During the collision of India with the Eurasian continent, the Indian plate was pushed about 500 kilometers under Tibet, reaching a depth of 250 kilometers. The result of the world's largest collision was the world's highest mountain range but that isn't the end of the story. 

Cut to 2004 and a tsunami that made world headlines ...

A year ago, you probably did not know what a vuvuzela was but, if you read this site during the World Cup, you know it now.

Turns out so do a lot of other people.  The Global Language Monitor, which analyzes trends in word usage (read: English) says Vuvuzela was among the top new terms of the year, along with Tea Party and others, while last year Twitter and H1N1 were big winners.

Are you willing to switch to an @Facebook.com e-mail address?

Email wars, which have been dormant since the 1990s, appear to be back and social-networking behemoth Facebook is leading the charge.  But it isn't just mail, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and it's more than just chat.   It has messaging across a variety of platforms, including SMS and texting conversation history across those platforms and a "social in-box", so people can parse messages from friends and family before the inbox.

At Oddee, Gracie Murano has compiled 10 Bizarre Medical Discoveries, among them items like "asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride" and coffee drinkers are more likely to have hallucinations.

Will kids be inspired by a talking proton?   A filmmaker is betting on it.   Using as a plot an effort to destroy the Cassini-Huygens antenna, writer/director Harry Kloor in Quantum Quest has a photon, a neutrino and two protons setting out to save the project - and the whole universe.

New Scientist has an interview with Kloor, including the struggles involved in getting actors like William Shatner, Chris Pine (so, two Captain Kirks!), Samuel L. Jackson and Amanda Peet  for small(ish) budget films and criticisms from some scientists, like 'protons can't talk'.

Philip K. Dick wrote over a hundred short stories, none better than "The Minority Report", where police were able to anticipate crimes rather than arrest people after the fact - leading to arrests before the fact for crimes people hadn't committed yet and a 1950s science-fiction discourse on the nature of free will.

In "The Minority Report" three unaccountable mutants sit in a room mumbling gibberish until a computer sifts through it and makes projections about parallel futures created by actions; when two predictions agree it is a majority report.  When a police commissioner finds out he is going to be arrested for a future murder, he goes out to find the minority report where he commits no crime.

As I wrote in While Webb Bleeds, Space Science Hemorrhages, U.S. budget skepticism is going to persist as long as every big project is years behind schedule and far over budget.    The nation that put a man on the moon has since seen fiascoes like the Superconducting Supercollider and now the James Webb Space Telescope.   

One is addicted to attention, delusions of grandeur and a belief that money exists in a magical pot that never ends - and the other is Lindsay Lohan.

Allysia Finley argues that California is suffering from spending addiction like starlet Lindsay Lohan - and also a fair amount of denial.   'Smoke free restaurants' do not actually make California the envy of the world any more than the remake of "The Parent Trap" makes Lohan enviable (though she was pretty good).  If you look at the decline in the California economy, it happened when the legislature started funding social activism and penalizing businesses that pay taxes - result; a whopping 12% unemployment rate though, since Lohan is 100% unemployed, California has her beat there.

City Hall station, which opened in 1904, has been out of use since 1945, but riders can still make the journey to this long-forgotten subway stop - if they know how.  

John-Paul Palescandolo was kind enough to take some pictures and tell curious folks how to visit.