title: Jack Wild

text: By 21, Wild was an alcoholic. After exhausting his remaining fortune, he lived with his retired father for a few years. His alcoholism caused three cardiac arrests and resulted in numerous hospital stays. He was diagnosed with diabetes on 14 March 1983. His alcoholism ruined both his career and marriage to Gaynor Jones, who left him in 1985 because of his drinking.


title: Jack Wild

text: During the mid-1980s, he often drank three to four bottles of vodka a week, and typically drank half a bottle of vodka and two bottles of wine every day. He later admitted his alcoholism was so debilitating that he was incapable of performing any kind of work. He once attended a drying-out clinic for drug addicts and alcoholics, run by Pete Townshend, but after being "dry" for six weeks, he bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the fact he had stopped drinking. Wild eventually became sober on 6 March 1989, after joining a support group, "Alcoholics Victorious".


title: Jack Wild

text: Wild died on 1 March 2006 of oral cancer. He is buried in Toddington Parish Cemetery, Bedfordshire. He had been unable to speak for the last two years of his life following the operation in which his vocal cords and part of his tongue were removed.


title: Jack Wild

text: At the time of his death, his wife, Claire, and he had been working on his autobiography. She said: "All the material was there when Jack died, it just needed rearranging, editing, and in certain sections, writing out from transcripts Jack and I made as we recorded him talking about his life." The book, "It's a Dodger's Life" , was published in 2016 with a foreword by "Pufnstuf" co-star Billie Hayes, an afterword by Clive Francis, and an epilogue by Wild's wife.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: In mathematics, the sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: It does so by iteratively marking as composite (i.e., not prime) the multiples of each prime, starting with the first prime number, 2. The multiples of a given prime are generated as a sequence of numbers starting from that prime, with constant difference between them that is equal to that prime. This is the sieve's key distinction from using trial division to sequentially test each candidate number for divisibility by each prime. Once all the multiples of each discovered prime have been marked as composites, the remaining unmarked numbers are primes.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: The earliest known reference to the sieve (, "kóskinon Eratosthénous") is in Nicomachus of Gerasa's "Introduction to Arithmetic", an early 2nd cent. CE book which attributes it to Eratosthenes of Cyrene, a 3rd cent. BCE Greek mathematician, though describing the sieving by odd numbers instead of by primes.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: One of a number of prime number sieves, it is one of the most efficient ways to find all of the smaller primes. It may be used to find primes in arithmetic progressions.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: A prime number is a natural number that has exactly two distinct natural number divisors: the number 1 and itself.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: The main idea here is that every value given to will be prime, because if it were composite it would be marked as a multiple of some other, smaller prime. Note that some of the numbers may be marked more than once (e.g., 15 will be marked both for 3 and 5).


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: As a refinement, it is sufficient to mark the numbers in step 3 starting from , as all the smaller multiples of will have already been marked at that point. This means that the algorithm is allowed to terminate in step 4 when is greater than .


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: Another refinement is to initially list odd numbers only, , and count in increments of in step 3, thus marking only odd multiples of . This actually appears in the original algorithm. This can be generalized with wheel factorization, forming the initial list only from numbers coprime with the first few primes and not just from odds (i.e., numbers coprime with 2), and counting in the correspondingly adjusted increments so that only such multiples of are generated that are coprime with those small primes, in the first place.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: The first number in the list is 2; cross out every 2nd number in the list after 2 by counting up from 2 in increments of 2 (these will be all the multiples of 2 in the list):


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: The next number in the list after 2 is 3; cross out every 3rd number in the list after 3 by counting up from 3 in increments of 3 (these will be all the multiples of 3 in the list):


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: The next number not yet crossed out in the list after 3 is 5; cross out every 5th number in the list after 5 by counting up from 5 in increments of 5 (i.e. all the multiples of 5):


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: The next number not yet crossed out in the list after 5 is 7; the next step would be to cross out every 7th number in the list after 7, but they are all already crossed out at this point, as these numbers (14, 21, 28) are also multiples of smaller primes because 7 × 7 is greater than 30. The numbers not crossed out at this point in the list are all the prime numbers below 30:


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: This algorithm produces all primes not greater than . It includes a common optimization, which is to start enumerating the multiples of each prime from . The time complexity of this algorithm is , provided the array update is an operation, as is usually the case.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: As Sorenson notes, the problem with the sieve of Eratosthenes is not the number of operations it performs but rather its memory requirements. For large , the range of primes may not fit in memory; worse, even for moderate , its cache use is highly suboptimal. The algorithm walks through the entire array , exhibiting almost no locality of reference.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: A solution to these problems is offered by "segmented" sieves, where only portions of the range are sieved at a time. These have been known since the 1970s, and work as follows:


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: If is chosen to be , the space complexity of the algorithm is , while the time complexity is the same as that of the regular sieve.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: For ranges with upper limit so large that the sieving primes below as required by the page segmented sieve of Eratosthenes cannot fit in memory, a slower but much more space-efficient sieve like the sieve of Sorenson can be used instead.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: An incremental formulation of the sieve generates primes indefinitely (i.e., without an upper bound) by interleaving the generation of primes with the generation of their multiples (so that primes can be found in gaps between the multiples), where the multiples of each prime are generated directly by counting up from the square of the prime in increments of (or for odd primes). The generation must be initiated only when the prime's square is reached, to avoid adverse effects on efficiency. It can be expressed symbolically under the dataflow paradigm as


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: Primes can also be produced by iteratively sieving out the composites through [[Trial division|divisibility testing]] by sequential primes, one prime at a time. It is not the sieve of Eratosthenes but is often confused with it, even though the sieve of Eratosthenes directly generates the composites instead of testing for them. Trial division has worse theoretical [[Analysis of algorithms|complexity]] than that of the sieve of Eratosthenes in generating ranges of primes.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: When testing each prime, the "optimal" trial division algorithm uses all prime numbers not exceeding its square root, whereas the sieve of Eratosthenes produces each composite from its prime factors only, and gets the primes "for free", between the composites. The widely known 1975 [[functional programming|functional]] sieve code by [[David Turner (computer scientist)|David Turner]] is often presented as an example of the sieve of Eratosthenes but is actually a sub-optimal trial division sieve.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: The sieve of Eratosthenes is a popular way to benchmark computer performance. The time complexity of calculating all primes below in the random access machine model is operations, a direct consequence of the fact that the prime harmonic series asymptotically approaches . It has an exponential time complexity with regard to input size, though, which makes it a pseudo-polynomial algorithm. The basic algorithm requires of memory.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: The normally implemented page segmented version has the same operational complexity of as the non-segmented version but reduces the space requirements to the very minimal size of the segment page plus the memory required to store the base primes less than the square root of the range used to cull composites from successive page segments of size .


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: A special (rarely, if ever, implemented) segmented version of the sieve of Eratosthenes, with basic optimizations, uses operations and bits of memory.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: Using big O notation ignores constant factors and offsets that may be very significant for practical ranges: The sieve of Eratosthenes variation known as the Pritchard wheel sieve has an performance, but its basic implementation requires either a "one large array" algorithm which limits its usable range to the amount of available memory else it needs to be page segmented to reduce memory use. When implemented with page segmentation in order to save memory, the basic algorithm still requires about bits of memory (much more than the requirement of the basic page segmented sieve of Eratosthenes using bits of memory). Pritchard's work reduced the memory requirement at the cost of a large constant factor. Although the resulting wheel sieve has performance and an acceptable memory requirement, it is not faster than a reasonably Wheel Factorized basic sieve of Eratosthenes for practical sieving ranges.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: Euler's proof of the zeta product formula contains a version of the sieve of Eratosthenes in which each composite number is eliminated exactly once. The same sieve was rediscovered and observed to take linear time by . It, too, starts with a list of numbers from 2 to in order. On each step the first element is identified as the next prime, is multiplied with each element of the list (thus starting with itself), and the results are marked in the list for subsequent deletion. The initial element and the marked elements are then removed from the working sequence, and the process is repeated:


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: Here the example is shown starting from odds, after the first step of the algorithm. Thus, on the th step all the remaining multiples of the th prime are removed from the list, which will thereafter contain only numbers coprime with the first primes (cf. wheel factorization), so that the list will start with the next prime, and all the numbers in it below the square of its first element will be prime too.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: Thus, when generating a bounded sequence of primes, when the next identified prime exceeds the square root of the upper limit, all the remaining numbers in the list are prime. In the example given above that is achieved on identifying 11 as next prime, giving a list of all primes less than or equal to 80.


title: Sieve of Eratosthenes

text: Note that numbers that will be discarded by a step are still used while marking the multiples in that step, e.g., for the multiples of 3 it is , , , , ..., , ..., so care must be taken dealing with this.


title: John Dunsworth

text: John Francis Dunsworth (April 12, 1946 – October 16, 2017) was a Canadian actor. He was best known for playing the antagonistic trailer park supervisor Jim Lahey on the cult comedy series "Trailer Park Boys" (2001–2018). His other roles included the mysterious reporter Dave Teagues on the supernatural drama series "Haven" (2010–2015) and Officer McNabb in the CBC film "" (2003). He also had extensive experience in regional theater.


title: John Dunsworth

text: Dunsworth was born in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, the second of 10 children born to Frank and Frances Dunsworth. In 1988, he starred in a video documentary short titled "John Dunsworth: The Candidate", which was written and directed by Neal Livingston. The film follows an underdog provincial candidate for the New Democratic Party in the riding of Halifax Bedford Basin as he campaigns, based on Dunsworth's candidacy in the 1988 Nova Scotia general election.


