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Awesome. After conducting tests, the military has decided to use the thumb-sized "bhut jolokia," or "ghost chili," to make tear gas-like hand grenades to immobilize suspects, defense officials said Tuesday...It has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili's spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000.Nature: Still making the best biological weapons!
Depressing. Excerpts:The key to understanding the implications of peak oil is to see it not just directly through its effect on transport, petrochemicals, or food say, but its systemic effects. A globalising, integrated and co-dependant economy has evolved with particular dynamics and embedded structures that have made our basic welfare dependent upon delocalised 'local' economies. It has locked us into hyper-complex economic and social processes that are increasing our vulnerability, but which we are unable to alter without risking a collapse in those same welfare supporting structures. And without increasing energy flows, those embedded structures, which include our expectations, institutions and infrastructure that evolved and adapted in the expectation of further economic growth cannot be maintained.&The economics of peak oil are explicated using three indicative models: linear decline; oscillating decline; and systemic collapse. While these models are not to be considered as mutually exclusive, a case is made that our civilisation is close to a critical transition, or collapse.• A decline in energy flows will reduce global economic production; reduced global production will undermine our ability to produce, trade, and use energy; which will further decrease economic production.&• Our localized needs and welfare have become ever-more dependent upon hyper-integrated globalised supply-chains. One pillar of their system-wide functioning is monetary confidence and bank intermediation. Money in our economies is backed by debt and holds no intrinsic value; deflation and hyper-inflation risks will make monetary stability impossible to maintain. In addition, the banking system as a whole must become insolvent as their assets (loans) cannot be realised, they are also at risk from failing infrastructure.• A failure of this pillar will collapse world trade. Our 'local' globalised economies will fracture for there is virtually nothing produced in developed countries that can be considered truly indigenous. The more complex the systems and inputs we rely upon, the more globalised they are, and the more we are at risk from a complete systemic collapse.• Peak oil is likely to force peak energy in general. The ability to bring on new energy production and maintain existing energy infrastructure is likely to be severely compromised. We may see massive demand and supply collapses with limited ability to re-boot.• The above mechanisms are non-linear, mutually re-enforcing, and not exclusive.There are more points (of doom), but you get the picture. So, while everyone's bitching about Health Care or American Idol or whatever, the machinations of Peak Oil continue on, unabated. Whether or not oil is actually abiotic (and therefore, not in danger of running out), the current system is primed (or being primed) for collapse. I'm not sure I want to be around for the coming Resource Wars; not sure at all..
"It looks like a film maker's apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster.But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet's Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by NASA scientists.The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater's wall terraces."The reason I decided to highlight the fact this is a digital terrain model is due to the anti-science comments following the article. Seems none of those people believe too much in technology to think this might be real representation of the actual terrain. Thank God they have the Internet to post their anti-science rants..
"A few weeks ago, Chile was hit was one of the most powerful earthquakes on record. Now citizens of the region are coming forward with stories of UFOs on the night of the quake. Did aliens make the earth move?"From io9 via Inexplicata.
While I'm comfortable with the idea of navigating a roundabout, I'm still not sure it was a great idea for the City of Branson to expose tourists and old people from different parts of the Midwest and Mid-South to such a highfalutin road drivin' contraption. This article vastly understates the roundabout problem(Specifically to a higher traffic than normal or anticipated location, like Branson), but the focus of the article is on a new solution: The Vortex Junction. Look at the artist rendering, read the explanation of traffic flow, and think about how well this would work in a completely new town or city suburb. No stop signs. No stop lights. No problem entering the Junction. Smart, like the future should be.
From Cracked.com, rapidly becoming on of my favorite new sites.
