Remediation #2

Remediation #1

The Seven Stages of Me

All the world's a big fat book,

With characters who follow their own paths;

They have their own opinions and beliefs with times for tears and laughs,

Seven stages is what they go through;

At first and infant, so cuddly and cute,

With their little pug nose and little toes, too!

The second stage comes along with terrible twos,

The wild, screaming toddler who is a monster;

Then comes the school life as our third stage;

With drama and boys, your mind in a haze;

College is next, responsibility knocks on your door,

You have to care for yourself and figure out what life is for;

At last there is love like a sweet-smelling rose,

So complex and confusing, but still it grows;

Then kids come along as our sixth stage,

You care for them dearly, and wish them the best, filled with happiness.

And finally there is death,

You start to age and get wiser but you have shortness of breath;

Life is short, I'm halfway through my story,

I have a lot to discover, has your life been perfect,

From cover to cover?

Y2K and the Sun Becoming a Red Giant (Numbers 2 and 1)

The Y2K computer glitch was the most prominent doomsday prophecy with the turning of the millennium. The scare originated from a universal computer problem. When computers were first made years were computed with the last two digits.  For example, 1980 would just be 80.  But when 2000 came around the computers would calculate with 00, which many believed would cause apocalyptic consequences. Many believed that at midnight on January 1st, 2000 airplanes would fall randomly from the sky, elevators would fall from the tops of skyscrapers, and the world economy would completely stop. One hundred eight point eight BILLION dollars were spent by the U.S. government and American corporations to fix Y2K computers. Obviously nothing drastic occurred. The worse damage caused by Y2K computers was a credit card disruption in Britain, which sent out bills dated in 1900.  All in all, no big deal.

One of the few apocalyptic predictions based on valid science is the fact that the sun is going to transform into a Red Giant, or a step in a star's life. When the sun enters its red giant phase, which most scholars agree will occur roughly 7.6 billion years from now, all of its hydrogen will convert into helium causing the sun to expand to twenty times the size of Earth's orbit and will shine three thousand times brighter. After this process the sun will collapse into a white dwarf, another step in a star's life. Why is this so bad you ask? That is a topic of heated debate, some people think that the Earth could survive such a transformation while others believe there is no way the Earth could survive.  However, if the Earth remains in its current orbit, there is no doubt the Earth will be engulfed by the expanding sun and vaporized. But the Earth with drift further and further away from the sun when the sun transforms due to its loss of mass. This movement might just save the Earth from absolute destruction. But there is a catch. Either way the sun will get close enough to destroy life on Earth as we know it.

Historical Remediation

     The Veggie Tales is a television series for young children that often depicts stories from the Bible and has many valuable lessons to be learned throughout the stories. Veggie Tales was created by computer animation designer Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki and first aired nationwide in 1992.  In the Veggie Tales movie Jonah the veggie characters run into a few car troubles on the way to a concert and end up going into a restaurant called Seafood.  In this restaurant is the singing trio called "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything", who in fact do something when they tell Jr. Asparagus about the story of Jonah, in a hilarious way of course, and in doing so teach Jr. about compassion, mercy, and second chances.  



Doomsday Debacles: Shoko Asahara and Heaven's Gate (Numbers 4 and 3)

     You know you are truly crazy when you stage your own doomsday prophecy. That is exactly what Shoko Asahara, born Chizuo Matsumoto in 1955, attempted to accomplish on March 20th, 1995. In 1984, he established the Aum Shinrikyo religion, a combination of Asahara's personal interpretations of yoga, aspects of the Buddhism, Christianity, and the writings of Nostradamus. The name Aum Shinrikyo comes from the Japanese word "Supreme Truth". In Asahara's book, published in 1992, he declared himself "Christ" and the "Lamb of God". He proposed that his mission was to liberate the sins of the World and carry the burden of their sins onto himself. Asahara believed that he could take away the sins and bad Karma of the people by exchanging with them his spiritual power. Drinking his bathwater and blood was something that Asahara claimed that his followers should do. He believed that the world would end in a World War III kind of scenario. Asahara prophesied that Mount Fuji would erupt and that there would be a gas attack on Tokyo. Perhaps to expedite his claims, Asahara and a few of his 40,000 followers released Sarin gas into three subway lines in Tokyo Japan. Four people died immediately and 5,500 people were injured. Japanese authorities arrested Shoko Asahara two days after the gas attack and over a decade later in February 24th he was sentenced to death.

