Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

There was apparently a 6.0 earthquake in Northern California today, and Volcano Bang Bang Boom over in Iceland is threatening to smother the northern hemisphere in ash  but, as damaging as these events might be, they are at least natural disasters of a type we understand: fire, flood, hurricane, tsunami, volcano, earthquake, avalanche…there might be a few others on that list.

Golfo de Hermosillo (proposed)

Nobody really knows how  bad the Icelandic volcano could be (experts are estimating it at ‘very fucking bad.’), and a 6.0 is nothing to sneeze at, especially if you’re near the epicenter, but Bay Area residents have lived through worse.

As bad as they might be, though, there are people who know about earthquakes and volcanoes, there are emergency responses in place. 

The strange holes in the Earth’s surface that have been appearing all over the place, now, there’s another kettle of fish.  Of course, sinkholes aren’t even making the news any more, unless they swallow a bus or something.  People aren’t paying too much attention to the weird holes that opened up in Siberia, probably because it’s Siberia.  Not a lot of people want to live there.  In fact, the number who want to live there is probably somewhat less than the number of people who actually live there, and that is not a high number.  Then there is the Hermosillo Trench.

The Hermosillo Trench is a hole in the Earth that just opened up the other day, about a kilometer long, about 8 meters deep at the deepest and about 5 meters wide at the widest.  It is near Hermosillo, Mexico, which is just a bit inland from the Pacific Coast.  A couple of newspaper articles I read said ‘farmland,’ but it sure looks like desert to me.

Some experts are saying quake, some are saying a collapsed river bed.  I say, whatever.  The question is, what are we going to do about it.

With the Siberian  holes, as I wrote once before, the sensible thing to do would be to plant as many plants as possible around the rims, to try and get the methane out of the air the same way that plants everywhere take care of carbon dioxide, or  monoxide, I always get those two confused (which is a euphemistic way of saying I don’t know the difference).

With the Golfo do Hermosillo, I would (if I were the town council  of Hermosillo) widen it a bit and extend it as far as the ocean.  Give yourselves a bit of a recreational area, and a tourist draw.  Maybe even set up some shrimp farms.

You know.  Lemons.  Lemonade.

I do love a cute robot story, so here is this one. A hotel in Silicon Valley (obvs) is trying out a new service. Robot bell hops. They can deliver your luggage to your room or items from room service ordered via the hotel intranet – no living person needs to be aware of your porn fetish.

Thank you, Botlr!

The robotic butler, known as Botlr due, no doubt, to some horribly contrived acronym, will not be too rude or too sycophantic, will not leer at your girlfriend, will not even think about stealing your possessions and, most importantly, will not wait around for a tip just because he had to come all they way up in the elevator to bring you a bottle of vodka.  The price of hotel living just got a little bit cheaper.

I expect this will work, because the job is simple enough for robots to do.  There’s no real imagination required.  Once upon a time we had elevator operators and gas station attendants, but the jobs just weren’t complicated enough to require full time human employees.

What other jobs will someday be done by robots?  I’ve got a suggestion.  It’s a complex job, but one human beings constantly screw up.  It’s one that requires objectivity, but every human who ever gets the job has an agenda.  I’m talking about world leadership.

Need to redraw the voting districts so they’re not gerrymandered? There must be an algorithm for that.  Need a fairer method of taxation, which brings in enough money for all necessary social services but doesn’t ding anybody too harshly?  Add enough data in, the answer will pop out.  It could be done on an experimental basis at first, with the Presibot just as an advisor, but once it gets to the point where it makes the right decision more often than not, flesh and blood politicians would be fools to ignore it.  Unfortunately , they are.

It’s midnight and I want to get to bed and, as usual, I am fishing for a topic.  I do not want to write about Ferguson or Gaza because I’ve written about both topics  before, they are totally  depressing and it seems  like everybody’s decided what side they’re on.  I could, I suppose, write about the two things that could happen in the next week which might be big enough to end life on Earth  as we know it -the Icelandic supervolcano, bangerbonker or something  like that, and the  looming Russian  invasion of Ukraine.

In the case of the  supervolcano, there’s little we can do.  Stock up on bottled water and surgical  masks, I guess.  But, if it’s going  to happen, nobody  can  stop it happening.

Russia invading  Ukraine would be Russia saying to the world “Fuck you, world, we’re back.”  This  is not what the world wants to hear.  It could wind up being disastrous.  Certainly for the Ukrainians who are, for the most part,  harmless folk.

