Awesome video, I especially like the stab to creationism at the end and the disclaimer in the beginning:
"The following essay reflects what appear to be the best estimates we can make according to what everything we know collectively indicates the world was like on one particular not so special day"

But the statement about humans killing off the megafauna is far from certain. They could have easily died out due to climate change or evolutionary pressures besides humans.

Also I really hope they can bring back the Aurochs through cloning their ancient DNA.
"The aurochs was far larger than most modern domestic cattle, being approximately 2 metres (6.6 ft) at the shoulder and weighing 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lb)"
Though wiki also reveals another slight mistake in the video, being that our domestic cows were not bred from Aurochs, but from Indian Zebu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs#Domestication_and_extinction

but that's just nit picking

Gold is the oldest fiat currency. Its value is an arbitrary function of how much faith people have in it as a currency. Its price is being propped up by that faith alone. As an industrial material, the demand for gold is very low compared to the amount available.

By the way, imposing the gold standard would shrink the money supply so dramatically as to cause deflation, and then deflation would cause loan defaults, and loan defaults would cascade to another great depression.

The current amount of dollar currency in circulation is $800 billion, and the amount of Euro currency in circulation is about $1 trillion. Backing all of that with gold, at the price of $855 per ounce, would require 59.6 MILLION kilograms of gold. That is about double the world's total gold reserves. Because you have to shrink the money supply so dramatically to impose a gold standard, you cannot do it without extreme deflation.

It is the federal reserve's job to prevent inflation by jacking up its interest rates and curtailing the printing of money as needed. Plenty of fiat currencies are doing fine with less than 1% inflation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency#18th_and_19th_century

"A sustainable use of trees and other non-edible plant material could supply 60% of the nations gasoline."

That's rather vague, isn't it? How many kilograms of cellulose does he need to create one liter of gasoline? How does he define sustainable? How much more additional logging will be needed? (Not to mention that this doesn't do anything to cut the CO2 footprint). I'm dubious.

Wow, Frankie's in the top comments. A siftlebrity at 10 weeks old. Rock on little 2 1/2 lb. (1.1340 kilograms) dude.

D) Fusion reactors small enough to put in a space ship
E) Better Ion Thrusters
F) Electromagnetic interstellar gas collector to replenish fuel
G) Electric-lighted botanical gardens in space, fertilized by excrement
H) Combine D through G in a spaceship for a comfy 1000-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back.*
I) Now here's the one that requires changing the laws of physics: WARP DRIVE!!


*: Hydrogen fusion converts about 1/1000 of the mass into energy while burning hydrogen plus oxygen converts only 3/10,000,000,000 of the mass into energy. So you get about 3 million times more energy from your fuel per kilogram compared to conventional rockets. That means you can eject your exhaust about (the square root of that) 1800 times faster and go about 1800 times faster.

The fastest conventional rocket yet (Voyager 1) used several stages and gravity assists to get to about C/17,000 (17.46 km/s), which would be fast enough to get to alpha centauri and back in about 150,000 years. (150,000 / 1800) + slack = 1000 years.

ah - but buying it by the kilogram?

"The child eats 10,000 calories a day, she cannot walk or bear physical strain and his cardiovascular system is at risk.

Seven-year-old Jessica Gaude differs greatly from her pals. With 222 kilograms, she is the fattest child in the world.
She eats 10,000 calories each day in Coca-Colas, 15 hamburgers with fries and several kilograms of chocolate. What she eats in one day some children eat in half a year. Her breakfast consists of white bread, potato chips and two litres of coke. And she wants more...."

http://www.fun-on.com/weird.php

I couldn't find an English version

[edit]

but then calvados could so i replaced it with his/her find
props to calvados!!

thanks for the audio pyrex. That's some LOL stuff

Here is some info on the toxicity of THC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol#Toxicity
According to the Merck Index, 12th edition, THC has a LD50 value of 1270 mg/kg (male rats) and 730 mg/kg (female rats) administered orally dissolved in sesame oil.[2]

If this were scaled up to an adult human, the LD50 would be between approximately 50 and 86 g for a 68 kg (150 lb) female or male person respectively. This would be equivalent to 1-1.8 kg of cannabis with a 5% THC content (roughly average) taken orally.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/mj_overdose.htm
In summary, enormous doses of Delta 9 THC, All THC and concentrated marihuana extract ingested by mouth were unable to produce death or organ pathology in large mammals but did produce fatalities in smaller rodents due to profound central nervous system depression.

The non-fatal consumption of 3000 mg/kg A THC by the dog and monkey would be comparable to a 154-pound human eating approximately 46 pounds (21 kilograms) of 1%-marihuana or 10 pounds of 5% hashish at one time. In addition, 92 mg/kg THC intravenously produced no fatalities in monkeys. These doses would be comparable to a 154-pound human smoking at one time almost three pounds (1.28 kg) of 1%-marihuana or 250,000 times the usual smoked dose and over a million times the minimal effective dose assuming 50% destruction of the THC by smoking.

Thus, evidence from animal studies and human case reports appears to indicate that the ratio of lethal dose to effective dose is quite large. This ratio is much more favorable than that of many other common psychoactive agents including alcohol and barbiturates (Phillips et al. 1971, Brill et al. 1970).