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Stephen Colbert Addresses Knox College

Stephen Colbert gave a commencement address at Knox College on Saturday, June 3, 2006.

From the Knox College website:

[Pours water into a glass at the podium, splashes face and back of neck]

Thank you. Thank you very much. First of all, I’m facing a little bit of a conundrum here. My name is Stephen Colbert, but I actually play someone on television named Stephen Colbert, who looks like me, and who talks like me, but who says things with a straight face he doesn’t mean. And I’m not sure which one of us you invited to speak here today. So, with your indulgence, I’m just going to talk and I’m going to let you figure it out.


Read the rest of Colbert’s speech here.

It may take a minute or two for the speech to load, as I expect the college is getting more hits than they planned on – www.boingboing.net picked up the story, which is where I found it. It’s worth the wait.

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Mother Earth Bumps Her Head

250 million years ago there was a great extinction on earth and scientists have recently figured out why. A 50km wide meteor, the size of London or Sydney, struck Antarctica causing a mascon (the equivalent of a bump on the head for the earth) 500km wide.

The shock to the earth was enough to wipe out a significant portion of the earth’s animals and is thought to have caused the split of Australia from Antartica.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

They say a meteor almost 50 kilometres wide caused a 500-kilometre-wide crater deep under the Wilkes Land region of Antarctica, directly south of Australia.

The massive explosion from the impact probably created the continent of Australia, forcing it to break away from the existing land mass.

The incredible discovery caused huge excitement among Australian scientists last night. It could be the missing link in the geological formation of the continents. It would also answer why life on Earth was almost completely wiped out hundreds of millions of years ago.

The meteor the size of Sydney struck 250 million years ago and must have been the biggest explosion ever seen on the planet, far bigger than the 10-kilometre-wide meteor which hit east of Mexico 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs….more

(tags: science australia continents history news)