A Day Off
I have been doing a lot of writing recently on an old, partially finished novel in a series that I started back in 2008. After working on it for the last three weeks, I thought I would take a day off and do some other things, like write a blog or two. I also did a little research on a couple of things that I have wondered about recently and found out some very peculiar information along the way.
While looking at a map of Canada, I could see that there are a number of very large islands north of the arctic circle that are in total, close to the size of Greenland. Is the ice cover and glaciers there melting as rapidly as the ice cap in Greenland? The answer was yes, and there is a lot of extra melt water being added to the worlds oceans from these islands.
The year 536-37 AD was a very bad one for Europe and the Mediterranean because of a volcanic eruption in Iceland that led to crop failures and famine due to a heavy volcanic fog which lasted for 18 months.
During WWII, German technological prowess was not all it was cracked up to be. They over-engineered nearly everything, making it very difficult to produce the quantity of weapons they needed for a successful continuation of the war. Only a quarter of their army was ever completely mechanized, the rest had to rely on horse power for most of the war.
The Black Death, which perhaps killed a third or more of the population of Europe, likely started with climate variations in Central Asia that disrupted the population of gerbils there. Also that rats were not the likely distributor of the plague in Europe, but humans fleeing the outbreak were. Black rats, which got the infected fleas from gerbils, most certainly did get the whole thing started.
Early homo sapiens were able to out-compete the three of four other homo variants of the time because of their ability to speak and communicate with their fellows and thus form a group collective of new ideas, survival strategies and cooperative behaviors.
So that was my day. Who says that an old dog can’t learn new things.
(The Black Death (Bubonic Plague), that ravaged Europe from 1346 to 1353 was only the first of many other, though lesser waves of the plague over the next 400 years.)
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