mega-eruptions Caused Mass Extinction, Study Finds - 0 views
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In a new study published today in the journal Science, researchers say they have confirmed that eruptions large enough to bury the U.S. under 300 feet (91 meters) of lava occurred at the same time that vast numbers of plant and animal species disappeared from the fossil record. About 201 million years ago, tectonic forces started ripping the supercontinent known as Pangaea apart, said Terrence Blackburn, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and lead author of the study. The underlying mantle rock melted, generating these large eruptions, he added. The rift, which eventually created the Atlantic Ocean basin, happened between sections of Pangaea that would go on to become North America and Africa. (Read about how Pangaea formed.)
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by using a rare mineral called zircon, found in igneous rocks like basalts, the researchers were able to narrow down their margin of error to 20,000 to 30,000 years—pegging the initial eruptions to just before the mass extinction event. “Zircon is a perfect time capsule for dating those rocks,” said Blackburn. When the mineral crystallizes, it incorporates uranium, which decays over a known time with respect to the element lead. By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in our samples, we can determine the age of those crystals, he explained.
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There is evidence that the initial volcanic eruptions doubled the amount of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which led to increased global temperatures and ocean acidification, he noted. This happened quickly, which probably didn’t give organisms at the time much of a chance to adjust to the changes.
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What Our Words Tell Us - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.
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The first element in this story is rising individualism
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between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.
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How to avert America's Brexit - The Washington Post - 0 views
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there is a meaningful chance that 2016 could begin a retreat of the United States from the mix of economic policies and the global engagement that U.S. businesses have regarded for decades as central to their success — unless business leaders can move decisively to redefine their goals as harmonious with those of working- and middle-class families.
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The key question is how we rise up in more muscular defense of the interests of U.S. workers and industries without doing permanent damage to our economy. We must also demonstrate that government can function and that business can be a constructive partner to it.
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every generation, we seem to witness an election that startles us, triggering tectonic shocks that change our politics and policies for decades to come. This could be one of those elections. Very much like the realignment revealed by the vote in Britain to leave the European Union, U.S. politics might be transforming into a debate less between right and left and more between those voters who are advantaged by globalization and those who are not.
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Living in the Ring of Fire - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Pacific Northwest is so beautiful because of the still-active tectonic forces that have shaped it. But this summer, The New Yorker published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared. The collective anxiety has not gone away.
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The larger question, from Seattle to Sagamore Hill, is how we fit disaster into our daily lives — a pact with the known unknown. There is no such thing as a safe place on this earth.
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More than 90 percent of Americans live in an area with at least a moderate risk of tornadoes, or wildfires, or hurricanes, or floods, or earthquakes
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Destined for War: Can China and the United States Escape Thucydides's Trap? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago.
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Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war.
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When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.
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Lee Kuan Yew, the Man Who Remade Asia - WSJ - 0 views
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Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.
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Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.
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there was an irony in Lee’s latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and Asian authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of modernization. After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese intellectuals (including Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian “Asian values” as the very cause of their country’s backwardness and weakness, and then sought to extirpate them from Chinese thinking.
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The Truth About Tucker Carlson's Monologue - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“Carlson is advancing a form of victim-politics populism that takes a series of tectonic cultural changes—civil rights, women’s rights, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution, the mass-scale loss of religious faith, the sexual revolution, etc.—and turns the negative or challenging aspects of those changes into an angry tale of what they are doing to you.”
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Untruths hurt real people. Try having dinner with a 79-year-old who watches Tucker Carlson every day. They’re anxious, angry, trapped in their own heads, and thinking of themselves as aggrieved victims. That’s why every assertion and argument on matters of national import that a popular TV-news host offers is “meaningful” and “important,” especially if it’s crafted to provoke an emotional response in viewers.
Can Europe Enforce Its Founding Ideals? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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PARIS—When history books are written on Europe in the early 21st century, this week may stand out. Pro-independence parties gained a majority in Catalonia’s regional elections, exacerbating a constitutional crisis in Spain. This occurred just days after Poland’s defiant right-wing government pushed back against the unprecedented threat of European Union sanctions by moving ahead with changes to the judiciary that European officials say threaten the rule of law.
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All politics are local—until they’re not. The developments in Poland and Catalonia stem from unique circumstances, but each case tests the European Union from opposite sides, right in one case, and somewhat left in the other.
