Category Archives: Apocalypse Soon

Victoria’s Bitter indeed

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A scientist in New Zealand manages to make me sit up and pay attention to his dire global warming message by hitting me right where it hurts: in the liver.  Apparently this global warming thing is going to make malting barley hard to grow where it currently grows.  The only saving grace here was this report was focused on farmers in New Zealand and Australia, and not Canada, but it’s not hard to imagine it here, now is it?

That would definitely put a kink in my climate change survival plan.  If the climate is going to cook us to death in a dusty hellish wasteland, I was really planning to just sit on a lawn chair (or dirt chair as they will soon be called) and drink beer, watching Rome burn so to speak.  Now beer will also be (somehow more) expensive or (GASP!) nonexistent?  If that’s not enough to get your fat ass into a Prius, what is?  This is beer we are talking about folks!

Creepy Crawlers

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Although I gave Australia a hard time recently, it doesn’t have a monopoly on truly scary-assed insects. I saw this list of really gross and scary bugs that make you once again glad you live in Canada with harsh winters that tend to take the rough edges off most of our bugs. Have a gander at those suckers, man! The wasp is especially terrifying and looks like a cheap photoshop job. That’s just crazy. I would be screaming like a little girl if one of those things lumbered by.

Scary Assed Hornet

Then it’s off to something a lot less terrifying, but more fascinating. It’s a segment of a nature show about ants and the colonies they build. The researchers poured concrete into an ant colony they found, 10 tons of concrete. Then they excavated it to study how the ants work. It’s amazing. We could probably stand to study how they do it, there’s a lot to learn from them. Very neat stuff.

Love Thy Neighbour?

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A flat out brawl erupted in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.  Who was involved, you may ask.  Hoodlums? Nope.  Gang members?  Nah.  Soldiers?  Wrongo.  It was two groups of priests actually.

“The brawl apparently began when Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church after the Christmas Day celebrations.  Armenian priests claimed that the ladders encroached on their portion of the church, which led the two sects to exchange angry words which quickly turned to blows.”

Now, I’m not an expert on religion, but I’m thinking that this is not exactly how priests should be behaving.  It took a dozen policemen to break up the brawl.  It was quite the holy racket, apparently.

I’m having a hard time picturing this going down, actually.  Was there two lines of priests facing off, doing the West Side Story thing, snapping their fingers?  Or was it an Outsiders-style gang fight?  Did they use those smoking yo-yos as weapons?  That could look pretty cool.  What kind of gang signs would they use?   Maybe they had a gang name for themselves even.  Maybe Heaven’s Devils?  That has a nice ring to it.

No wonder the world is exploding with religious intolerance when priests of (almost) the same religion can’t even get along.

Cells with frickin LASER BEAMS

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Faithful reader Wilson sent a link my way yesterday about how bio-tech is getting so good, scientist can create new custom cells by effectively programming their characteristics on a computer and “printing” them off.  The cell’s common characteristics are being shared like chunks of code and are essentially freely available.  You can dream something up that has never existed before in nature and then just make it.  Talk about your God complex.  Stuff like this is already happening, with vats of cells engineered to make a synthetic fiber which is made into fabrics at DuPont. 

Naturally there is some concern about what kind of things could be made to, oh you know, kill everyone.  Of course these concerns are quite valid, but really it probably all boils down to the same risk as nuclear weapons.  The basic theory is common knowledge, everybody can find out how to make them.  The actual making of them is still pretty darn hard, but it can be done.  The real problem is making them without anyone else knowing you are making them, and that has so far proven to be impossible.  The tools and materials are just too rare and scarce.  Time will tell how long it takes before making really bad viruses or bacteria becomes easy enough to become a serious threat.  Like when you can just Napster yourself a good solid flu virus on a Thursday night to call in sick on Friday.  Then that’s a problem.  Oh wait, I guess it would be better if you weren’t actually sick, but just pretended to be sick….

In the meantime we will probably see some bio-tech companies start to expand to Googlific heights.  If I had any money, maybe that would be a good bet.  Since I’m a capitalist, I will think of a way to make money from this before we all die.

Have a read for yourself.

The War on Everything

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I really enjoyed reading this article on security and counter-terrorism on Wired today.  It’s a great piece on how everyone from the average citizen right on up to police officers and government officials are encouraged by the system to report anything suspicious, or different, or strange, no matter how ridiculous.

Here’s how it goes:

“Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to — a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant — now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it’s a false alarm, it’s not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he’s wrong, it’ll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he’ll be praised for “doing his job” and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA (cover your ass) decisions. And before we’re done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.”

It’s a sad truth of this time that this is the case.  People are scared of using their own heads for fear of the personal and professional consequences.  The big money quote from the article is:

“If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.”

It’s a good read, I have mentioned the author, Bruce Schneier, before.  Another good article by him is here, about how the very goal of terrorism is to cause terror, not blow things up, so we should respond with less fear and more rational thought.  All good stuff, read it sometime.

State of the World Today

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Here’s a kind of good news, bad news post.  The good news?  No, let’s save that for last.  The bad news is, military robots have already killed humans and we are all doomed.  Also, drunken elephants go on a tear and some get electrocuted for their troubles.  Also, slime in a petri dish can fly an aircraft, so quite naturally it probably wants to kill us.  Also, extra big, humungous forest fires are now the norm, instead of your grand-dad’s teeny tiny ones.

Scared yet?  Ok, now for the good news.  A “regular joe” mechanic can take parts right off of General Motors’ own shelves and make a car (or truck, but usually a Hummer or a Cadillac) get  at least twice the fuel efficiency, and at the same time twice the horsepower.  For example, his latest project is a 2005 Hummer H3:

“Conservatively,” Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, “it’ll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You’ll be able to smoke the tires. And it’s going to be superefficient.”  He laughs. “Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!”

A great article on the Fast Company website that simultaneously makes me mad and hopeful at the same time.  On the mad side, this mechanic can take existing parts and just do incredible things, but for some unknown reason the big 3 US car makers can’t do the same.  Still the fact that he is doing it just confirms something I have always suspected:  we already know everything we need to fix the energy problem, the climate problem and most of our pollution problems.  That’s a very very good thing, I think.  I love the fact that this guy seems to love working on the hugest of the gas guzzlers and making them really efficient.  Consider his first Hummer conversion:

“Goodwin installed the Duramax and a five-speed Allison–the required transmission for a Duramax, which also helps give it race-car-like control and a rapid take off. After five days’ worth of work, the Hummer was getting about 18 mpg–double the factory 9 mpg–and twice the original horsepower. He drove it over to a local restaurant and mooched some discarded oil from its deep fryer, strained the oil through a pair of jeans, and poured it into the engine. It ran perfectly.”

It’s a really good read, and nice to hear somebody is doing something the big boys say can’t be done, and getting their attention doing it.