The calendar has been running a little slow and is now off by about two months. From when I was a kid until the 80s or so cold weather was creeping in by late October, with snow and freezing by mid November, and by late January or mid February it was starting to warm up again. Now it seems like it starts cooling down around mid December and getting really cold in mid January. It doesn’t seem to start warming up again until mid March or even early April.
That for whatever reason (biological, social, I don’t know or care!) we are all far more similar to our great-grandparents and great-grandchildren than to our grandparents, parents, children or grandchildren. Maybe it’s specifically because if we live to see our grandchildren, they generally know less about us than their grandparents and parents? If they strive for individuality from all the family members the do know…
I believe that faster then light travel is possible, E=MC2 can be outmaneuvered by eliminating your mass via the Warp Bubble. Somewhat akin to a mag lev train a bubble around a space ship that negates its mass. But maybe I just want off this crazy world
Time is mutable in small ways or we move easily between alternate universes of only very very small differences. The most obvious example is that some celebrities and people have died and I remember them dying and it being news and then there they are, sticking it in my face by being alive.
Heh…Harry Turtledove would seem to agree with you. 
My own theory?
A lot of the religious requirements involving ritual cleanliness, worldwide, stems from ancient holy figures, social leaders, and/or families of the same—probably perfectly nice, spiritually inclined people, all—who had rampant, untreated Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. And rationalized it (“I must have these impulses because God wants it this way”) or covered for it (“Uh, I’m not crazy…it’s more holy to do this.”) in a religious context. Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, was (figuratively) chief among them.
Interesting theory not from me…the “Last Airbender” movie made so many changes to the story and setting of the original series because M. Night Shyamalan, personally, is a racist. (Personally, I’m not convinced it was anything consciously done on his part…because, after hearing some of that dialogue, I’m not convinced he could think hard enough to do it on purpose.)
-That Mormons ended up practicing proto-eugenics thanks to the best men getting several women which explains why Mormons look on average better than most other Americans.
-That it is the Germans not the French who are the most romantic people in the world (as opposed to being sensual).
-That it was the common heritage of Germanic culture which led to countries like the US, UK, the Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavia to pioneer liberalism, parliamentary rule, capitalism, rights of property, and generally be the wealthiest and most progressive areas of the world to-day
That’s my personal theory dammit! Get your own!
To expand upon this, the critical point was the millennium. We needed to make the adjustment at some point +/- five years from the year 2000.
:: canned audience laughter ::
:looks at username: I believe you.
You too, huh?
Good-looking LDS? Assumes facts not in evidence.
Oh, no, who turned him onto Germanic supremacism? Lyndon LaRouche? Some Austrian?
OK, kid, you need a corrective. Read something in a Romance language. Or some good Russian lit. Or manga, for Og’s sake, but you need to kick this romanticization of northern Europe before you start making life choices based on it. Take it from a Scots-Deutscher-Swede mutt. No sense in this at all.
I think human life is like fish in a river, our lives mirror the life of fish in a river. There are big fish, dangerous fish, beautiful fish just as there are humans with the same characteristics. Most fish swim along in a big school, just as humans mingle with each other in daily life (as well as actual schools!). But some fish get sort of stuck and isolated in little nooks and crannies down there, separate from their schools. The manage to swim free now and then, to mate, to swim with the other fish, but for some reason are driven back to live there in their hidey-holes. They manage to stay alive, eating smaller clueless creatures that come along. Just like some humans seem to seek isolation, out of fear or illness or whatever. The humans will often break free, too, get married, go to work, socialize, but they just aren’t ‘school fish’. I don’t know if any of this is true, don’t know what the day to day life of a fish is like, or if there actually are ‘loser’ fish that want to join the school but get trapped in holes. But that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
Germans are so unromantic that they don’t even have a word for sturm und drang.
I believe that reliance on cars is the main driver of obesity. I think a lot of weight is determined not by trips to the gym or concentrated activity, but by the sorts of seamless, constant, low-level activity that was once a part of daily life. We’ve lost a lot the “easy” ways to keep in motion, largely because people rarely walk routinely.
This is awesome because I’ve noticed the exact opposite observations. I mean forget the private theory as to why, I can’t even agree on the direction. August used to be the hottest month but now it’s already cooling down the August. Likewise it starts getting HOT by April now when April used to be cool to some lucky warm days.
So, I think of it in terms of summer being shifted, but it applies to winter too, except by my observation it now gets cool by late October instead of waiting until mid December.
As they say, in Heaven the French are the cooks, the Germans are the engineers, the Italians are the lovers, and the British are the soldiers.
In Hell, the French are the soldiers, the Germans are the lovers, the Italians are the engineers, and the British are the cooks.
That is so obvious to me it shouldn’t even be controversial yet it is. People keep looking for the ‘causes’ of the obesity epidemic when it couldn’t be more simple. I was once skinny and then quite heavy and now skinny again. There was no mystery involved. I lost 45 pounds and kept it off for over three years because I changed my diet and make it a point to walk around as much as I can at as part of my job and ever day life. I don’t even work out yet I have muscle tone. It’s brain dead simple.
My off the wall theory is that there is a Heaven/Hell but it isn’t what you think. We are already in it and there is no way out ever. You are born and then you die but that isn’t the end. The universe or multi-universes create whatever makes up your consciousness over and over again through natural cycles of chance. It doesn’t matter if it take 100 trillion trillion trillion years in your current time. You never know about the gaps. It is certain that ‘you’ will exist again to undergo every possible pleasure and pain scenario over and over again. Suicide can’t even get you out of it. It is literally unending forever and you can’t even carry over any lessons learned from one life to another to help you the next time around.
I blame the high obesity rate among women on loose-fitting yoga pants. It used to be that women would wear shorts to the gym. Now it’s very common for them to wear yoga pants. With yoga pants, they don’t have to worry about displaying their fat legs at the gym, so they have no incentive to keep their weight down.
Its a perfectly mainstream theory. See here: for example: http://www.johnreilly.info/gogo.htm
Actually I’m taking French (;)) and I enjoy manga and anime (though ironically some mangas and animes make me look like a Germanophobe…)
Well I do like Ferraris, fish & chips, and Napoleon…
The Gulf of Mexico does contain a well-studied major impact crater, though the crater is not thought to be responsible for the entire Gulf: Chicxulub crater - Wikipedia
Don’t ask a Doper a question for you will receive three answers - all of which are true and horrifying to know.
I don’t think that’s an ‘off the wall’ theory. In fact, I was under the assumption that it’s a pretty well documented manifestation of urban sprawl. If you keep the houses in one area and the shopping district in another area and the business area in another place and they’re all too far from each other too walk, you have to drive and if every one drives, some people are going to gain weight.
ETA, from wiki
There’s a 31 page PDF linked as a cite (#31) if you want to read it..