I like things, and I do stuff.
I am looking for my childhood friends Hammadi & Bilad, Lebanese refugees raised in Melbourne, Australia. We were best friends when I was 2 to 4 years old.
I used to run The Stray Cat in downtown Kansas City (an all-ages multi-purpose venue and art gallery), but the city condemned our historic 3-story building to make way for the new Sprint Center Arena.
I am currently working at OpenMethods in the River Market on the Eclipse Voice Tools Project.
I believe in the End of the Ages and in the Fulness of Times, and I promote all works and efforts which bring about the End Times and the Second Coming ; the appearance of the Messiah , the Mahdi , and the One Mighty and Strong ; the fulfillment of missions of the Two Witnesses and the Ancient of Days ; and/or the acceleration of punctuated equilibrium . Voting for Bush, investing your life savings in the military-industrial complex (and getting rich!), or encouraging your politically- & religiously-zealous and/or -retarded friends are all actions worthy of support. For the enterprising reader, I have included below a chart of Earth's Prime Moving events:
The classical "Big Five" mass extinctions identified by Raup and Sepkoski (1982) are widely agreed upon as some of the most significant: End Ordovician , Late Devonian , End Permian , End Triassic , and End Cretaceous .
These and a selection of other extinction events are highlighted below:
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488 million years ago — a series of mass extinctions at the Cambrian - Ordovician transition (the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction events ) eliminated many brachiopods and conodonts and severely reduced the number of trilobite species.
444 million years ago — at the Ordovician - Silurian transition two Ordovician-Silurian extinction events occurred, probably as the result of a period of glaciation . Marine habitats changed drastically as sea levels decreased, causing the first die-off, and then another occurred between 500 thousand to a million years later when sea levels rose rapidly. It has been suggested that a gamma ray burst may have triggered this extinction.
360 million years ago — near the Devonian - Carboniferous transition (the Late Devonian extinction ) a prolonged series of extinctions led to the elimination of about 70% of all species. This was not a sudden event, with the period of decline lasting perhaps as long as 20 million years. However, there is evidence for a series of extinction pulses within this period.
251 million years ago — at the Permian - Triassic transition (the Permian-Triassic extinction event ) about 95% of all marine species went extinct. This catastrophe was Earth's worst mass extinction, killing 53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera , and an estimated 70% of land species (including plants, insects, and vertebrate animals.)
200 million years ago — at the Triassic - Jurassic transition (the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event ) about 20% of all marine families as well as most non-dinosaurian archosaurs , most therapsids , and the last of the large amphibians were eliminated.
65 million years ago — at the Cretaceous - Paleogene transition (the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event ) about 50% of all species became extinct (including all non-avian dinosaurs ). This extinction is widely believed to have resulted from an asteroid or comet impact event .
Present day — the Holocene extinction event . A 1998 survey by the American Museum of Natural History found that 70% of biologists view the present era as part of a mass extinction event, the fastest to have ever occurred. Some, such as E. O. Wilson of Harvard University , predict that man's destruction of the biosphere could cause the extinction of one-half of all species in the next 100 years. Research and conservation efforts, such as the IUCN 's annual " Red List " of threatened species, all point to an ongoing period of enhanced extinction, though some offer much lower rates and hence longer time scales before the onset of catastrophic damage. The extinction of many megafauna near the end of the most recent ice age is also sometimes considered a part of the Holocene extinction event.