title: John Dunsworth

text: Dunsworth studied acting at the University of Guelph, but dropped out in his fourth year. He went on to act in numerous CBC radio dramas, and had starring roles in many stage productions at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax. In 1970, Dunsworth leased an abandoned building on Halifax's waterfront, and converted it into a playhouse. Dubbing it the Pier One Theatre, it became the city's first and most successful alternative theater production house. In the late 1980s, Dalhousie University hired Dunsworth to produce the university's Welcome Show for new students at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, in which he also occasionally had an unseen voice-over role. In 1987, Dunsworth founded Filmworks Casting where he worked as Halifax's most renowned casting director. Dunsworth met director Mike Clattenburg in the mid-1990s when he tried out for a bit part in Clattenburg's film short, "One Last Shot". Dunsworth's small role gradually transformed into a leading part that earned him a Best Performance award from the Atlantic Film Festival. From there, he further developed the character into what would eventually become Jim Lahey in "Trailer Park Boys".


title: John Dunsworth

text: Dunsworth, John Paul Tremblay, and Robb Wells can be seen in the 2002 movie Virginia's Run starring Gabriel Byrne and Joanne Whalley. Dunsworth plays a local cop while Tremblay and Wells play active and verbal townsmen similar to their Trailer Park Boys characters. Actors are credited as cop for John Dunsworth, J.P. for John Paul Tremblay (credits as J.P. Tremblay), and Robb Wells as Rob. The movie was filmed in Nova Scotia, Canada. Dunsworth starred in "Haven", the television series adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Colorado Kid.


title: John Dunsworth

text: In 2010, Dunsworth reunited with many of his former "Trailer Park Boys" castmates in the new series "The Drunk and On Drugs Happy Fun Time Hour".


title: John Dunsworth

text: Dunsworth lived in his native Nova Scotia with his wife, Elizabeth, whom he married sometime after 1974. Together, they had three daughters (Sarah, Zoë, and Molly) and one son (Geoff). Two of his daughters, Sarah and Molly, are actresses.


title: John Dunsworth

text: Unlike the character he played on "Trailer Park Boys", Dunsworth rarely drank alcohol; the 'alcohol' he drank in the show was usually iced tea. He admitted to suffering from a gambling problem in his early years. As a result of his recovery, he had been instrumental in trying to remove video lottery terminals from bars in Nova Scotia.


title: John Dunsworth

text: Dunsworth once appeared on stage with Guns N' Roses in Halifax, as Axl Rose is a fan of "Trailer Park Boys" and Dunsworth's character in particular. He was a boating enthusiast and frequently spent time on his yacht, "Emerald Princess". He enjoyed building granite sculptures and structures with local stone and concrete.


title: John Dunsworth

text: Dunsworth died of an initially undisclosed illness on October 16, 2017, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the age of 71. In a statement, Dunsworth's daughter Sarah described the illness as "short and unexpected" and stated that her father was an "amazing husband, father and grandfather". On a Facebook post written on May 26, 2021, from the "100% John Dunsworth" page, which is a page run by Dunsworth's surviving family and friends, it was revealed in the comments section in a comment made by the page that he passed due to complications related to thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP). John Dunsworth is buried at St. Anthony's & St. Augustine's Catholic Cemetery located in Simms Settlement, Nova Scotia.


title: Neil Young discography and filmography

text: The discography and filmography of Neil Young contains both albums and films produced by Young. Through his career most of Young's work has been recorded for and distributed by Reprise Records, a company owned by Warner Bros. Records since 1963 and now part of the Warner Music Group. The only exceptions are Young's five albums for Geffen Records in the 1980s, which were once distributed by Warner, but are now distributed by Universal Music Group.


title: Neil Young discography and filmography

text: Neil Young has included material recorded live on many of his albums; listed here are albums consisting completely or primarily of live concert recordings. "Time Fades Away" consists of previously unreleased material. "Weld" and "Arc" were initially released as a single package, "Arc-Weld". See also the Archives Series listed separately below.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul, billed as "Bragging Rights", was an exhibition boxing match between former five-division world champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. and YouTuber Logan Paul. It took place on June 6, 2021, at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. The fight reportedly sold more than one million pay-per-view buys.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: On December 6, 2020, Paul and Mayweather agreed to fight in an exhibition bout on February 20, 2021. The fight was postponed to June 6, 2021 and took place at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: On April 27, 2021, Badou Jack and Jean Pascal were added to the card. However, on May 29, 2021, Jean Pascal failed a drug test and was removed from the bout. On June 1, 2021, Dervin Colina replaced Jean Pascal to face Badou Jack.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: On May 3, 2021, a fight between former NFL wide receiver Chad Johnson and Brian Maxwell was also added to the card.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: Mayweather started tentatively and defensively, reluctant to throw often and avoiding most of Paul's shots. Toward the end of the first round, Paul unleashed a wild flurry, but all of his punches were blocked by Mayweather's guard. The second round was similar to the first, with Mayweather content with the slow pace of the fight. He finally turned up the offense in the third, opening up with some clean left hooks that rocked Paul's head back, as well as mixing in his trademark pull counter with the right hand. From the fourth round onward, Paul was visibly fatigued and took every opportunity to utilize his weight advantage by tying the smaller Mayweather up in the clinch after every exchange. Despite Paul's constant attempts at neutering Mayweather's offense, the latter continued to dictate the pace of the fight and land the cleaner, more effective punches. Toward the end of the eighth and final round, Paul showboated when it became clear that he had done enough to avoid being stopped as most had predicted would be the case, and that he would survive to hear the final bell.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: The fight went the full eight-round distance, and no winner was announced. Mayweather's superior boxing was reflected by the CompuBox punch stats, with Mayweather having landed 43 punches of 107 thrown (40.2%), compared to Paul's 28 landed of 217 thrown (12.9%).


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: In his post-fight interview, Mayweather praised his opponent, saying: "He's better than I thought he was ... he's a tough, rough competitor." Paul appeared to harbor some doubt about how seriously Mayweather had taken the fight, saying: "I'm going to go home thinking, 'Did Floyd let me survive?'" Mayweather later claimed that he did hold back saying "If it was a real fight, it would've been a blowout in the first round."


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: On the undercard, former two-division champion Badou Jack beat undefeated Dervin Colina by fourth-round technical knockout, Luís Arias secured an upset victory against former unified light-middlweight champion Jarrett Hurd via split decision, and Chad Johnson and Brian Maxwell went the full distance in a four-round exhibition bout.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the undercard was televised on Sky Sports Action, Sky Sports Mix, Sky Sports Main Event, Sky One and Sky Sports Boxing YouTube, whereas the main card aired on Sky Sports Box Office.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: ESPN broadcast the fight across Latin America, with former world boxing champions Marcos Maidana and Acelino Freitas as guest analysts in the Spanish and Portuguese broadcasts respectively.


title: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul

text: The fight was televised on Showtime PPV (and free to Showtime's subscribers) in the United States, and globally on Fanmio PPV at Fanmio.com. In Australia, the fight was televised on Main Event. In New Zealand, the fight was televised on Sky Arena. In South Africa, the fight was televised on SuperSport. In Russia, the fight was televised on REN TV. In Poland, the fight was televised on TVP Sport. In Portugal, the fight was televised on Sport TV. In the Czech Republic, the fight was televised on Sport 2. In Turkey, the fight was televised on S Sport Plus. In Spain, the fight was televised on Mitele Plus. In Indonesia, the fight was televised on tvOne. In Malaysia, the fight was televised on Astro Box Office.


title: Societal collapse

text: Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline, and mass migration. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.


title: Societal collapse

text: Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity, but some of them later revived and transformed, such as China, India, and Egypt. However, others never recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Maya civilization, and the Easter Island civilization. Societal collapse is generally quick but rarely abrupt.


title: Societal collapse

text: Anthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, secular decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune. However, complete extinction of a culture is not inevitable, and in some cases, the new societies that arise from the ashes of the old one are evidently its offspring, despite a dramatic reduction in sophistication. Moreover, the influence of a collapsed society, such as the Western Roman Empire, may linger on long after its death.


title: Societal collapse

text: The study of societal collapse, collapsology, is a topic for specialists of history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. More recently, they are joined by experts in cliodynamics and study of complex systems.


title: Societal collapse

text: Joseph Tainter frames societal collapse in "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (1988), a seminal and founding work of the academic discipline on societal collapse. He elaborates that 'collapse' is a "broad term," but in the sense of societal collapse, he views it as "a "political" process." He further narrows societal collapse as a rapid process (within "few decades") of "substantial loss of sociopolitical structure," giving the fall of the Western Roman Empire as "the most widely known instance of collapse" in the Western world.


title: Societal collapse

text: Others, particularly in response to the popular "" (2005) by Jared Diamond and more recently, have argued that societies discussed as cases of collapse are better understood through resilience and societal transformation, or "reorganization", especially if collapse is understood as a "complete end" of political systems, which according to Shmuel Eisenstadt has not taken place at any point. Eisenstadt also points out that a clear differentiation between total or partial decline and "possibilities of regeneration" is crucial for the preventive purpose of the study of societal collapse. This frame of reference often rejects the term collapse and critiques the notion that cultures simply vanish when the political structure that organize labor for large archaeologicaly prominent projects. For example, while the Ancient Maya are often touted as a prime example of collapse, in reality this reorganization was simply the result of the removal of the political system of Divine Kingship largely in the eastern lowlands as many cities in the western highlands of Mesoamerica maintained this system of divine kingship into the 16th century. The Maya continue to maintain cultural and linguistic continuity into the present day.


