I saw a show on television about all the different ways the Earth could end, and there was one segment featuring Snowball Earth, a theorized former incarnation of our planet. It seems that a long time ago, the Earth had a pretty major ice age. I think it was 750 million years ago. The world started to cool, and the ice caps expanded. The ice became so big that the sun’s rays were deflected, and that caused further cooling. So the ice continued to expand, covering landmasses, and freezing oceans, until the entire world was covered in ice, and it looked like a cue ball. What I found interesting was how the television program was saying that in thousands years, the Earth might return to a similar state, or maybe just a partially frozen state, and that humanity would have a difficult time in such a situation.
I was mildly disappointed that the program didn’t focus on our potential success in either preventing or combating such a situation, given the likely technological advancements that will be made in such a period of time. Even in a hundred years, we will likely have made leaps and bounds of progress from where we are today. And our current situation isn’t one of ignorance. We know a great deal, and have a great many capabilities. So I think that theorizing that humanity will end in 50,000 years just because the Earth freezes isn’t the best way of looking at things. I figure, give us a couple hundred years at the most, and we will pretty much be in control of the entire planet, its whether patterns, atmospheric conditions, temperature, and even things that we can’t conceive of at this present moment. I guess my main point is I have a lot of faith in humanity. Let’s just hope nuclear war doesn’t put the kibosh on our plans.
It’s so wild the number of intense and far-reaching issues that have taken up news time lately. Just a little while ago we had a hurricane problem. Then a war with Russia possibly looming. And then at that point Sarah Palin took all the focus. What she experienced enough to become the Vice President of the United States? A heart beat away from the presidency? And then the news said don’t worry about her, it’s the economy that we need to focus on now.
The economy has remained in the front seat for a while now. It’s interesting to think that the environment is still a major problem, and yet we don’t really have the capacity to give it all the attention it deserves at the moment.
I just read that one in four mammals faces extinction, and I think 50% are dwindling in number. That is some majorly disturbing news, and yet the news about the economy this morning pretty much trumped everything else. I hope our new leadership is up to the task of solving all of these incredible problems.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, “The King and I”, and “The Catcher in the Rye”
Eisenhower, vaccine, England’s got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
CHORUS
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
Josef Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron
Dien Bien Phu and “Rock Around the Clock”
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team
Davy Crockett, “Peter Pan”, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, “Peyton Place”, trouble in the Suez
CHORUS
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, “Bridge on the River Kwai”
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide
Buddy Holly, “Ben-Hur”, space monkey, Mafia
hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no go
U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, “Psycho”, Belgians in the Congo
CHORUS
Hemingway, Eichmann, “Stranger in a Strange Land”
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs Invasion
“Lawrence of Arabia”, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say
CHORUS
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon, back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollolah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
“Wheel of Fortune” , Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China’s under martial law
Rock and Roller Cola Wars, I can’t take it anymore
CHORUS
We didn’t start the fire
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on…
They’ll run the protons one way around the huge underground circular tunnel. Then the other way. Then both ways at once (I think in October), to collide at high speed. That’s when the supposed danger begins.
But who knows? Maybe just starting up the LHC is enough to create a rip in the Space-Time Continuum.
You may have seen clips of cell phones being used to explode popcorn. Here’s a neat compendium:
My God… If cell phones can do that to corn, imagine what they are doing to our brains!!!
But seriously, the video clips were part of a stealth marketing campaign masterminded by the CEO of Cardo Systems, Abraham Glezerman, to sell Bluetooth headsets.
The popcorn effect was created by dropping popped corn into the scene and digitally removing the unpopped kernels.
Did you ever have one of those moments where you’re watching TV and an episode or movie from a series that you really enjoy comes on, and it’s completely unrecognizable? You’re a real fan, so you’re thinking to yourself, “How could I have missed this one?” Is it new? Was it lost years ago and only recently released? How is this happening?
The other night, AMC played “The World Is Not Enough.” I hadn’t seen it before, and I noticed it was on right around the part where one bad guy was talking with a bad girl about how James Bond was dead. “Holy crap!” I thought. “What is this?”
It took a long 10 minutes before I was able to learn that Pierce Brosnan was Bond, and Bond was not dead. He’s never dead!
It took an hour or more before I watched the credits and waited until the very end hoping to see the title of the film. Luck was on my side, as it ended with “The World Is Not Enough.” Of course on other televisions out there you can just look up the info…
It was really surprising to me, seeing a James Bond film I wasn’t too familiar with. I’m no expert, but I had assumed they play the films on TV enough that I’m aware of most of them. Although I do know there’s one I haven’t seen at all — I think it starred the youngest Bond ever, the guy who only did one film. “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” with George Lazenby as James Bond.
I bought a computer on ebay, and it came with an AMD cpu that has the JPEG Display Problem some folks have encountered over the years. The processor is fine otherwise.
