Mount Desert Island in Hancock County, Maine, is the largest island off the coast of Maine. With an area of 108 square miles (280 km2) it is the 52nd-largest island in the United States, the sixth-largest island in the contiguous United States, and the second-largest island on the Eastern Seaboard, behind Long Island and ahead of Martha’s Vineyard. According to the 2010 census, the island has a year-round population of 10,615. In 2017, an estimated 3.5 million tourists visited Acadia National Park on MDI. The island is home to numerous well-known summer colonies such as Northeast Harbor and Bar Harbor.
Some residents stress the second syllable (/dɪˈzɜːrt/dih-ZURT) in the French fashion, while others pronounce it like the English common noun desert (/ˈdɛzərt/DEZ-ərt). French explorer Samuel de Champlain’s observation that the summits of the island’s mountains were free of vegetation as seen from the sea led him to call the island L’Isle des Monts-déserts (meaning island of barren mountains). Wikipedia
Whoops, we accidentally made the planet move: New research says human-caused climate change has accelerated the rate at which Earth’s rotational axis changes.
Earth has two kinds of poles. The north and south magnetic poles, which affect things like navigation, drift and even switch places back and forth over time. Earth’s other kind of pole is the axis around which the planet physically spins. This axis has also slightly shifted over time, but scientists haven’t been able to exactly figure out why.
To get to the bottom of it, researchers from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in China and the Technical University of Denmark pulled satellite data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft and studied this “true polar wander” phenomenon during a specific period of time in the 1990s.
By now, you have probably heard of the huge Facebook data breach, in which upwards of 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had personal data leaked online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates — you name it.
Your first question will be, of course, how to check whether you are part of that breach. There are a couple of places out there where you can find out whether your data has been compromised.
One well-known site that tracks data breaches is Have I Been Pwned. Just follow the link to the site and put in your email address or phone number. You will find out not only if you’ve been part of the Facebook breach, but also any other breaches in which your data may have been compromised.
Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned, was considering whether to include a phone number search (as this comes with certain privacy risks), but ultimately decided to add the feature:
Seattle is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2019 population of 753,675, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The Seattle metropolitan area’s population is 3.98 million, making it the 15th-largest in the United States. In 2013-2016, Seattle rated the fastest-growing major city and remained in the top five in May 2015 with an annual growth rate of 2.1%. In July 2016, Seattle ranked as the fastest-growing major U.S. city, with a 3.1% annual growth rate, and continuously among the fastest-growing cities in the United States.
Seattle is situated on an isthmus between Puget Sound (an inlet of the Pacific Ocean) and Lake Washington. It is the largest northern city in the United States, located about 100 miles (160 km) south of the Canadian border. A major gateway for trade with northern Asia, Seattle is the fourth-largest port in North America in terms of container handling as of 2015.
For an academic, Michael Caulfield has an odd request: Stop overthinking what you see online.
Mr. Caulfield, a digital literacy expert at Washington State University Vancouver, knows all too well that at this very moment, more people are fighting for the opportunity to lie to you than at perhaps any other point in human history.
Misinformation rides the greased algorithmic rails of powerful social media platforms and travels at velocities and in volumes that make it nearly impossible to stop. That alone makes information warfare an unfair fight for the average internet user. But Mr. Caulfield argues that the deck is stacked even further against us. That the way we’re taught from a young age to evaluate and think critically about information is fundamentally flawed and out of step with the chaos of the current internet.
“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”
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Our attention economy allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us and steal our focus. Credit…Leah Nash for The New York Times
As we inch closer to the heart of winter, many Americans are starting to prepare for the worst. Maybe you’re adjusting your thermostat more often or preparing your garage for cold weather conditions.
Among the terms used to describe wintery weather, the most dreaded might be “polar vortex.” The ominous term sounds like some earthly black hole trying to kill us with Arctic air. So what exactly is a polar vortex, and why do we keep hearing about it year after year?
The term “polar vortex” dates back to at least 1853, but names for the phenomenon shifted when scientists began to study it in earnest in the 20th century. The term was revised in 1950 when it was called a “circumpolar vortex,” then back to “polar vortex” by 1959. The American Meteorological Society glossary revised the definition in 2000, 2014, and then again in 2015.
The reason these changes keep happening is that the term “polar vortex” actually describes two types of cold weather events. One happens in the troposphere, the lowest layer of the earth’s atmosphere, while another happens higher up in the stratosphere. Basically, it’s a frigid cyclone.
Morskie Oko, or Eye of the Sea in English, is the largest and fourth deepest lake in the Tatra Mountains, in southern Poland. It is located deep within the Tatra National Park in the Rybi Potok (the Fish Brook) Valley, of the High Tatras mountain range at the base of the Mięguszowiecki Summits, in Lesser Poland Voivodeship.
The peaks that surround the lake rise about 1,000 meters above its surface; one of them is Rysy (2,499 meters), the highest peak in the Polish Tatras. Besides Mięguszowiecki Summits (including Mięguszowiecki Szczyt Wielki, 2,438 meters), farther away and slightly to the left, is the distinctive, slender Mnich (“Monk,” 2,068 meters). Many Swiss Pines also grow around the lake. Wikipedia
For Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday we’ve compiled our list of the 80 greatest covers of his songs — a collective gift back to him to say thank you for everything he’s given us. The list has songs recorded by his folk peers nearly 60 years ago, and others from as recently as last year. Getting down to 80 wasn’t easy. As the greatest songwriter of all time, Dylan has inspired thousands of covers of his songs by artists from every corner of music. Our picks include everyone from Hendrix, Baez, and the Byrds to Cher, Adele, and Roots.
Dylan loved the ides of other people doing his songs, and it’s amazing how many songs here were recorded many times by other artists before the man himself ever released his own versions; often, they lived whole other lives, evolving and changing over the years, with his idea of the song as only a blueprint. And because there are so many kinds of Dylan songs, there’s a vast array of different kinds of Dylan covers: R&B singers love relaxing into the contours of “Lay Lady Lay”; country singers like his rootsy stuff; indie-rockers key into his sad side; heroic rock singers love scaling the peaks of open-ended classics — like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” or “Like a Rolling Stone” — finding their own way to make new meanings amidst the intersecting, and often contradictory, emotions and ideas that can roil around within one Dylan song. Even weird, tossed-off or straight-up bad Dylan songs can make for great covers.
Upon reading this, true fans will immediately think of their own favorite covers that didn’t make the list. And that’s part of the fun. This story leads in a million directions. The road always ends wherever you’re at right now.
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Photographs in illustration by Bruce Fleming/AP; Yui Mok/PA Wire/AP; H. Thompson/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images; Jason DeCrow/AP
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An image from Mount Desert Island, Maine
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