Heaven's Gate, a cult founded in the early 1970s in Texas, was lead by Marshall Applewhite. They believed that the "Level Above Human", a variation of Heaven, could be reached when a spaceship came and saved the true believers from doomsday. In 1997, when the comet Hale-Bopp was visible from Earth, Heaven's Gate predicted that some mysterious object was in the comets tail. Heaven's Gate soon prepared for boarding the UFO that was come to save them. The Californian police entered Heaven's Gate's compound to find 39 dead bodies, dressed in black tunics. They had committed a mass suicide via deathly tonics or suffocation.

Doomsday Debacles: Halley's Comet and The Large Hadron Collider (Numbers 6 and 5)

 

Halley's comet, a ball of icy dust discovered by the British Astronomer Edmond Halley, is visible from earth every 76-ish years. Astronomers at the Chicago's Yerkes Observatory claimed that when Earth passed through Halley's comet tail on May 1910 it would emit cyanogen gas, a poisonous miasma, onto Earth. They stated that this cyanogen gas would cause widespread death on Earth. The people who believed this claim stuffed towel under their doors and placed paper over the keyholes in their doors. Believers even bought “comet pills”, specialized masks, and bottled oxygen to escape the toxic waste that was supposedly going to be emitted from Halley's comet. People who were correct and believed that the Halley's comet doomsday prophecy was a bunch of bologna held rooftop “comet parties” to observe the harmless beauty.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is a 17 mile circular particle accelerator located under Geneva, Switzerland. This particle accelerator collides Hydrogen protons, or positively charged particles in the nucleus, at near the speed of light in order to recreate the physical properties of the universe at the time of the Big Bang.  The Big Bang is a theory that attempts to explain how the universe developed from a very tiny, dense state into what it is today. The LHC aids in the discovery of subatomic elements or particles. However, many people believe that black holes, or regions of space having such massive gravitational fields that no matter or radiation can escape, will be a byproducts of the LHC. They believe that these black holes will engulf the world, thereby destroying everything on it. In some sense, these people are correct. The LHC does create black holes, however, they are infinitesimally small. These black holes are microscopic, being only a couple cells across. Also, these black holes are only present for seconds, even milliseconds. So, these black holes don't exist long enough to encompass the Earth.

Doomsday Debacles: Harold Camping and William Miller (Numbers 8 and 7)

 "But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father," Mark 13:32 reads. Despite this passage many Christians have used biblical prophecies to explain the end of the world. Harold Camping, a retired engineer, believes that there is a numerical system in the bible, that when interpreted right, says that the end of the world would have been on May 21, 2011. This excerpt from http://articles.sfgate.com/explains how Camping got the date 5/21/11.

"The number 5, Camping concluded, equals "atonement." Ten is "completeness." Seventeen means "heaven." Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011. Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D, now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that's 1,978 years. Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days - the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year. Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500. Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500. Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared." (Berton 2)

Many people all over the world believed, and still believe, Campings ideas. He reaches people all over the world through his Family Radio, 610 AM KEAR. In fact on May 21, 2011 many people dressed up in their nicest clothes and held their Bibles upto the Heavens, awaiting the return of Christ. However, in my opinion, this "religious man", also claims that we should ditch our churches and that we can not be forgiven, we are predestined to go to Heaven or predestined to go to Hell. I thought that Christians belived in a forgiving God and that you could be cleansed of your sins. Isn't that the whole reason He supposedly died on the cross for us?