title: Societal collapse

text: The social scientist Luke Kemp analyzed dozens of civilizations, which he defined as "a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure," from 3000 BC to 600 AD and calculated that the average life span of a civilization is close to 340 years. Of them, the most durable were the Kushite Kingdom in Northeast Africa (1,150 years), the Aksumite Empire in Africa (1,100 years), and the Vedic civilization in South Asia and the Olmecs in Mesoamerica (both 1,000 years), the Byzantine Empire (1083 years) and the shortest-lived were the Nanda Empire in India (24) and the Qin Dynasty in China (14).


title: Societal collapse

text: A statistical analysis of empires by complex systems specialist Samuel Arbesman suggests that collapse is generally a random event and does not depend on age. That is analogous to what evolutionary biologists call the Red Queen hypothesis, which asserts that for a species in a harsh ecology, extinction is a persistent possibility.


title: Societal collapse

text: Contemporary discussions about societal collapse are seeking resilience by suggesting societal transformation.


title: Societal collapse

text: Because human societies are complex systems, common factors may contribute to their decline that are economical, environmental, demographic, social and cultural, and they may cascade into another and build up to the point that could overwhelm any mechanisms that would otherwise maintain stability. Unexpected and abrupt changes, which experts call nonlinearities, are some of the warning signs. In some cases, a natural disaster (such as a tsunami, earthquake, pandemic, massive fire or climate change) may precipitate a collapse. Other factors such as a Malthusian catastrophe, overpopulation, or resource depletion might be contributory factors of collapse, but studies of past societies seem to suggest that those factors did not cause the collapse alone. Significant inequity and exposed corruption may combine with lack of loyalty to established political institutions and result in an oppressed lower class rising up and seizing power from a smaller wealthy elite in a revolution. The diversity of forms that societies evolve corresponds to diversity in their failures. Jared Diamond suggests that societies have also collapsed through deforestation, loss of soil fertility, restrictions of trade and/or rising endemic violence.


title: Societal collapse

text: In the case of the Western Roman Empire, some argued that it did not collapse but merely transformed.


title: Societal collapse

text: Archeologists identified signs of a megadrought for a millennium between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago in Africa and Asia. The drying of the Green Sahara not only turned it into a desert but also disrupted the monsoon seasons in South and Southeast Asia and caused flooding in East Asia, which prevented successful harvest and the development of complex culture. It coincided with and may have caused the decline and the fall of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization. The dramatic shift in climate is known as the 4.2-kiloyear event.


title: Societal collapse

text: The highly advanced Indus Valley Civilization took roots around 3000 BC in what is now northwestern India and Pakistan and collapsed around 1700 BC. Since the Indus script has yet to be deciphered, the causes of its de-urbanization remain a mystery, but there is some evidence pointing to natural disasters. Signs of a gradual decline began to emerge in 1900 BC, and two centuries later, most of the cities had been abandoned. Archeological evidence suggests an increase in interpersonal violence and in infectious diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis. Historians and archeologists believe that severe and long-lasting drought and a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia caused the collapse. Evidence for earthquakes has also been discovered. Sea level changes are also found at two possible seaport sites along the Makran coast which are now inland. Earthquakes may have contributed to decline of several sites by direct shaking damage or by changes in sea level or in water supply.


title: Societal collapse

text: Volcanic eruptions can abruptly influence the climate. During a large eruption, sulfur dioxide (SO) is expelled into the stratosphere, where it could stay for years and gradually get oxidized into sulfate aerosols. Being highly reflective, sulfate aerosols reduce the incident sunlight and cool the Earth's surface. By drilling into glaciers and ice sheets, scientists can access the archives of the history of atmospheric composition. A team of multidisciplinary researchers led by Joseph McConnell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada deduced that a volcanic eruption occurred in 43 BC, a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March (March 15) in 44 BC, which left a power vacuum and led to bloody civil wars. According to historical accounts, it was also a period of poor weather, crop failure, widespread famine, and disease. Analyses of tree rings and cave stalagmites from different parts of the globe provided complementary data. The Northern Hemisphere got drier, but the Southern Hemisphere became wetter. Indeed, the Greek historian Appian recorded that there was a lack of flooding in Egypt, which also faced famine and pestilence. Rome's interest in Egypt as a source of food intensified, and the aforementioned problems and civil unrest weakened Egypt's ability to resist. Egypt came under Roman rule after Cleopatra committed suicide in 30 BC. While it is difficult to say for certain whether Egypt would have become a Roman province if Okmok volcano (in modern-day Alaska) had not erupted, the eruption likely hastened the process.


title: Societal collapse

text: More generally, recent research pointed to climate change as a key player in the decline and fall of historical societies in China, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. In fact, paleoclimatogical temperature reconstruction suggests that historical periods of social unrest, societal collapse, and population crash and significant climate change often occurred simultaneously. A team of researchers from Mainland China and Hong Kong were able to establish a causal connection between climate change and large-scale human crises in pre-industrial times. Short-term crises may be caused by social problems, but climate change was the ultimate cause of major crises, starting with economic depressions. Moreover, since agriculture is highly dependent on climate, any changes to the regional climate from the optimum can induce crop failures.


title: Societal collapse

text: The Mongol conquests corresponded to a period of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Medieval Warm Period was giving way to the Little Ice Age, which caused ecological stress. In Europe, the cooling climate did not directly facilitate the Black Death, but it caused wars, mass migration, and famine, which helped diseases spread.


title: Societal collapse

text: A more recent example is the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century in Europe, which was a period of inclement weather, crop failure, economic hardship, extreme intergroup violence, and high mortality because of the Little Ice Age. The Maunder Minimum involved sunspots being exceedingly rare. Episodes of social instability track the cooling with a time lap of up to 15 years, and many developed into armed conflicts, such as the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which started as a war of succession to the Bohemian throne. Animosity between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire (in modern-day Germany) added fuel to the fire. Soon, it escalated to a huge conflict that involved all major European powers and devastated much of Germany. When the war had ended, some regions of the empire had seen their populations drop by as much as 70%. However, not all societies faced crises during this period. Tropical countries with high carrying capacities and trading economies did not suffer much because the changing climate did not induce an economic depression in those places.


title: Societal collapse

text: Between ca. 4000 and 3000 BCE, neolithic populations in western Eurasia declined, probably due to the plague and other viral hemorrhagic fevers. This decline was followed by the Indo-European migrations. Around 3,000 BC, people of the pastoralist Yamnaya culture from the Pontic–Caspian steppe, who had high levels of WSH ancestry, embarked on a massive expansion throughout Eurasia, which is considered to be associated with the dispersal of the Indo-European languages by most contemporary linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists. The expansion of WSHs resulted in the virtual disappearance of the Y-DNA of early European farmers (EEFs) from the European gene pool, significantly altering the cultural and genetic landscape of Europe. EEF mtDNA however remained frequent, suggesting admixture between WSH males and EEF females.


title: Societal collapse

text: A mysterious loose confederation of fierce maritime marauders, known as the Sea Peoples, was identified as one of the main causes of the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Sea Peoples might have themselves been victims of the environmental changes that led to widespread famine and precipitated the Collapse. After the Battle of Kadesh against the Egyptians in 1285 BC, the Hittite Empire began to show signs of decline. Attacks by the Sea Peoples accelerated the process, and internal power struggles, crop failures, and famine were contributory factors. The Egyptians, with whom the Hittites signed a peace treaty, supplied them with food in times of famine, but it was not enough. Around 1200 BC, the Sea Peoples seized a port on the west coast of Asia Minor, cutting off the Hittites from their trade routes from which their supply of grain came. Hattusa, the Hittite capital, was destroyed. Some Hittite territories survived but would eventually be occupied by the Assyrians in the seventh century BC.


title: Societal collapse

text: The Minoan Civilization, based on Crete, centered on religious rituals and seaborne trade. In around 1450 BC, it was absorbed into Mycenaean Greece, which itself went into serious decline around 1200 BC because of various military conflicts, including the Dorian invasion from the north and attacks from the Sea Peoples.In the third century BC, a Eurasian nomadic people, the Xiongnu, began threatening China's frontiers, but by the first century BC, they had been completely expelled. They then turned their attention westward and displaced various other tribes in Eastern and Central Europe, which led to a cascade of events. Attila rose to power as leader of the Huns and initiated a campaign of invasions and looting and went as far as Gaul (modern-day France). Attila's Huns were clashing with the Roman Empire, which had already been divided into two halves for ease of administration: the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire. Despite managing to stop Attila at the Battle of Chalons in 451 AD, the Romans were unable to prevent Attila from attacking Roman Italy the next year. Northern Italian cities like Milan were ravaged. The Huns never again posed a threat to the Romans after Attila's death, but the rise of the Huns also forced the Germanic peoples out of their territories and made those groups press their way into parts of France, Spain, Italy, and even as far south as North Africa. The city of Rome itself came under attack by the Visigoths in 410 and was plundered by the Vandals in 455. A combination of internal strife, economic weakness, and relentless invasions by the Germanic peoples pushed the Western Roman Empire into terminal decline. The last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was dethroned in 476 by the German Odoacer, who declared himself King of Italy.