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In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s six-month-old government is coming under pressure from right-wing critics who say the government hasn’t cracked down enough on illegal migrants, and from left-wing critics who say his handling of the crisis has been scandalously inhumane, with authorities busting up migrant encampments. More than 13,000 asylum-seekers are stuck on Greek islands, living in tents, Human Rights Watch reported. In Italy, younger voters who’ve come of age knowing only economic crisis are not convinced the European Union is doing them any favors.
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Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street (Tomas Sedlacek and Vaclav Havel) - 2 views
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Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?
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The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.
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most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.
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Furor in Japanese Town Casts Light on Fukushima's Legacy - The New York Times - 0 views
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It seemed like an easy payday. The Japanese government was conducting a study of potential locations for storing spent nuclear fuel — a review of old geological maps and research papers about local plate tectonics. It put out a call for localities to volunteer. Participating would commit them to nothing.
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There are few places on earth eager to host a nuclear waste dump. Only Finland and Sweden have settled on permanent repositories for the dregs of their atomic energy programs. But the furor in Suttsu speaks to the deep anxiety that remains in Japan 10 years after an immense earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Fukushima Prefecture, the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
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Even before the Fukushima calamity, which led to three explosions and a release of radiation that forced the evacuation of 150,000 people, ambivalence toward nuclear energy was deeply ingrained in Japan.
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Opinion | Joe Biden Is a Transformational President - The New York Times - 0 views
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We’re seeing a policy realignment without a partisan realignment.
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In a polarized era, the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans, according to a Morning Consult survey. The Republican members of Congress voted against it, but the G.O.P. shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle. As I began to write this on Thursday morning, the Fox News home page had only two stories on the Covid relief bill and dozens on things like the royal family and cancel culture.
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This is not socialism. This is not the federal government taking control of the commanding heights of the economy. This is not a bunch of programs to restrain corporate power. Americans’ trust in government is still low. This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.
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NASA Picks Twin Missions To Visit Venus, Earth's 'Evil Twin' : NPR - 0 views
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NASA has decided to send two new missions to Venus, our closest planetary neighbor, making it the first time the agency will go to this scorching hot world in more than three decades.The news has thrilled planetary scientists who have long argued that Venus deserves more attention because it could be a cautionary tale of a pleasant, Earth-like world that somehow went horribly awry.
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Venus has been called Earth's "evil twin" because it is about the same size as Earth and probably was created out of similar stuff; it might have even had at one time oceans of liquid water.
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But Venus appears to have suffered a runaway greenhouse effect. Temperatures at its surface now exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and its atmosphere is toxic to humans.NASA's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced that after considering four different proposals for its Discovery Program, including proposed trips to moons of Jupiter and Neptune, the agency went all in on Venus.
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Trump vs Biden Election Live Updates: Bitter Campaign Closes With Late Rallies - The New York Times - 0 views
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There were the staggering early vote totals, with a record 97.6 million people already casting their ballots by mail or in person — a tectonic shift away from one-day voting that has been the staple of the American electoral system — and predictions that the total turnout would break the record set in 2016, when nearly 139 million people voted.
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There was the legal wrangling that has been a feature of this campaign even before Election Day, with a federal judge in Texas on Monday rejecting Republican efforts to invalidate more than 127,000 votes that were cast at drive-through locations in a Democratic stronghold.
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The coronavirus pandemic, which has left millions unemployed and millions more confined to working or taking classes from their homes, was never far from the surface.
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Google Lawsuit Marks End Of Washington's Love Affair With Big Tech : NPR - 0 views
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The U.S. Justice Department and 11 state attorneys general have filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Google, accusing it of being an illegal monopoly because of its stranglehold on Internet search.
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The government alleged Google has come by its wild success — 80% market share in U.S. search, a valuation eclipsing $1 trillion — unfairly. It said multibillion-dollar deals Google has struck to be the default search engine in many of the world's Web browsers and smartphones have boxed out its rivals.
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Google's head of global affairs, Kent Walker, said the government's case is "deeply flawed." The company warned that if the Justice Department prevails, people would pay more for their phones and have worse options for searching the Internet.
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World War II coronavirus: The shadow hangs over the pandemic age - The Washington Post - 0 views
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eaders in Europe marked the 75th anniversary of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany in recent days. Wreaths were laid, somber speeches intoned, and promises made to “never forget.”
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The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us of how much World War II is hard-wired in the West’s political imagination.
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In Europe, the trauma of the war now forever lurks beneath the continent’s appeals for unity and solidarity.
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