I was using it the other day to test some things out, and I noticed that the image problem varies between browsers. In Internet Explorer, the JPEGs are all messed up. Real fun when a captcha randomly shows up for sending email or buying something. Firefox doesn’t seem to have the problem. It shows the same images just fine. Both IE and FF seem to have a problem with videos, though. YouTube videos looked really bad with the JPEG glitch. But not in Opera! Opera showed images fine, and videos were only a little glitchy. The results were tolerable, especially considering how bad videos looked in the other two browsers.
So, if you’ve got one of those faulty chips, it would seem you can get by as far as surfing is concerned by using Firefox or Opera whenever the images you can/can’t see are crucial.
I was reading Megatrends the other day, an old ’80’s copy, and it was talking about how Nuclear Power used to be touted (before the book was written) as the one and only necessary total solution for our energy woes. Megatrends went on to say that the best solution would instead be diversification.
A few months ago, I think McCain was talking about nuclear power as a powerful solution for our current energy problems. In a recent speech, though, I heard him lay out his plan for diverse fuel sources, and he specifically said that no one effort will be an end-all solution to our big problem. But a combination of efforts would itself provide the solution.
I thought it was interesting that a shift that had apparently taken place 25 years ago seemed to have been recently repeated.
I was of the mind that if an undertaking wasn’t going to solve our issue 100%, then why bother? But now I see we’re going for a cumulative impact that requires many different undertakings to be pursued simultaneously.
Here’s my crrrrraaaaazzzzzy theory, in short: The Atom Smasher will be activated this August, take 2 months to warm up, and then destroy the world on Halloween. If the world survives, the machine will be upgraded in 2012. That’s right, a Super Atom Smasher will be built. Then we’re all dead for sure.
Here’s my crrrrraaaaazzzzzy theory, with a bit of detail:
When they flip the switch in August of 2008, and turn on the Large Hadron Collider (which is underground, along the Franco-Swiss border), nothing will happen — not for 2 months.
From Wikipedia: “The first beams are due for injection in August 2008, with the first collisions planned to take place about two months later.”
So, August 2008 + “about two months” + time it takes some crazy pseudo-scientists to make a last-ditch effort to stop them = October 31, 2008.
If the world doesn’t end on Halloween this year, then gear up for 2012!
From Wikipedia: “The Super Large Hadron Collider (SLHC) is a proposed upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider to be made around 2012. The upgrade aims at increasing the luminosity of the machine by factor of 10 to 10^35….”
So sometime in 2012, they’ll upgrade the device that is already scaring science enthusiasts everywhere.
Maybe the souped-up version will be ten times more powerful.
Maybe it will be more so… say an increase in power by a factor of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s right, 1 with 35 zeros behind it.
Here’s my saner theory: The world won’t end, but some weird and incredible things could potentially happen. Maybe a major breakthrough that changes everything… Maybe free energy! Maybe a big explosion… Maybe someone has an idea and decides to hold the world hostage with the threat of turning on the unproven but so-called Ultimate Doomsday Weapon.
Maybe an electro-magnetic pulse wipes out the electronics in Europe.
The Sci-Fi Channel has been airing a bunch of Hulk TV show marathons lately, so I watched a few episodes. They must have been pulling content from later in the series, because I saw some amazing stuff.
I used to watch The Hulk a little bit a few years ago, and I think at that point Sci-Fi was airing mainly early episodes, in which the Hulk was establishing first that he was strong, then that he was super strong, and so on. So his feats of strength were slowly ramped up. Obviously the series continued to ramp up the action and take the story to new places.
I just saw one where he was captured by the government when a meteor landed, and they thought he was an alien. The space rock emitted Gamma Rays, which prevented him from fully returning to normal once going Green. In that state, he was confused, but somewhat able to reason and speak. He had big eyebrows and a big nose, was flesh-colored, and quite muscular. It seemed that they used Lou Ferrigno for some shots of the body, and Bill Bixby for others, of the face. Then when he transformed again, they showed him increasing in size, to make the Hulk more sensational, even though his final form would still be played by Lou Ferrigno.
In another episode, somehow some old guy could become a second Hulk, a weird gangly tall thin green angry snarling smiling monster, who reveled in murder. He allowed himself to kill a guy just to prove how tough he was. His goal was to use his weird Hulk to achieve his dream life, but he wasn’t very good at controlling it. Give him a break, right? He hasn’t been at it very long. Still, David Banner’s a lot smarter, and with his experience has calmed his Hulk down a bit. Banner wanted to first cure the second Hulk, and then himself. The second Hulk destroyed the cure, Banner freaked, Hulked out, they fought, and then the cops came in and killed the second Hulk. I’d like to believe that Banner’s Hulk would have survived a similar shooting…