Another religious prophesier, William Miller, also prochesied a doomsday using the Bible in mathmatical ways. "Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." Daniel 8:14. From the preeceding biblical passage William Miller beleived that the world would come to an end between March 21, 1843 and March, 21, 1844. He took the days as years, so the sanctuary would be cleansed in 2,300 years and he took the sanctuary being cleansed as Jesus's return. He said that Jesus's return would come 2.300 years after the decree of Greek King Artaxerxes in 457 B.C. So, 2,300-457= 1843. When March 21st, 1844 passed by he changed the date to October 6th, 1844, The Jewish Day of Atonement. And that obviously didn't work either. but he died beliveing that a doomsday was imminent.

Berton , Justin. "Biblical scholar's date for rapture: May 21, 2011." SFGate.com. 01/01//2010: 1-3. Web. 31 Oct. 2011. <http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-01/bay-area/17466332_1_east-bay-bay-area-first-time-camping>.

Doomsday Debacles: The Seekers and The Mayan Calendar (Numbers 10 and 9)

"Doctor Warns of Disasters in World Tuesday -- Worst to Come in 1955 He Declares."

How would you react if you saw this headline in your local newspaper? Well in 1954, citizens of Chicago, Illinois woke up and stumbled onto this headline in The Chicago Tribune. The doctor making this extravagant claim was Dr. Charles Laughead, a Michigan State College physician. He believed that voices in his head were telling him that aliens were going to save the world from God's wrath on December 20^th, 1955. He probably got these ideas from Dorothy Martin, aka Marian Keech, of whom he was an adamant enthusiast. Dorothy Martin, a 54-year-old Illinois resident, was the leader of The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, a UFO cult that is also known as The Seekers. On Christmas Eve 1955 many of Martin's believers gathered in her home, believing that a world abolishing flood was imminent, a message that was allegedly beamed to Martin from the alien race on the planet Clarion. The few people who found Martin's ideas truthful, most of them having quit their jobs and sold their possessions, sang Christmas carols in wait of the salvation from the aliens of Clarion. After waiting for hours on end, Dorothy Martin claimed that her and her followers actions had such an influence on God, that he decided not to wreak havoc on the Earth. In fact, Leon Festinger wrote the book “When Prophecy Fails”, about the cognitive dissonance in the members of The Seekers minds in order to better understand apocalyptic cults.

On December, 21^st, 2012 I will be enjoying my third month in college at UW Eau Claire, on my way to becoming an educator. Or will I? Some people claim that December 21^st, 2012 is the day of the apocalypse, the day that the world will be eradicated. But why 12/21/12? The believers of this doomsday augury interpreted this date as THE day due to the Mayan “Long Count” calendar. The “Long Count” calendar was used by the Mayan people to document the historical events past what their shorter 52 year calenders could do. Since the Mayans produced this calendar in 1314 BC and the calendar spans for 5,126 years the first cycle is said to end on, you guessed it, December, 21^st, 2012. This date, ironically, is the same date as the winter solstice for the Northern Hemisphere.  Many people infer that life as we know it will end on 12/21/12 in many different ways from a comet, a meteorite, or Planet X hitting Earth to the rotation of Earth reversing.  However, neither the ancient Mayans or decendents of the Mayans alive today predicted this prognosis. In fact, Mayan decendents believe that 12/21/12 is the start of a new age, in which humanity will evolve to better understand our place in the universe.



Doomsday Debacles: Introduction

What do the Large Hadron Collider, Halley's comet, Y2K, Heaven's Gate, and The Seekers all have in common? The for-mentioned subjects are doomsday prophecies, all of which contain some downright psychotic and impractical ideas and some grandiose acts to accompany those absurd convictions. In the up-and-coming posts I will be writing about the top ten failed doomsday apocalypses. I will be writing as a journalist in Guru Magazine, a debonair yet refined magazine with a wide variety of different topics and writing styles presented in a simplistic way, so that Average Joe's can easily comprehend the information. In fact Guru Magazine is the world's first “science lifestyle magazine” combining the informational content of science magazines with the fun and understandable aspect of lifestyle magazines. I plan to match Guru's writing style by being informative and creative but concise. I would also like to bring the artistic feature of the magazine into my blogs by incorporating pictures and color, although with my topic the color will be subtle.

http://gurumagazine.org/