I wrote last night about the Russian discovery  of microscopic organismss (sea plankton) growing on the outside of the space station, and nothing can really top that.

So tonight I’m just going  to comment on this, a study in which one  person just ‘liked’ everything on their facebook page and another just ignored the like button totally.  Unsurprisingly, the one who didn’t ‘like’ anything was much happier with the results.

Myself, I use it sparingly, family pictures, sometimes a vacation pic if it’s a particularly beautiful spot,  some art stuff, but with most posts I’m either moved to comment or not interested enough to do anything at all.

Besides, as long as that’s your only choice,  it’s rather  meaningless.  They should also have a ‘dislike’ button.  While they’re at it, they should have a ‘grossed out’ button, and a ‘please seek psychiatric help button.’  There should be a ‘mildly aroused but feeling guilty about it’ button and ‘WTF did I just watch?’ button.

But none of them are necessary.  You can just type your feelings into the comments, like this: I like this.

This should be headline news everywhere.  This is the most important thing to happen this week.  This month.  This century.  Maybe ever.  Life has been discovered in outer space!

Of course, it is microscopically small life, little sea plankton particles growing on the outside of the International Space Station, like barnacles on a ship.  Who was the scientist who said that our first contact with extra-terrestrial life would be some kind of bacteria or something extremely small like that?  Was it Sagan?  Whoever it was, he just got proved right.

No matter that it’s small.  There is life outside of the Earth!

No matter that it’s growing on an artificial surface.  It proves that live can survive in deep space, without any atmosphere, and exposed to extremes of solar radiation alternating with the terrifying cold of the void.

It doesn’t even matter that it’s terrestrial in origin.  Nobody’s quite sure how it got there, but since it’s not something usually found in the middle of landlocked Southern  Russia, scientists think it probably drifted up (being particulate matter, lighter than air) into outer space, which is kind of an amazing development with regards to terrestrial life as well.  Our atmosphere is not an impermeable barrier.  It’s thin enough for meteors to come in and destroy everything, which means it’s thin enough that some life can get out.  That’s important, but it’s doubly amazing that life formed on Earth can live, and thrive, in space.  Without a space suit, outside of a ship, that is.

If it’s that easy for life to leave a planet and grow in outer space, then life is almost undoubtedly widespread throughout the universe.

Now, it’s just microscopic plankton.  What if the station is up there for a thousand years?  Will it be covered with moss?  What about a million years?  What about the multi-generational Stanford Torus ark ships?  Will they arrive, millions of years in the future, at some distant solar system, covered with forests, encased in a self-generated atmosphere, with squirrels leaping from branch to branch and birds flitting around and around?  Maybe they will.  Maybe they will.

I was scrolling through the headlines when I saw “New study shows modern man did not wipe out the Netherlands” and I kept going and then jerked back a second later, thinking WTF did I just read.  Oh.  Neanderthals.  Never mind.

I don’t know.  As creatures just a few generations removed (perhaps a few hundred generations, but with little technological change) from grunting animal consciousness, we probably would have had even fewer moral objections to genocide than we do now and, as a quick perusal of the headlines will tell you, we have too few today.

A Lot Like Us

On the one hand, with so few individuals spread over such a huge area, there probably wasn’t too much fierce competition over hunting grounds.  On the other hand, people are still feuding over land today when the obvious solution is for somebody to move.  On the one hand, while the two species could interbreed, on the other, the two species were different enough that neither one probably felt the other was attractive.  DNA analysis has shown that there probably was some sex between the two.    (we are worried today about the NSA spying on our every move, but it doesn’t matter.  40,000 years from now, scientists, who will have huge,  V shaped heads will dig up your bones and say “Oh, yeah, he was fooling around with a girl from work, drank two glasses of wine a day, red, liked seafood, and spent too much time on facebook,” because we’re almost getting that specific now)

I suspect that Jean Auel probably nailed it with her descriptions of sex between the two.  Generally not consensual, or socially acceptable.  I know, she  was writing fiction, but at 40,000 years back, the scientists are, too, a bit.

Anyway, the big evidence that  Homo Sapiens is probably innocent of genocide and the Neanderthals died of cold, maybe, or starvation, or something else, was that the two species had co-existed for a couple of thousand years before the Neanderthals went  extinct.  I don’t think that proves anything at all.  Having just rocks and clubs, it might have taken 4,000   years to wipe out another species.