Written by: Beck

I'm not all that familiar with the specifics of the Revelation of Saint John, but I'm pretty sure I spotted at least three signs of the pending apocalypse within 1 minute of booting up my computer this morning.

Sign 1: Searches for sex online as a percentage of total web searches declined by 75% in the past 7 years.

"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997, now it's about 5 percent," said Amanda Spink, the University of Pittsburgh professor who co-authored "Web Search: Public Searching of the Web" with Penn State professor Bernard J. Jansen.

If there's one thing that I know, it's that the proper and intended use of the internet is to search for porn. If people can lose sight of that, they can lose sight of anything. What is the world coming too!?!

Sign 2: There was a lunar eclipse last night, and I didn't find out about it until today, so I completely missed it, and that kind of ticks me off. It's a well known fact that me being ticked off heralds the riding forth of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Nifty factoid for you:

During totality, when the moon is completely immersed in shadow, it might turn red, the result of Earth's atmosphere bending hints of all the world's sunrises and sunsets simultaneously onto the moon while the sun's primary light is blocked.

Sign 3: A missing link in the human evolutionary chain... OK, more of a failed digression from the human evolutionary chain... stick with me here, you'll see what I mean in a second... has been found. And that missing link is hobbits.

Scientists in Australia have found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 18,000 years ago on an Indonesian island in a discovery that adds another piece to the complex puzzle of human evolution.

The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on the island of Flores, is of an adult female that was 3 feet tall, had a chimpanzee-sized brain and was substantially different from modern humans.

It shared the isolated island to the east of Java with miniature elephants and Komodo dragons. The creature walked upright, probably evolved into its dwarf size because of environmental conditions and coexisted with modern humans in the region for thousands of years.

[...] Local legends tell of hobbit-like creatures existing on islands long ago but there has been no evidence of them.

[...] Brown and his colleagues have found the remains of seven other dwarf individuals at the same site since the first find.

"The other individuals all show similar characteristics, and over a time range that now extends from as long ago as 95,000 years to as recently as 13,000 years ago -- a population of hobbits that seemed to disappear at about the same time as the pygmy elephants that they hunted," said Bert Roberts, one of the authors of the Nature study.

Current theories to explain the disappearance of the hobbits include encroaching human settlement, massive warfare, or maybe just smoking too much weed. One cave drawing which hints at this depicts a strange demon creature with huge eyes wearing a ring, lots of other demon creatures with spears fighting men on horses, and a cryptic scene which scientists have described as, "A bunch of hobbits being trampled by pygmy elephants."