The Ten Big Killers in USA

Generally I am neutral on the gun control discussion... but the stats are educational...

What You Should Really Be Afraid Of...

Found unsourced on Facebook.

What is Unknown?

How many things do we really take for granted and actually know very little about? John Lloyd gives a short overview, supported by entertaining illustrations.

Imaging at a trillion frames per second

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it visualizes the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look "around" corners or see inside the body without X-rays.

 Read the story here.

Art and Memory

Getting back on fiscal track

Motivational speaker Tony Robbins explores options for dealing with the US national debt and getting back on track. Certainly stimulating...

U.S. Family Net Worth Drops to Level of Early ’90s

The recent economic crisis left the median American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, the Federal Reserve said Monday in a New York Times story.

A hypothetical family richer than half the nation’s families and poorer than the other half had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, compared with $126,400 in 2007, the Fed said. The crash of housing prices directly accounted for three-quarters of the loss.

Families’ income also continued to decline, a trend that predated the crisis but accelerated over the same period. Median family income fell to $45,800 in 2010 from $49,600 in 2007. All figures were adjusted for inflation.

The survey also confirmed that Americans are shifting the kinds of debts they carry. The share of families with credit card debt declined by 6.7 percentage points to 39.4 percent, and the median balance fell 16.1 percent to $2,600. 

Families also reduced the number of credit cards that they carried, and 32 percent of families said they had no cards, up from 27 percent in 2007.

The new data comes from the Fed’s much-anticipated release on Monday of its Survey of Consumer Finances, a report issued every three years that is one of the broadest and deepest sources of information about the financial health of American families.

Why does "x" stand for the unknown?

In this short and funny TED talk, Terry Moore gives the surprising answer...

The Changing Face of Europe

Turn up the speakers and watch the borders ebb and flow over the centuries...