…that caused the apparently contemporaneous development of agriculture on opposite sides of the world?

…fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old.

Five and a half years extra life expectancy after 30 years. Not bad. An extra 30 after 100 years. Nice. I guess the combination of stress, pollution, moral decrepitude, corroded job protections, declining medical care and all the other crises of the day are actually coincident with increased lifespan. Don’t be optimistic about it; it’s not fashionable.

Thirty-five years ago, the last mission to the moon ended. We haven’t been back since (by definition), and who knows when we’ll return again. No time soon, and no time affordably, with NASA’s current plans.

And nine years ago, Bill Clinton was impeached, the first time that happened to an elected president, though the Senate, under the dubious “leadership” of Trent Lott, had a sham trial afterward that let him off.

On a beautiful Sunday morning in Hawaii, a sleeping giant was awakened, and filled with a terrible resolve.

I was at the memorial about a year ago. Some of the tour guides there were present at the scene, and described the chaos and heroism. There is a project to capture their memories and pictures, before they’re all gone.

The memorial itself is deteriorating, and needs to be replaced. If you’d like to help, today might be a good time to do it, while we remember.

[Update mid morning]

Here’s a story about five of the survivors.

Over sixty years after it went down, a P-38 Lightning has been found buried on a beach in Wales.

This Thanksgiving is also the forty-fourth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

When we were in Dallas for a wedding a couple weeks ago, we went over to Dealey Plaza, where we’d never been, and went to the Sixth Floor Museum. I’d watched the coverage at the time it happened, and seen many photos and the Zapruder film, but you can’t really get a sense of what it is like without actually seeing the historic site of the assassination. It wasn’t what I’d imagined. I think that I’d always inflated the distances in my mind. It seemed almost mundane to look at the street that the limo had driven down, and up at the window of the repository where the sniper had lurked in wait.

Anyway, here’s an interesting article about the Zapruder film, and the mythology about it, that helps explain something that has provided fodder for the conspiracy theorists over the years.

Paul Hsieh points out an interesting end of an era, that most people weren’t even aware they were in.

And is this illegal? It certainly is hilarious. And gratifying to anyone who’s been called by a telemarketer (i.e., anyone with a land line, and perhaps even with cells these days).

If it’s breaking the law, I assume that it would involve impersonating a police officer.