title: Societal collapse

text: In the eleventh century AD, North Africa's populous and flourishing civilization collapsed after it had exhausted its resources in internal fighting and suffering devastation from the invasion of the Bedouin tribes of Banu Sulaym and Banu Hilal. Ibn Khaldun noted that all of the lands ravaged by Banu Hilal invaders had become arid desert.


title: Societal collapse

text: In 1206, a warlord achieved dominance over all Mongols with the title Genghis Khan and began his campaign of territorial expansion. The Mongols' highly flexible and mobile cavalry enabled them to conquer their enemies with efficiency and swiftness. In the brutal pillaging that followed Mongol invasions during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the invaders decimated the populations of China, Russia, the Middle East, and Islamic Central Asia. Later Mongol leaders, such as Timur, destroyed many cities, slaughtered thousands of people, and irreparably damaged the ancient irrigation systems of Mesopotamia. The invasions transformed a settled society to a nomadic one. In China, for example, a combination of war, famine, and pestilence during the Mongol conquests halved the population, a decline of around 55 million people. The Mongols also displaced large numbers of people and created power vacuums. The Khmer Empire went into decline and was replaced by the Thais, who were pushed southward by the Mongols. The Vietnamese, who succeeded in defeating the Mongols, also turned their attention to the south and by 1471 began to subjugate the Chams. When Vietnam's Later Lê Dynasty went into decline in the late 1700s, a bloody civil war erupted between the Trịnh family in the north and the Nguyễn family in the south. More Cham provinces were seized by the Nguyễn warlords. Finally, Nguyễn Ánh emerged victorious and declared himself Emperor of Vietnam (changing the name from Annam) with the title Gia Long and established the Nguyễn Dynasty. The last remaining principality of Champa, Panduranga (modern-day Phan Rang, Vietnam), survived until 1832, when Emperor Minh Mạng (Nguyễn Phúc Đảm) conquered it after centuries of Cham–Vietnamese wars. Vietnam's policy of assimilation involved the forcefeeding of pork to Muslims and beef to Hindus, which fueled resentment. An uprising followed, the first and only war between Vietnam and the jihadists, until it was crushed.


title: Societal collapse

text: Around 1210 BC, the New Kingdom of Egypt shipped large amounts of grains to the disintegrating Hittite Empire. Thus, there had been a food shortage in Anatolia but not the Nile Valley. However, that soon changed. Although Egypt managed to deliver a decisive and final defeat to the Sea Peoples at the Battle of Xois, Egypt itself went into steep decline. The collapse of all other societies in the Eastern Mediterranean disrupted established trade routes and caused widespread economic depression. Government workers became underpaid, which resulted in the first labor strike in recorded history and undermined royal authority. There was also political infighting between different factions of government. Bad harvest from the reduced flooding at the Nile led to a major famine. Food prices rose to eight times their normal values and occasionally even reached twenty-four times. Runaway inflation followed. Attacks by the Libyans and Nubians made things even worse. Throughout the Twentieth Dynasty (∼1187–1064 BC), Egypt devolved from a major power in the Mediterranean to a deeply divided and weakened state, which later came to be ruled by the Libyans and the Nubians.


title: Societal collapse

text: Between 481 BC and 221 BC, the Period of the Warring States in China ended by King Zheng of the Qin dynasty succeeding in defeating six competing factions and thus becoming the first Chinese emperor, titled Qin Shi Huang. A ruthless but efficient ruler, he raised a disciplined and professional army and introduced a significant number of reforms, such as unifying the language and creating a single currency and system of measurement. In addition, he funded dam constructions and began building the first segment of what was to become the Great Wall of China to defend his realm against northern nomads. Nevertheless, internal feuds and rebellions made his empire fall apart after his death in 210 B.C.


title: Societal collapse

text: In the early fourteenth century AD, Britain suffered repeated rounds of crop failures from unusually heavy rainfall and flooding. Much livestock either starved or drowned. Food prices skyrocketed, and King Edward II attempted to rectify the situation by imposing price controls, but vendors simply refused to sell at such low prices. In any case, the act was abolished by the Lincoln Parliament in 1316. Soon, people from commoners to nobles were finding themselves short of food. Many resorted to begging, crime, and eating animals they otherwise would not eat. People in northern England had to deal with raids from Scotland. There were even reports of cannibalism.


title: Societal collapse

text: In Continental Europe, things were at least just as bad. The Great Famine of 1315–1317 coincided with the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the start of the Little Ice Age. Some historians suspect that the change in climate was due to Mount Tarawera in New Zealand erupting in 1314. The Great Famine was, however, only one of the calamities striking Europe that century, as the Hundred Years' War and Black Death would soon follow. (Also see the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages.) Recent analysis of tree rings complement historical records and show that the summers of 1314–1316 were some of the wettest on record over a period of 700 years.


title: Societal collapse

text: Historically, the dawn of agriculture led to the rise of contagious diseases. Compared to their hunting-gathering counterparts, agrarian societies tended to be sedentary, have higher population densities, be in frequent contact with livestock, and be more exposed to contaminated water supplies and higher concentrations of garbage. Poor sanitation, a lack of medical knowledge, superstitions, and sometimes a combination of disasters exacerbated the problem. The journalist Michael Rosenwald wrote that "history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated."


title: Societal collapse

text: From the description of symptoms by the Greek physician Galen, which included coughing, fever, (blackish) diarrhea, swollen throat, and thirst, modern experts identified the probable culprits of the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD) to have been smallpox or measles. The disease likely started in China and spread to the West via the Silk Road. Roman troops first contracted the disease in the East before they returned home. Striking a virgin population, the Antonine Plague had dreadful mortality rates; between one third to half of the population, 60 to 70 million people, perished. Roman cities suffered from a combination of overcrowding, poor hygiene, and unhealthy diets. They quickly became epicenters. Soon, the disease reached as far as Gaul and mauled Roman defenses along the Rhine. The ranks of the previously formidable Roman army had to be filled with freed slaves, German mercenaries, criminals, and gladiators. That ultimately failed to prevent the Germanic tribes from crossing the Rhine. On the civilian side, the Antonine Plague created drastic shortages of businessmen, which disrupted trade, and farmers, which led to a food crisis. An economic depression followed and government revenue fell. Some accused Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Co-Emperor Lucius Verus, both of whom victims of the disease, of affronting the gods, but others blamed Christians. However, the Antonine Plague strengthened the position of the monotheistic religion of Christianity in the formerly-polytheistic society, as Christians won public admiration for their good works. Ultimately the Roman army, the Roman cities, the size of the empire and its trade routes, which were required for Roman power and influence to exist, facilitated the spread of the disease. The Antonine Plague is considered by some historians as a useful starting point for understanding the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire. It was followed by the Plague of Cyprian (249–262 AD) and the Plague of Justinian (541-542). Together, they cracked the foundations of the Roman Empire.


title: Societal collapse

text: In the sixth century AD, while the Western Roman Empire had already succumbed to attacks by the Germanic tribes, the Eastern Roman Empire stood its ground. In fact, a peace treaty with the Persians allowed Emperor Justinian the Great to concentrate on recapturing territories belonging to the Western Empire. His generals, Belisarius and Narses, achieved a number of important victories against the Ostrogoths and the Vandals. However, their hope of keeping the Western Empire was dashed by the arrival of what became known as the Plague of Justinian (541-542). According to the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea, the epidemic originated in China and Northeastern India and reached the Eastern Roman Empire via trade routes terminating in the Mediterranean. Modern scholarship has deduced that the epidemic was caused by the bacterium "Yersinia pestis", the same one that would later bring the Black Death, the single deadliest pandemic in human history, but how many actually died from it remains uncertain. Current estimates put the figure between thirty and fifty million people, a significant portion of the human population at that time. The Plague arguably cemented the fate of Rome.


title: Societal collapse

text: The epidemic also devastated the Sasanian Empire in Persia. Caliph Abu Bakr seized the opportunity to launch military campaigns that overran the Sassanians and captured Roman-held territories in the Caucasus, the Levant, Egypt, and elsewhere in North Africa. Before the Justinian Plague, the Mediterranean world had been commercially and culturally stable. After the Plague, it fractured into a trio of civilizations battling for power: the Islamic Civilization, the Byzantine Empire, and what later became known as Medieval Europe. With so many people dead, the supply of workers, many of whom were slaves, was critically short. Landowners had no choice but to lend pieces of land to serfs to work the land in exchange for military protection and other privileges. That sowed the seeds of feudalism.


title: Societal collapse

text: There is evidence that the Mongol expeditions may have spread the bubonic plague across much of Eurasia, which helped to spark the Black Death of the early fourteenth century. The Italian historian Gabriele de’ Mussi wrote that the Mongols catapulted the corpses of those who contracted the plague into Caffa (now Feodossia, Crimea) during the siege of that city and that soldiers who were transported from there brought the plague to Mediterranean ports. However, that account of the origin of the Black Death in Europe remains controversial, though plausible, because of the complex epidemiology of the plague. Modern epidemiologists do not believe that the Black Death had a single source of spreading into Europe. Research into the past on this topic is further complicated by politics and the passage of time. It is difficult to distinguish between natural epidemics and biological warfare, both of which are common throughout human history. Biological weapons are economical because they turn an enemy casualty into a delivery system and so were favored in armed conflicts of the past. Furthermore, more soldiers died of disease than in combat until recently. In any case, by the 1340s, Black Death killed 200 million people. The widening trade routes in the Late Middle Ages helped the plague spread rapidly. It took the European population more than two centuries to return to its level before the pandemic. Consequently, it destabilized most of society and likely undermined feudalism and the authority of the Church.


