Helen Keller — inspiration to generations and inspiration for an entire genre of schoolyard humor — and her teacher and friend Anne Sullivan in a clip from 1930 in which they describe the way in which Helen learned how to speak ... It’s a fascinating little clip which pays homage to a woman who, even beyond her amazing circumstances, was a radical socialist, suffragist, and supporter of birth control, who was friends with the likes of Mark Twain and who worked tirelessly to champion the rights of both the downtrodden and the physically disabled.
A hoax video purportedly showing Michael Jackson emerging from a coroner's van was an experiment aimed at showing how quickly misinformation and conspiracy theories can race across the internet, German broadcaster RTL said Tuesday. The video was posted by RTL on YouTube for a single day a week ago and received 880,000 hits. The broadcaster has since removed the video from YouTube, but it has been picked up by other websites around the world.
"We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the internet with hoax videos," spokesman Heike Schultz of Cologne-based RTL told The Associated Press.
There's something strange in the air where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela...
For 140 to 160 nights out of the year, for 10 hours at a time, the sky above the river is pierced by almost constant lightning, producing as many as 280 strikes per hour. Known as the "Relampago del Catatumbo," this lightning storm has been raging, on and off, for as long a people can remember.
In fact, the lighting, visible from 40 kilometers away, is so regular that it's been used as a navigation aid by ships and is known among sailors as the "Maracaibo Beacon."
It is a sprawling film, shot on location from the West Coast to West Africa. An audiovisual manifesto filmed over the course of 4 years and 4 continents, FIRST EARTH makes the case that earthen homes are the healthiest housing in the world; and that since it still takes a village to raise a healthy child, it is incumbent upon us to transform our suburban sprawl into eco-villages, a new North American dream.
Chocking up over 300,000 hits on YouTube even before its official release, FIRST EARTH is not a how-to film; rather, it's a why-to film. It establishes the appropriateness of earthen building in every cultural context, under all socio-economic conditions, from third-world communities to first-world countrysides, from Arabian deserts to American urban jungles. In the age of environmental and economic collapse, peak oil and other converging emergencies, the solution to many of our ills might just be getting back to basics, focusing on food, clothes, and shelter. We need to think differently about house and home, for material and for spiritual reasons, both the personal and the political.
The repentant former KKK leader Johnny Lee Clary explains how Reverend Wade Watts, an NAACP leader, disarmed him by being cool, funny and brave, engaging in some first-rate psy-ops. Be sure to listen through to the end for the chicken story.
Two scientists suggest that depression is not a malfunction, but a mental adaptation that brings certain cognitive advantages.
Life may begin at 40, but research suggests that 44 is the age at which we are most vulnerable to depression. Data analysis on two million people from 80 countries found a remarkably consistent pattern around the world.
The risk of depression was lowest in younger and older people, with the middle-aged years associated with the highest risk for both men and women.
