Whoa... Moments

I've had two such moments today:
Number One: The Near Collapse of World Economy, or, How Centuries of Civilization Nearly Broke Down Within Two Hours
In the movie below, Representative Kanjorski explains how fragile our economy actually was a while back. Here's the excerpt:

At 2 minutes, 20 seconds into this C-Span video clip, Kanjorski reports on a "tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars." According to Kanjorski, this electronic transfer occured over the period of an hour or two.
"The Treasury opened its window to help. They pumped a hundred and five billion dollars into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic and there. And that's what actually happened. If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, five-and-a-half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed."
"It would have been the end of our political system and our economic systems as we know it."

Number Two: Clocks That Know Time Better Than Time Itself
Brett linked to this New Scientist article: Super Clocks: More Accurate Than Time Itself. Awesome. Now we will know exactly, to the 1*10^-18 second, when the economy kills us all.

On another note, last week I found another article to be very interesting. A lot of detractors to human-caused changes in our environment--global warming in particular--claim that the earth is going through another warming period, similar to that which was evidenced in the middle ages. Quoting from this paper:

In summary, it appears that the late 20th and early 21st centuries are likely the warmest period the Earth has seen in at least 1200 years.

And looking at that graph...temperature's rising at an alarming rate.