title: Societal collapse

text: With labor in short supply, workers' bargaining power increased dramatically. Various inventions that reduced the cost of labor, saved time, and raised productivity, such as the three-field crop rotation system, the iron plow, the use of manure to fertilize the soil, and the water pumps, were widely adopted. Many former serfs, now free from feudal obligations, relocated to the cities and changed profession to crafts and trades. The more successful ones became the new middle class. Trade flourished as demands for a myriad of consumer goods rose. Society became wealthier and could afford to fund the arts and the sciences.


title: Societal collapse

text: Encounters between European explorers and Native Americans exposed the latter to a variety of diseases of extraordinary virulence. Having migrated from Northeastern Asia 15,000 years ago, Native Americans had not been introduced to the plethora of contagious diseases that emerged after the rise of agriculture in the Old World. As such, they had immune systems that were ill-equipped to handle the diseases to which their counterparts in Eurasia had become resistant. When the Europeans arrived in the Americas, in short order, the indigenous populations of the Americas found themselves facing smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and the bubonic plague, among others. In tropical areas, malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, river blindness, and others appeared. Most of these tropical diseases were traced to Africa. Smallpox ravaged Mexico in the 1520s and killed 150,000 in Tenochtitlán alone, including the emperor, and Peru in the 1530s, which aided the European conquerors. A combination of Spanish military attacks and evolutionarily novel diseases finished off the Aztec Empire in the sixteenth century. It is commonly believed that the death of as much as 90% or 95% of the Native American population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases, though new research suggests tuberculosis from seals and sea lions played a significant part.


title: Societal collapse

text: Similar events took place in Oceania and Madagascar. Smallpox was externally brought to Australia. The first recorded outbreak, in 1789, devastated the Aboriginal population. The extent of the outbreak is disputed, but some sources claim that it killed about 50% of coastal Aboriginal populations on the east coast. There is an ongoing historical debate concerning two rival and irreconcilable theories about how the disease first entered the continent (see History of smallpox). Smallpox continued to be a deadly disease and killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone, but a vaccine, the first of any kind, had been available since 1796.


title: Societal collapse

text: As humans spread around the globe, human societies flourish and become more dependent on trade, and because urbanization means that people leave sparsely-populated rural areas for densely-populated neighborhoods, infectious diseases spread much more easily. Outbreaks are frequent, even in the modern era, but medical advances have been able to alleviate their impacts. In fact, the human population grew tremendously in the twentieth century, as did the population of farm animals, from which diseases could jump to humans, but in the developed world and increasingly also in the developing world, people are less likely to fall victim to infectious diseases than ever before. For instance, the advent of antibiotics, starting with penicillin in 1928, has resulted in the saving of the lives of hundreds of millions of people suffering from bacterial infections. However, there is no guarantee that would continue because bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and doctors and public health experts such as former Chief Medical Officer for England Sally Davies have even warned of an incoming "antibiotic apocalypse." The World Health Organization warned in 2019 that the spread of vaccine scepticism has been accompanied by the resurrection of long-conquered diseases like measles. This lead the WHO to name the antivaccination movement one of the world’s top 10 public-health threats.


title: Societal collapse

text: Writing in "The Histories", the Greek historian Polybius largely blamed the decline of the Hellenistic world on low fertility rates. He asserted that while protracted wars and deadly epidemics were absent, people were generally more interested in "show and money and the pleasures of an idle life" than in marrying and raising children. Those who had children, according to him, had no more than one or two, with the express intention of "leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury."


title: Societal collapse

text: By around 100 BC, the notion of romantic love started becoming popular in Rome. In the final years of the Roman Republic, Roman women were well known for divorcing, having extramarital affairs, and being reluctant to bear children. Viewing that as a threat to the social and political order and believing that the Roman upper-class was becoming increasingly cosmopolitan and individualistic, upon the establishment of the Roman Empire, Caesar Augustus introduced legislation designed to increase the birthrate. Men aged 20 to 60 and women aged 20 to 50 were legally obliged to marry, and widowed or divorced individuals within the relevant age range were required to remarry. Exemptions were granted to those who had already had three children in the case of free-born people and four in the case of freed slaves. For political or bureaucratic office, preference was given to those with at least three legitimate children. Diminished inheritance rights awaited those who failed to reproduce. In a speech to Roman nobles, he expressed his pressing concern over the low birthrates of the Roman elite. He also said that freed slaves had been granted citizenship and Roman allies given seats in government to increase the power and prosperity of Rome, but the "original stock" was not replacing itself and leaving the task to foreigners.


title: Societal collapse

text: Other population imbalances may occur when low fertility rates coincides with high dependency ratios or when there is an unequal distribution of wealth between elites and commoners, both of which characterized the Roman Empire.


title: Societal collapse

text: Several key features of human societal collapse can be related to population dynamics. For example, the native population of Cusco, Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest was stressed by an imbalanced sex ratio.


title: Societal collapse

text: There is strong evidence that humans also display population cycles. Societies as diverse as those of England and France during the Roman, medieval, and early modern eras, of Egypt during Greco-Roman and Ottoman rule, and of various dynasties in China all showed similar patterns of political instability and violence becoming considerably more common after times of relative peace, prosperity, and sustained population growth. Quantitatively, periods of unrest included many times more events of instability per decade and occurred when the population was declining, rather than increasing. Pre-industrial agrarian societies typically faced instability after one or two centuries of stability. However, a population approaching its carrying capacity alone is not enough to trigger general decline if the people remained united and the ruling class strong. Other factors had to be involved, such as having more aspirants for positions of the elite than the society could realistically support (elite overproduction), which led to social strife, and chronic inflation, which caused incomes to fall and threatened the fiscal health of the state. In particular, an excess in especially young adult male population predictably led to social unrest and violence, as the third and higher-order parity sons had trouble realizing their economic desires and became more open to extreme ideas and actions. Adults in their 20s are especially prone to radicalization. Most historical periods of social unrest lacking in external triggers, such as natural calamities, and most genocides can be readily explained as a result of a built-up youth bulge. As those trends intensified, they jeopardized the social fabric, which facilitated the decline.


title: Societal collapse

text: Historical theories have evolved from being purely social and ethical, to ideological and ethnocentric, and finally to multidisciplinary studies. They have become much more sophisticated.


title: Societal collapse

text: The anthropologist Joseph Tainter theorized that collapsed societies essentially exhausted their own designs and were unable to adapt to natural diminishing returns for what they knew as their method of survival. The philosopher Oswald Spengler argued that a civilization in its "winter" would see a disinclination for abstract thinking. The psychologists David Rand and Jonathan Cohen theorized that people switch between two broad modes of thinking. The first is fast and automatic but rigid, and the second is slow and analytical but more flexible. Rand and Cohen believe that explains why people continue with self-destructive behaviors when logical reasoning would have alerted them of the dangers ahead. People switch from the second to the first mode of thinking after the introduction of an invention that dramatically increases the standards of living. Rand and Cohen pointed to the recent examples of the antibiotic overuse leading to resistant bacteria and failure to save for retirement. Tainter noted that according to behavioral economics, the human decision-making process tends to be more irrational than rational and that as the rate of innovation declines, as measured by the number of inventions relative to the amount of money spent on research and development, it becomes progressively harder for there to be a technological solution to the problem of societal collapse.


title: Societal collapse

text: What produces modern sedentary life, unlike nomadic hunter-gatherers, is extraordinary modern economic productivity. Tainter argues that exceptional productivity is actually more the sign of hidden weakness because of a society's dependence on it and its potential to undermine its own basis for success by not being self limiting, as demonstrated in Western culture's ideal of perpetual growth.


title: Societal collapse

text: As a population grows and technology makes it easier to exploit depleting resources, the environment's diminishing returns are hidden from view. Societal complexity is then potentially threatened if it develops beyond what is actually sustainable, and a disorderly reorganization were to follow. The scissors model of Malthusian collapse, in which the population grows without limit but not resources, is the idea of great opposing environmental forces cutting into each other.


title: Societal collapse

text: The complete breakdown of economic, cultural, and social institutions with ecological relationships is perhaps the most common feature of collapse. In his book "", Jared Diamond proposes five interconnected causes of collapse that may reinforce each other: non-sustainable exploitation of resources, climate changes, diminishing support from friendly societies, hostile neighbors, and inappropriate attitudes for change.


title: Societal collapse

text: Energy has played a crucial role throughout human history. Energy is linked to the birth, growth, and decline of each and every society. Energy surplus is required for the division of labor and the growth of cities. Massive energy surplus is needed for widespread wealth and cultural amenities. Economic prospects fluctuate in tandem with a society's access to cheap and abundant energy.


title: Societal collapse

text: Political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and ecologist Charles Hall proposed an economic model called energy return on investment (EROI), which measures the amount of surplus energy a society gets from using energy to obtain energy. Energy shortages drive up prices and as such provide an incentive to explore and extract previously uneconomical sources, which may still be plentiful, but more energy would be required, and the EROI is then not as high as initially thought.


title: Societal collapse

text: There would be no surplus if EROI approaches 1:1. Hall showed that the real cutoff is well above that and estimated that 3:1 to sustain the essential overhead energy costs of a modern society. The EROI of the most preferred energy source, petroleum, has fallen in the past century from 100:1 to the range of 10:1 with clear evidence that the natural depletion curves all are downward decay curves. An EROI of more than ~3 then is what appears necessary to provide the energy for socially important tasks, such as maintaining government, legal and financial institutions, a transportation infrastructure, manufacturing, building construction and maintenance, and the lifestyles of all members of a given society.


