Doom, gloom, and loss of sleep or productivity!

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! ...

wait, wrong story ...

The days are shorter! The days are shorter! Due to recent events in Chile, commonly referred to as "major earthquake" or "national disaster," the length of a day on earth is going to be 1.26 microseconds shorter! You know, how a figure skater who is spinning, when she pulls in her arms, she spins faster. Well, the Chilean earthquake has caused mother earth to pull in her arms a bit, speeding up her rotation. And when her rotation speeds up, the time to rotate decreases. Welcome to a much shorter day! Whatever are you going to do? You have 1.26 fewer microseconds with which to perform your daily activities... will you lose that amount in sleep? In work? In play time? Or will you split it across all your various daily activities?

This isn't the first time this has happened, of course; according to the article, the 2004 earthquake that cause a deadly tsunami shortened the earth's rotational period by 6.8 microseconds. That's nearly 10 microseconds in six years! I knew I was getting tired-er since 2004!

In an only semi-related (due to seismic activity) vein, Yellowstone may be getting ready to do its own major natural disaster thing. Yellowstone, in case you haven't heard, is part of a HUGE volcano, known as a "supervolcano" - that may be getting ready to cover the US in ash. Recently there have been a swarm of earthquakes in the area - there were over 1800 quakes (as reported by the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory) in the days between January 17 and February 11, 2010. If you're wanting to visit Yellowstone, I'd say do it soon before it blows its top. If you live near Yellowstone, I'd say move away. If you want to find an elephant, don't look in a mud cauldron, 'cause you probably won't find one there, but there might be one at your neighborhood zoo. If that zoo is near Yellowstone, try to get the elephant to move away; you can bring it to my house if you want, because I like elephants. If you live in the mid to eastern US, you might want to get a snow shovel (if you don't already have one due to the increasing winter storms from global warming) to help dig your way out of the ash layer that may soon cover your property, as well as picking up some high quality dust masks, bottling some water, and getting some non-perishable food supplies gathered for the potential chaos.

I hope I haven't caused great anguish to circumnavigate your thinking regions with this blog post, but it gets worse: the post office is considering doing away with Saturday deliveries. The cost of mailing things may go up as well, as the USPS is currently set to deliver a $238 billion loss over the next 10 years. What does this mean to you? The cool thing you bought on eBay may 1) cost more to ship; 2) not arrive until Monday whereas before you would've gotten it on Saturday.

Shorter days, ash-covered USA, and no Saturday mail deliveries of your favorite postal items... what's the world coming to? This, unfortunately (and I'll refrain from commenting on that at this time, although I expect some discussion in the comments from my 3 readers).