Thursday, November 25, 2010

History of Thanksgiving

Although Thanksgiving celebrations dated back to the first European settlements in America, it was not until the 1860s that Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be a national holiday.


Thanksgiving Turkey -
In this Holiday Foods video clip we learn about Thanksgiving traditions and about turkey. David Rosengarten talks about a new trend that has come up with turkey. Today many people are deep frying their birds.




Tuesday, November 9, 2010

How the Earth Was Made



There's a lot of information in How the Earth Was Made, but perhaps the most interesting relates to time. Quite often, the numbers are so staggering that scientists refer to it as "deep time," an appropriate term when one grapples with the notion that our planet is 4.5 billion years old, or that the oceans were formed by rainfall that lasted literally millions of years, or that 700 million years ago, Earth was completely covered by ice that was a mile thick, with surface temperatures reaching minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other end of the scale are numbers that seem surprisingly small: for instance, it wasn't until 220 years ago that the accepted church doctrine regarding the planet's age (no more than 6000 years, according to the Bible) was seriously challenged and that the key to its past was found in rocks, not scripture, while the discovery that dinosaurs once ruled the Earth came considerably later than that.



Monday, November 8, 2010

In Depth with Michio Kaku



Original air date of Oct 3, 2010 on C-SPAN2 BookTV.

Michio Kaku talked about his life, career, and his work. He responded to telephones calls and electronic communications. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and co-founder of the string field theory, a branch of the string theory. He has taught at the City College of New York for 25 years and currently holds the school's Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1968 with a B.S. in Physics and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972. He is the host of two science radio shows and the Science Channel television series "Sci Fi Science." Michio Kaku is author of eight books, besides two text books:

- Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe (1995);

- Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension (1995);

- Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century and Beyond (1999);

- Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (2005);

- Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (2006);

- Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel (2008).

- His forthcoming book, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Change Daily Life by 2100, is to be released in 2011.



TIME - Part 1