title: Societal collapse

text: The social scientist Luke Kemp indicated that alternative sources of energy, such as solar panels, have a low EROI because they have low energy density, meaning they require a lot of land, and require substantial amounts of rare earth metals to produce. Hall and colleagues reached the same conclusion. There is no on-site pollution, but the EROI of renewable energy sources may be too low for them to be considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels, which continue to provide the majority of the energy used by humans.


title: Societal collapse

text: The mathematician Safa Motesharrei and his collaborators showed that the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels allows populations to grow to one order of magnitude larger than they would using renewable resources alone and as such is able to postpone societal collapse. However, when collapse finally comes, it is much more dramatic. Tainter warned that in the modern world, if the supply of fossil fuels were somehow cut off, shortages of clean water and food would ensue, and millions would die in a few weeks in the worse-case scenario.


title: Societal collapse

text: Homer-Dixon asserted that a declining EROI was one of the reasons that the Roman Empire declined and fell. The historian Joseph Tainter made the same claim about the Maya Empire.


title: Societal collapse

text: According to Joseph Tainter (1990), too many scholars offer facile explanations of societal collapse by assuming one or more of the following three models in the face of collapse:


title: Societal collapse

text: Tainter argues that those models, though superficially useful, cannot severally or jointly account for all instances of societal collapse. Often, they are seen as interconnected occurrences that reinforce one another.


title: Societal collapse

text: Tainter considers that social complexity is a recent and comparatively-anomalous occurrence, requiring constant support. He asserts that collapse is best understood by grasping four axioms. In his own words (p. 194):


title: Societal collapse

text: With those facts in mind, collapse can simply be understood as a loss of the energy needed to maintain social complexity. Collapse is thus the sudden loss of social complexity, stratification, internal and external communication and exchange, and productivity.


title: Societal collapse

text: In his acclaimed 12-volume work, "A Study of History" (1934–1961), the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee explored the rise and fall of 28 civilizations and came to the conclusion that civilizations generally collapsed mainly by internal factors, factors of their own making, but external pressures also played a role. He theorized that all civilizations pass through several distinct stages: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.


title: Societal collapse

text: For Toynbee, a civilization is born when a "creative minority" successfully responds to the challenges posed by its physical, social, and political environment. However, the fixation on the old methods of the "creative minority" leads it to eventually cease to be creative and degenerate into merely a "dominant minority" (that forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience), which fails to recognize new ways of thinking. He argues that creative minorities deteriorate from a worship of their "former self", by which they become prideful, and they fail in adequately addressing the next challenge that they face. Similarly, the German philosopher Oswald Spengler discussed the transition from "Kultur" to "Zivilisation" in his "The Decline of the West" (1918).


title: Societal collapse

text: Toynbee argues that the ultimate sign a civilization has broken down is when the dominant minority forms a Universal State, which stifles political creativity. He states:


title: Societal collapse

text: He argues that as civilizations decay, they form an "Internal Proletariat" and an "External Proletariat." The Internal proletariat is held in subjugation by the dominant minority inside the civilization, and grows bitter; the external proletariat exists outside the civilization in poverty and chaos and grows envious. He argues that as civilizations decay, there is a "schism in the body social", whereby "abandon" and "self-control" together replace creativity, and "truancy" and "martyrdom" together replace discipleship by the creative minority.


title: Societal collapse

text: He argues that in that environment, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world), and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight, as a prophet). He argues that those who transcend during a period of social decay give birth to a new Church with new and stronger spiritual insights around which a subsequent civilization may begin to form after the old has died. Toynbee's use of the word 'church' refers to the collective spiritual bond of a common worship, or the same unity found in some kind of social order.


title: Societal collapse

text: The historian Carroll Quigley expanded upon that theory in "The Evolution of Civilizations" (1961, 1979). He argued that societal disintegration involves the metamorphosis of social instruments, which were set up to meet actual needs, into institutions, which serve their own interest at the expense of social needs. However, in the 1950s, Toynbee's approach to history, his style of civilizational analysis, started to face skepticism from mainstream historians who thought it put an undue emphasis on the divine, which led to his academic reputation declining. For a time, however, Toynbee's "Study" remained popular outside academia. Interest revived decades later with the publication of "The Clash of Civilizations" (1997) by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who viewed human history as broadly the history of civilizations and posited that the world after the end of the Cold War will be multipolar and one of competing major civilizations, which are divided by "fault lines."


title: Societal collapse

text: Developing an integrated theory of societal collapse that takes into account the complexity of human societies remains an open problem. Researchers currently have very little ability to identify internal structures of large distributed systems like human societies. Genuine structural collapse seems, in many cases, the only plausible explanation supporting the idea that such structures exist. However, until they can be concretely identified, scientific inquiry appears limited to the construction of scientific narratives, using systems thinking for careful storytelling about systemic organization and change.


title: Societal collapse

text: In the 1990s, the evolutionary anthropologist and quantitative historian Peter Turchin noticed that the equations used to model the populations of predators and preys can also be used to describe the ontogeny of human societies. He specifically examined how social factors such as income inequality were related to political instability. He found recurring cycles of unrest in historical societies such as Ancient Egypt, China, and Russia. He specifically identified two cycles, one long and one short. The long one, what he calls the "secular cycle," lasts for approximately two to three centuries. A society starts out fairly equal. Its population grows and the cost of labor drops. A wealthy upper class emerges, and life for the working class deteriorates. As inequality grows, a society becomes more unstable with the lower-class being miserable and the upper-class entangled in infighting. Exacerbating social turbulence eventually leads to collapse. The shorter cycle lasts for about 50 years and consists of two generations, one peaceful and one turbulent. Looking at US history, for example, Turchin identified times of serious sociopolitical instability in 1870, 1920, and 1970. He announced in 2010 that he had predicted that in 2020, the US would witness a period of unrest at least on the same level as 1970 because the first cycle coincides with the turbulent part of the second in around 2020. He also warned that the US was not the only Western nation under strain.


title: Societal collapse

text: However, Turchin's model can only paint the broader picture and cannot pinpoint how bad things can get and what precisely triggers a collapse. The mathematician Safa Motesharrei also applied predator-prey models to human society, with the upper class and the lower class being the two different types of "predators" and natural resources being the "prey." He found that either extreme inequality or resource depletion facilitates a collapse. However, a collapse is irreversible only if a society experiences both at the same time, as they "fuel each other."


title: American robin

text: The American robin (Turdus migratorius) is a migratory bird of the true thrush genus and Turdidae, the wider thrush family. It is named after the European robin because of its reddish-orange breast, though the two species are not closely related, with the European robin belonging to the Old World flycatcher family. The American robin is widely distributed throughout North America, wintering from southern Canada to central Mexico and along the Pacific Coast. It is the state bird of Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin.


title: American robin

text: According to the Partners in Flight database (2019), the American robin is the most abundant bird in North America (with 370,000,000 individuals), ahead of red-winged blackbirds, introduced European starlings, mourning doves and house finches. It has seven subspecies, but only one of them, the San Lucas robin ("T. m. confinis") of Baja California Sur, is particularly distinctive, with pale gray-brown underparts.


title: American robin

text: The American robin is active mostly during the day and assembles in large flocks at night. Its diet consists of invertebrates (such as beetle grubs, earthworms, and caterpillars), fruits, and berries. It is one of the earliest bird species to lay its eggs, beginning to breed shortly after returning to its summer range from its winter range. The robin's nest consists of long coarse grass, twigs, paper, and feathers, and is smeared with mud and often cushioned with grass or other soft materials. It is among the earliest birds to sing at dawn, and its song consists of several discrete units that are repeated.


title: American robin

text: The adult robin's main predator is the domestic cat; other predators include hawks and snakes. When feeding in flocks, it can be vigilant, watching other birds for reactions to predators. Brown-headed cowbirds ("Molothrus ater") lay their eggs in robin nests (see brood parasite), but the robins usually reject the egg.


title: American robin

text: This species was first described in 1766 by Carl Linnaeus in the twelfth edition of his "Systema Naturae" as "Turdus migratorius". The binomial name derives from two Latin words: ', "thrush", and ' from ' "to migrate". The term ' for this species has been recorded since at least 1703. There are about 65 species of medium to large thrushes in the genus "Turdus", characterized by rounded heads, longish pointed wings, and usually melodious songs.


title: American robin

text: A study of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene indicates that the American robin is not part of the Central/South American clade of "Turdus" thrushes; instead it shows genetic similarities to the Kurrichane thrush ("T. libonyanus") and the olive thrush ("T. olivaceus"), both African species. This conflicts with a 2007 DNA study of 60 of 65 "Turdus" species, which places the American robin's closest relative as the rufous-collared thrush ("T. rufitorques") of Central America. Though having distinct plumage, the two species are similar in vocalization and behavior. Beyond this, it lies in a small group of four species of otherwise Central American distribution, suggesting it recently spread northwards into North America.


title: American robin

text: Seven subspecies of American robin are recognized. These subspecies intergrade with each other and are only weakly defined.


