C-Objectively

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

Continue to read this absolutely hilarious but serious treatment on how to destroy the Earth by Sam Hughes.

Update 10/2/06 - Fixed dead link to the full article.

Pacemaker ‘cure’ for depression

So check out this article that details a new procedure where doctors drill a hole in your skull, attach wires to some parts of your brain, then use a “pacemaker” type of device to stimulate those parts of your brain. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? I thought so. Oh, by the way, its used for curing severe clinical depression.

Expedition to find Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat [cnn.com]

Anybody want to take any bets on what they’ll find?

By the way, does this new Blogger interface suck or what? The one before had nice shortcut buttons to make links and embed images. All this one does is spell check. What are we now, illiterate and publishing to the web? Guess so…

Wired 11.09: The New Diamond Age

Finally…bye bye DeBeers.

The following is a description of a deap sea creature, one of many featured on this page.

Jewel Squid

The jewel squids are one of the strangest occupants of open-ocean waters. Firstly they have wonky eyes, the left eye is always much larger than the right. In some species the left eye is telescopic while the smaller right eye is normal. These squids have a funny slant on life, literally. They hang at a 45 ? angle and use the huge eye to look up for passing prey. Meanwhile the normal eye looks below for any signs of attackers. The common name comes from the scattering of small iridescent spots over the undersides of the body, head and arms. These are tiny directional light organs like tiny car headlights. When the squid is hanging at a 45 ? angle, all the light organs aim down and produce just enough light to cancel out the silhouette of the squid against the weak light from the surface above. They can even adjust the lights for different depths or time of day. Jewel squids are able to float mid-water by filling their soft flesh with pockets of ammonia solution that is less dense than seawater and cancels out the weight of their muscles. They make these solutions out of their body wastes: urine is turned into buoyancy.

Can you even believe that?!?! That is one of the most amazing descriptions of evolution and specialization I have ever heard of. WOW is all I can say. I wish human bodies were that tricked out.

I just read a cool little piece on some new theories behind how vision works, how our brains are able to interpret the things we supposedly “see”. This new idea basically says that vision is a reflex and not something we have to analyze and come up with. Check it out if for nothing else but the cool optical illusion pictures.

So apparently my brain took a break while I was writing my last post. I asked you to read an article to which I had not provided the link for. Here is the link to the Bombardier Beetle article.

I just read another very interesting article. It talks about voting theory and how the plurality method of voting that we use here in the US is the one that is most succeptible to paradoxical outcomes in which the intent of the majority of the voters does not agree with the results of the election. Quite impressive evidence that our voting system should be tweaked. For example one of the voting methods involves ranking all the candidates in order of preference. However I have a bone to pick with this system. In essence you are required to cast votes even for the candidates you may despise. There is also the caveat that a voter needs to be much more involved with the candidates and their stances on issues before they can correctly rank them all. Anyway its an intriguing issue that I think definitely deserves more attention than it receives.

Just a side note, I am the new webmaster for the ASA here at Cal and I’ve revived our web page, you can check it out here.

Another Halloween gone by. Oh well, I was never a big fan. Anyway my big plans for this weekend are studying for my Physics midterm and then a little studying for my Physics midterm. Considering how bad the last one was, this is not a bad thing for me. Meanwhile I encourage everyone to read this piece on The Bombardier Beetle. Curious as it sounds, it’s a thought provoking article on creationism and evolution. Whichever side you’re on you should check it out. That’s all for now, I’ll be back with a war report soon.