Minoans: The Ancient Badasses You've Probably Never Heard Of

Who Were the Minoans and Where Did They Go?

The Minoans were a very spiritual and ritualistic culture. Nature and harmony were important themes throughout their history. This society was very advanced for their time, and had a flourishing economy based upon intense commercial activity revolving around their abundance of natural resources. The Minoan civilization goes back before 2600 BCE, but little is known about them before then (“History of Minoan Crete”). One of the biggest mysteries though, is why their advanced and thriving society crumbled around 1450 BCE. No matter the reason for their fall, the Minoans made considerable contributions to the development and growth of Western civilization as it is recognized today.

New Dinosaur species Discovered in Texas!

              An April issue of the journal Cretaceous Research published a paper that releases new information. A new species of dinosaur has been discovered and it’s got a softball sized lump of bone on the top of its skull. Apparently the species is of the herbivore variety and about as big as a medium sized dog of the modern age. It is supposed to have lived 70 to 80 million years ago according to Nicolas Longrich of Yale University.

               Longrich is the lead author of the paper and he and his team discovered the fossil fragments at Big Bend National Park in Texas (2008). They know that it is not a previously identified species of dinosaur because the team compared the fossils of this new dino with ones of similar characteristics from Canada and Montana. It is apparently a new genus of thick-skulled, bipedal pachycephalosaur dinosaurs.

Longrich

          The new genus of dinosaur was given the name Texacephale langstoni. Texacephale" means "Texas head" and "langstoni" is named after Wann Langston, a fellow paleontologist.

        These types of dinosaur are one out of about a dozen that are known to have the distinguished lump of bone on top of their skull, which they speculate to have been used as a ramming mechanism against rivals, somewhat like what oxen and buffalo males do for territory.

         The findings of this specific characteristic has brought about better understanding on the idea that northern species dinosaur (as in Canada and northern United States) have distinct differences from their southern counterparts. Longrich says,

"Instead of roaming across the North American continent, we see pockets of different dinosaurs that are pretty isolated from one another. Every time we get good fossils from Texas, they end up looking very different from those to the north."

       Unfortunately fossils from Big Bend National Park tend to be in unsavory condition, not being preserved well. This set back leaves scientists with only fragments of the big picture, and are unable to get a clear idea of what they looked like, etc.

      However, with this new discovery the team might have dug up an important piece of this puzzle. They once believed this species to have originated in Asia but now it seems they are likely to evolved in North America. Longrich is optimistic to find more fossils of this nature in the future, especially since there have been so many recent findings in Texas and likewise. He even says,

"I think we underestimate how many different species there were."

         Other authors included on the paper were of those who discovered a more intact fossil of this species. They are Julia Sankey (leader of field work) and Darren Tanke.

Artist rendition:

Mind-Control Coming To A Computer Near You?

New technology is something easy to come by at the world’s largest technology fair, CeBit, and a new innovative thing that has sprung up is a cap that is attached to the head. What does this cap do?

         Well it is a cap full of electrodes attached to the head, which as it was at the fair was used to play pinball hands free. The cap enables usage of machinery such as the pinball machine by brain....

NASA Finds Deep Ice Holds Living Creatures (2010)

 I know this is old news, but I doubt that many people had heard about this:

      Deep in the waters of the arctic, beneath layers of frigid ice, life has been discovered to thrive. Scientists weren’t actually searching for the life forms though, just trying to capture a glimpse of what lies beneath the icy surface. Instead they caught a glimpse of a jellyfish and a shrimp-like amphipod.

        They believed that nothing more that microbes could exist in this dark cold place, six hundred feet below the ice....

Exposure to Fast Food Can Make Us Impatient

While the main idea behind the creation of fast food is to decrease the amount of time that food plays into peoples schedules, now the fast food industry has filled our nations bellies with unhealthy diets and impatient eating habits.

Le Fils De L’Homme (Son of Man)

 [I invite readers to express their opinions and ideas about this piece of art - comment!]
    The oil painting, "Son of Man" by Rene Magritte, was completed in 1964. The painting depicts a man in a suit and bowler hat; an average looking businessman of the era. The man wears a red tie, the only color in his outfit and the background is a mix of grays, blues, and white. A hovering apple hides the man’s face and he stands in front of a stone wall in which the hazy blue ocean peeks out behind him...

Gods, Devas, the Divine: Appearing to Men from the skies in vessels of fire?

 From multiple sources....I bring to you readers a small collection of information and photographs, which touch on a controversial subject for most people. The most important aspect of this topic is not necessarily the possibility of extraterrestrials or anything of that nature indefinitely, but more so (to me at least) the possibility of advanced civilizations in human-kinds' distant past. For example, just because there are quite a few primitave civilizations on the planet, does not mean that the two couldn't have coexisted -same era, on the same planet! Look at our world today, you have the big ol' Western civilizations, then compare that to the many more "primative" third-world type of places across the globe. I bet you most of those folks would take one look at our technology and think that something like say your fancy iPhone was a 'magic oricle scroll sent from the gods'...
    Anywho! If archaeological and historical evidence show us something like this, we can't just shrug off the opportunity to better understand and learn our past (I mean then we might be able to see where the future is headed...). This post is merely a means to evaluate bits of this evidence and allow readers to establish their own opinions/theories... Besides! At the very least you can be entertained!




An Analysis of Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World

written by Sierra Nevada

"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in't!"

-Shakespeare’s The Tempest

        Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World is a dystopian piece of fiction that was published in 1932 in London by Chatto and Windus. The novel takes place in a futuristic society where no longer are children raised by their parents. Infants are genetically manufactured and programmed to be ideal adults in a tightly knit community. The main character struggles to fit in because of a decanting malfunction that enabled him to think for himself and analyze situations. This outcast, throughout the novel, grasps a better understanding of the underlying workings of society, which create an urge for him to be alone and discover what else is outside of the bubble of community he is stuck in. Eventually he travels to a place where people still live and thrive in the old ways, isolated from the ideal world. There he meets a half-savage young man who turns his life around and opens his eyes. In the end of it all the society doesn’t change but some of the main characters are relocated to a place where their differences are accepted and they can live without constant ridicule as they were before.

Education in the U.S. and Parental Responsibility

More and more these days there are programs popping up like mushrooms, intending to benefit the children of today. Unfortunately the vast assortment of programs seem to take away the parental responsibility from society. Every decade it gets worse, the children are forced to be evaluated and they are pre-determined at ages so early it’s getting a bit ridiculous.