title: American robin

text: The eastern subspecies of the American robin ("T. m. migratorius") is long with a wingspan ranging from , with similar size ranges across all subspecies. The species averages about in weight, with males ranging from and females ranging from . Among standard measurements, the wing chord is , the culmen is and the tarsus is . The head varies from jet black to gray, with white eye arcs and white supercilia. The throat is white with black streaks, and the belly and undertail coverts are white. The American robin has a brown back and a reddish-orange breast, varying from a rich red maroon to peachy orange. The bill is mainly yellow with a variably dark tip, the dusky area becoming more extensive in winter, and the legs and feet are brown.


title: American robin

text: The sexes are similar, but the female tends to be duller than the male, with a brown tint to the head, brown upperparts and less-bright underparts. However, some birds cannot be accurately sexed on the sole basis of plumage. The juvenile is paler in color than the adult male and has dark spots on its breast, and whitish wing coverts. First-year birds are not easily distinguishable from adults, but they tend to be duller, and a small percentage retain a few juvenile wing coverts or other feathers.


title: American robin

text: This bird breeds throughout most of North America, from Alaska and Canada southward to northern Florida and Mexico. While robins occasionally overwinter in the northern part of the United States and southern Canada, most migrate to winter south of Canada from Florida and the Gulf Coast to central Mexico, as well as along the Pacific Coast. Most depart south by the end of August and begin to return north in February and March (exact dates vary with latitude and climate). The distance by which robins migrate varies significantly depending on their initial habitat; a study found that individual robins tagged in Alaska are known to travel as much as 3.5x further across seasons than robins tagged in Massachusetts.


title: American robin

text: This species is actually a rare vagrant to western Europe, where the majority of records, more than 20, have been in Great Britain. In the autumn of 2003, migration was displaced eastwards leading to massive movements through the eastern U.S., and presumably this is what led to no fewer than three American robins being found in Great Britain, with two attempting to overwinter in 2003–2004, although one was taken by a Eurasian sparrowhawk. A sighting occurred in Great Britain in January 2007. This species has also occurred as a vagrant to Greenland, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Belize. Vagrants to Europe, where identified to subspecies, are the eastern subspecies ("T. m. migratorius"), but the Greenland birds also included the Newfoundland subspecies ("T. m. nigrideus"), and some of the southern overshots may have been the southern subspecies ("T. m. achrusterus").


title: American robin

text: The American robin's breeding habitat is woodland and more open farmland and urban areas. It becomes less common as a breeder in the southernmost part of the Deep South of the United States, and there prefers large shade trees on lawns. Its winter habitat is similar, but includes more open areas.


title: American robin

text: The American robin is a known reservoir (carrier) for West Nile virus. While crows and jays are often the first noticed deaths in an area with West Nile virus, the American robin is suspected to be a key host, and holds a larger responsibility for the transmission of the virus to humans. This is because, while crows and jays die quickly from the virus, the American robin survives the virus longer, hence spreading it to more mosquitoes, which then transmit the virus to humans and other species.


title: American robin

text: The American robin is active mostly during the day, and on its winter grounds it assembles in large flocks at night to roost in trees in secluded swamps or dense vegetation. The flocks break up during the day when the birds feed on fruits and berries in smaller groups. During the summer, the American robin defends a breeding territory and is less social.


title: American robin

text: The American robin's diet generally consists of around 40 percent small invertebrates (mainly insects), such as earthworms, beetle grubs, caterpillars and grasshoppers, and 60 percent wild and cultivated fruits and berries. Their ability to switch to berries allows them to winter much farther north than most other North American thrushes. They will flock to fermented "Pyracantha" berries, and after eating sufficient quantities will exhibit intoxicated behavior, such as falling over while walking. Robins forage primarily on the ground for soft-bodied invertebrates, and find worms by sight (and sometimes by hearing), pouncing on them and then pulling them up. Nestlings are fed mainly on earthworms and other soft-bodied animal prey. In some areas, robins, particularly of the northwestern subspecies ("T. m. caurinus"), will feed on beaches, taking insects and small mollusks. American robins are common pests of fruit orchards in North America. Due to their insectivorous and frugivorous diet they have evolved to lose sucrase. Brugger & Nelms 1991 find sucrose is unpalatable to them and can be used by humans as a deterrent.


title: American robin

text: The American robin uses auditory, visual, olfactory and possibly vibrotactile cues to find prey, but vision is the predominant mode of prey detection. It is frequently seen running across lawns picking up earthworms, and its "running and stopping" behavior is a distinguishing characteristic. In addition to hunting visually, it also has the ability to hunt by hearing. Experiments have discovered that it can find earthworms underground by simply using its listening skills. It typically will take several short hops and then cock its head left, right or forward to detect movement of its prey. In urban areas, robins will gather in numbers soon after lawns are mowed or where sprinklers are in use.


title: American robin

text: Juvenile robins and eggs are preyed upon by squirrels, snakes, and some birds, such as blue jays, California scrub jays, Steller's jays, common grackles, American crows, and common ravens. Adults are primarily taken by "Accipiter" hawks, cats, and larger snakes (especially rat snakes and gopher snakes). Mammals, such as foxes and dogs, are mainly likely to grab fledgling young robins from the ground, while raccoons often prey upon nests and small carnivores such as American martens, ring-tailed cats and long-tailed weasels are agile enough to hunt adults. However, the greatest predatory impact (perhaps alongside domestic cats) is probably from raptorial birds. They may be taken by nearly every variety of North American accipitrid, from the smallest, the sharp-shinned hawk, to one of the two largest, the golden eagle, most every North American falcon from the smallest, the American kestrel, to the largest, the gyrfalcon, and almost all owl species from the northern pygmy owl to the snowy owl. Overall, 28 raptorial bird species are known to hunt American robins. Adult robins are most vulnerable when distracted by breeding activities, though they may also be attacked on the ground or even in flight. However, when feeding in flocks, the American robin is able to remain vigilant and watch other flock members for reactions to predators.


title: American robin

text: The American robin is known to be a rejecter of cowbird eggs, so brood parasitism by the brown-headed cowbird is rare. Even when it occurs, the parasite's chick does not normally survive to fledging. In a study of 105 juvenile robins, 77.1% were infected with one or more species of endoparasite, with "Syngamus" species the most commonly encountered, found in 57.1% of the birds.


title: American robin

text: The American robin begins to breed shortly after returning to its summer range. It is one of the first North American bird species to lay eggs, and normally has two to three broods per breeding season, which lasts from April to July.


title: American robin

text: The nest is most commonly located above the ground in a dense bush or in a fork between two tree branches, and is built by the female alone. The outer foundation consists of long coarse grass, twigs, paper, and feathers. This is lined with smeared mud and cushioned with fine grass or other soft materials. A new nest is built for each brood, and in northern areas the first clutch is usually placed in an evergreen tree or shrub, while later broods are placed in deciduous trees. The American robin does not shy away from nesting close to human habitations.


title: American robin

text: A clutch consists of three to five light blue eggs, and is incubated by the female alone. The eggs hatch after 14 days, and the chicks leave the nest a further two weeks later. The altricial chicks are naked and have their eyes closed for the first few days after hatching.


title: American robin

text: The chicks are fed earthworms, insects, and berries. Waste accumulation does not occur in the nest because the adults collect and take it away. Chicks are fed, and then raise tails for elimination of waste, a solid white clump that is collected by a parent prior to flying off. All chicks in the brood leave the nest within two days of each other. Juveniles become capable of sustained flight two weeks after fledging. Bird banders have found that only 25% of young robins survive their first year. The longest known lifespan of an American robin in the wild is 14 years; the average lifespan is about 2 years.


title: American robin

text: The male American robin, as with many thrushes, has a complex and almost continuous song. It is commonly described as a "cheery" carol, made up of discrete units, often repeated, and spliced together into a string with brief pauses in between. The song varies regionally, and its style varies by the time of day. The song period is from late February or early March to late July or early August; some birds, particularly in the east, sing occasionally into September or later. They are often among the first songbirds to sing as dawn rises or hours before, and last as evening sets in. It usually sings from a high perch in a tree. The song of the San Lucas subspecies ("T. m. confinis") is weaker than that of the eastern subspecies ("T. m. migratorius"), and lacks any clear notes.


title: American robin

text: The American robin also sings when storms approach and again when storms have passed. In addition to its song, the species has a number of calls used for communicating specific information, such as when a ground predator approaches and when a nest or another American robin is being directly threatened. Even during nesting season, when they exhibit mostly competitive and territorial behavior, they may still band together to drive away a predator.


title: American robin

text: The American robin has an extensive range, estimated at , and a large population of about 370 million individuals. The western subspecies ("T. m. propinquus") in central California are considered to be expanding their range, as is likely the case elsewhere in the United States. It is threatened by climate change and severe weather, but the population trend appears to be stable, and the species does not approach the vulnerable species thresholds under the population trend criterion (>30% decline over ten years or three generations), and therefore International Union for Conservation of Nature evaluated it as least concern.


title: American robin

text: At one point, the bird was killed for its meat, but it is now protected throughout its range in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.


title: American robin

text: The American robin is the state bird of Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It was also depicted on the 1986 Birds of Canada series Canadian $2 note (this note was subsequently withdrawn.) It has a place in Native American mythology. The story of how the robin got its red breast by fanning the dying flames of a campfire to save a Native American man and a boy is similar to those that surround the European robin. The Tlingit people of northwestern North America held it to be a culture hero created by Raven to please the people with its song. The Peace Bridge robins were a family of American robins that attracted minor publicity in the mid-1930s for their prominent nest on the Canadian side of the Peace Bridge connecting Buffalo, New York, to Fort Erie, Ontario.


title: American robin

text: The American robin is considered a symbol of spring. A well-known example is a poem by Emily Dickinson titled "I Dreaded That First Robin So". Among other 19th-century poems about the first robin of spring is "The First Robin" by Dr. William H. Drummond, which according to the author's wife is based on a Quebec superstition that whoever sees the first robin of spring will have good luck. The association has continued down to the present day, as, for example, in one "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon from 1990 that had Calvin celebrating his inevitable wealth and fame after seeing the first robin of spring. The harbinger of spring sobriquet is borne out by the fact that American robins tend to follow the isotherm north in spring, but also south in fall.


title: American robin

text: American popular songs featuring this bird include "When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along)", written by Harry M. Woods. Although the comic book superhero Robin was inspired by an N. C. Wyeth illustration of Robin Hood, a later version had his mother nicknaming him Robin because he was born on the first day of spring.


title: Michael Buffer

text: Michael Buffer (born November 2, 1944) is an American ring announcer (or "MC") for boxing, professional wrestling, and National Football League matches. He is known for his trademarked catchphrase: "Let's get ready to rumble!"