From Washington's Blog. Please, sir, don't get on any small planes. We don't want to lose you like we lost Wellstone..Excerpts..I write to request that you turn over to this office, and the public, e-mails backed up on AIG’s servers, including internal accounting documents and financial models developed by the company in the last decade. The public owns AIG. We bought it, for an initial down payment of $182 billion. You are the representatives of the public, through your positions as the three trustees of the AIG Credit Facility Trust.The public is unhappy with the purchase. In March, 2009, a poll found that 82% of the public wanted bonuses to AIG employees returned. This didn’t happen. We do not know who is responsible for the company’s collapse, or whether they are working now at other banks or for the Federal government. We do not know if they got bonuses, if they were committing fraud, whether there were kickbacks from counterparties, or if there was any significant restraining role played by the regulatory community. We cannot separate the bad decision-makers from innocent employees, because we simply do not know what went on. You can address this problem, by releasing to us and on the internet, with reasonable discretion, all or sustainably all of the emails and documents that describe the web of relationships and practices behind AIG’s failed business.Last year, I asked former AIG CEO Ed Liddy to give me the names of the people who destroyed AIG and cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. He refused. I asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to look into the matter. The GAO wrote that it didn’t have the authority to do an audit. I requested that the Special Inspector General of TARP look into the problem. I was told that the problem is too complicated.&On Wall Street, winners can win, but losers must lose. This did not happen with AIG. AIG itself, AIG employees, and AIG counterparties were bailed out. It is beyond outrageous that this company, which taxpayers capitalized after Wall Street used it as a slush fund, hides nearly all relevant facts from its owners, the public. Should this information be released, it is likely that the value of AIG’s remaining businesses will be unchanged. In any event, the public and public markets will benefit dramatically from transparency, because reliable information is the cornerstone of effective markets.Thank you, Congressman Grayson, for at least trying to do the right thing..
Yeah, I don't think the rest of the world will be as passive in their reaction to the Catholic Church's pedophilia problem..From CNN:"Now we have obvious confirmation that this is a global crisis," said John Allen, CNN's Vatican analyst and senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. "Anywhere there is a substantial Catholic population there is the potential for this type of scandal."&..But new revelations about church abuse continued Friday, including in the Munich, Germany, archdiocese where Benedict (Pope Benedict XVI)once served as archbishop.Under the pope's tenure as archbishop in the early 1980s, the Munich archdiocese ignored warnings to keep a molesting priest away from children, the doctor who issued those warnings said Friday. (Oh snap!)Werner Huth, a psychoanalyst, said he specifically demanded the priest never be allowed to interact with children again. Instead, Huth said, the church allowed the priest to return to work and to deal with children.&Beyond the Vatican, the crisis threatens to erode membership in Europe's remaining Catholic strongholds and to change secular Europe's posture toward the church from shrugging toleration to outright hostility. But church experts say the crisis is likely to have far less impact in parts of the world where Catholicism is growing fastest, like Africa and Southeast Asia.From the BBC:Pope Benedict XVI's former diocese in Germany is facing daily allegations of physical and sexual abuse, the head of its new sex-abuse task force says."It is like a tsunami," Elke Huemmeler told the Associated Press news agency.She said about 120 cases had come to light so far in Munich, about 100 of them at a boarding school run by monks.There's a deep conspiracy theory regarding a secret war between the Rothchilds and The Vatican, but I won't get into that here. If you're interested, Google is still your friend..
"We thought we understood the Moon, but we don't," says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. "It's clear now that water exists up there in a variety of concentrations and geologic settings. And who'd have thought that today we'd be pondering the Moon's hydrosphere?"&They don't know why some craters contain loads of pure ice while others are dominated by an ice-soil mixture. It's probably a sign that the moonwater comes from more than one source.&The researchers also think that much of the crater water migrates to the poles from the Moon's warmer, lower latitudes. "All our findings are telling us there's an active water cycle on the Moon," marvels Colaprete. Think about it. The "driest place in the solar system" has a water cycle."It's a different world up there," says Spudis, "and we've barely scratched the surface. Who knows what discoveries lie ahead?"
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