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 2, 1944. His father was enlisted in the United States Navy during World War II. Buffer's parents divorced when he was 11 months of age, and he was then raised by foster parents, a school bus driver and housewife, in Roslyn, Pennsylvania. He enlisted in the United States Army during the Vietnam War at age 20 and served until age 23. He held various jobs including a car salesman, then began a modeling career at age 32 before becoming a ring announcer at age 38.


title: Michael Buffer

text: In 1982, Buffer began his career as a ring announcer. By 1983, he was announcing all boxing matches promoted by Bob Arum's Top Rank on ESPN, which gave him a national identity at a time when ring announcers were strictly locally hired talent. By 1984, Buffer developed the catchphrase "Let's get ready to rumble!" in his announcing, which gained enormous popularity. He began the process of obtaining a federal trademark for the phrase in the 1980s, acquiring it in 1992. Consequently, Buffer has earned in excess of $400 million with the license for his trademark.


title: Michael Buffer

text: By the late 1980s, Buffer was the exclusive ring announcer for all bouts in Donald Trump-owned casinos. Trump said of Buffer, "He's great, he's the choice, he has a unique ability...I told my people, 'We got to have him.'" Buffer's work was also admired by many boxing greats. Sugar Ray Leonard once told Buffer, "When you introduce a fighter, it makes him want to fight."


title: Michael Buffer

text: In 2018, Buffer signed with DAZN to serve as the exclusive ring announcer for all of its boxing broadcasts, which include deals with Matchroom.


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer was formerly the exclusive ring announcer for World Championship Wrestling (WCW) main events featuring Hulk Hogan or other top WCW talent until 2001, when the organization folded. WCW's former parent company Time Warner owned through their pay-per-view subscription division HBO, which broadcast many matches from promoter Top Rank, of which Buffer is the lead ring announcer. The exclusivity of his contract with WCW prevented Buffer from announcing for other wrestling-type organizations, forcing him to stop announcing for the UFC (his only UFC cards were UFC 6 and UFC 7). However, when WCW ceased to exist, and Time Warner had no more affiliation with professional wrestling, Buffer was enabled to announce in other wrestling promotions. During the Monday Night Wars, while Buffer was on "WCW Monday Nitro", WWF wrestler Triple H created the phrase "Let's get ready to suck it!" to mock him, as part of his D-Generation X gimmick.


title: Michael Buffer

text: On "Saturday Night's Main Event XXXV", for the first time in more than six years, Buffer returned to pro-wrestling ring announcing duties at Madison Square Garden in a boxing match between pro boxer Evander Holyfield (who was substituting for Montel Vontavious Porter) and pro wrestler Matt Hardy. Buffer appears in the Royal Rumble 2008 commercial, in which he begins to say "Let's get ready to rumble!" only to be superkicked by Shawn Michaels, causing him to fall over. As well as being in the commercial for the event, he was the guest ring announcer during the Royal Rumble match itself.


title: Michael Buffer

text: During his career, Buffer has announced the MLB World Series, the Stanley Cup Finals, NBA Finals, the Volunteer 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, and NFL playoff games. He was a guest announcer at the 1999 Indianapolis 500 and the 2017 United States Grand Prix.


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer, like his brother Bruce, announced early UFC fights, starting at UFC 6 in 1995. He was the host of the Versus boxing retro show "Legends of the Ring", produced by Top Rank, Inc., where he was ring announcer for most of their top matches.


title: Michael Buffer

text: On July 19, 2008, he announced the "" mixed martial arts show. On November 10, 2008, Buffer started the heads-up action between the two remaining players, Peter Eastgate and Ivan Demidov at the 2008 World Series of Poker final table with a modified version of his trademark statement: "Let's get ready to shuffle up and deal."


title: Michael Buffer

text: On September 12, 2021, Buffer announced for NBC's "Sunday Night Football" matchup, where the Los Angeles Rams hosted the Chicago Bears at the first regular season NFL game with fan attendance in SoFi Stadium. He would later announce at the Rams' first home playoff game against the Arizona Cardinals on January 17, 2022, and two weeks later, during the 2022 NFC Championship game against the San Francisco 49ers.


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer has appeared on various talk shows hosted by Jay Leno, David Letterman, Arsenio Hall, Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel. He has also appeared on "Saturday Night Live", "In Living Color", "Mad TV" and "The Howard Stern Show".


title: Michael Buffer

text: He appeared on NBC's "Deal or No Deal" on December 10, 2007, and opened the finale of the seventh season of "American Idol", a production of RTL. In 2011 he made an appearance on the 12th season of "Dancing with the Stars" to announce Sugar Ray Leonard week 3 dance. Buffer has also served as ringside announcer for the syndicated television game show "The Grudge Match", hosted by Steve Albert and Jesse Ventura.


title: Michael Buffer

text: In the 1997 film "Hercules", Hades uses Buffer's catchphrase "Let's get ready to rumble!" during Hercules' fight with Hydra.


title: Michael Buffer

text: He has played himself in various films including "Ready to Rumble" and "Rocky Balboa", and in 2008 Buffer appeared as Walbridge, the main villain in the comedy "You Don't Mess with the Zohan". He also appeared in the 2019 remake of "Dumbo", portraying a ringmaster who delivers the line "Let's get ready for Dumbo!" in his trademark cadence.


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer has been animated in "The Simpsons", "South Park", and "Celebrity Deathmatch". Buffer also appears in the animated TV series "Phineas and Ferb" in the episode "Raging Bully", as the voice of the announcer for the big thumb-wrestling match with Phineas and Buford. Buffer appeared in the extended version of the Muppets webisode "Food Fight", where he is seen announcing the cooking competition between Gordon Ramsay and the Swedish Chef.


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer appears as featuring artist on "Let's Get Ready to Rumble" and "Go for It All!" by German eurodance group the K.O.'s and his voice was sampled in the Ant & Dec song "Let's Get Ready to Rhumble". He recorded the introduction track for country artist Josh Turner's 2012 album, "Punching Bag".


title: Michael Buffer

text: In 2013, Buffer appeared in Progressive Insurance commercials, promoting their program of combining different coverages into one policy, with a parody of his famous phrase - "Let's get ready to bundle!"


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer began using the phrase "Let's get ready to rumble!" in 1984. By 1992, he acquired a federal trademark for the phrase. Buffer uses his famous phrase in various licensing deals including the platinum selling album "Jock Jams" by Tommy Boy Records, the video games "Ready 2 Rumble Boxing", "" for the PlayStation 2, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast and Game Boy Advance and "Greatest Heavyweights" for the Sega Genesis and numerous other products. In addition, he has used variations of the phrase in advertisements, including the popular commercial for Mega Millions in which he says "Let's get ready to Win Big!" and the Kraft Cheese commercial in which he says "Let's get ready to Crumble!" and most recently for Progressive Insurance in which he says "Let's get ready to bundle!"


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer's fame has reunited him with long-lost family members. In 1989, Buffer was contacted by his birth father, who introduced Buffer to his half-brothers after seeing him on television. In the mid-1990s, Buffer brought along one of his half-brothers, Bruce Buffer, as his agent/manager. This grew into a business partnership to increase licensing productivity of the trademark.


title: Michael Buffer

text: Buffer first wed at age 21, but the marriage ended in divorce after seven years. He has two sons from his first marriage. More than 25 years passed before he remarried in 1999. He and his second wife divorced in 2003.


title: Michael Buffer

text: On September 13, 2007, while making an appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno", he proposed to his current (third) wife, Christine. Buffer currently resides in Southern California. His half-brother Bruce Buffer is an announcer for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a leading mixed martial arts promotion.


title: Coyote vs. Acme

text: Coyote vs. Acme is an upcoming American live-action/computer-animated legal comedy film starring the "Looney Tunes" character, Wile E. Coyote. Produced by Warner Animation Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, this film is being directed by Dave Green from a screenplay written by James Gunn (who also serves as a producer), Jeremy Slater, Jon Silberman, Josh Silberman, and Samy Burch, based in part on a short story of the same name by Ian Frazier originally published in "The New Yorker". The film is set to star John Cena, Will Forte, Lana Condor, and Eric Bauza.


title: Coyote vs. Acme

text: After all of the ACME Corporation's products backfired on Wile E. Coyote, in his pursuit of the Road Runner, he hires an equally-unlucky human attorney to sue the company. When Wile E.'s lawyer finds out that his former law firm's intimidating boss is ACME's CEO, he teams up with the coyote to win the court case against him.