I feel a bit odd posting about this given my general abhorrence for war, but technology for creating a ‘virtual minefield’ may be one of the only examples of a new killing machine that is less evil than its predecessor. Metal Storm’s multi-barreled, computer-controlled, non-mechanical machine gun is the basis of the weapon, which lays a minefield that consists not of explosives, but of proximity sensors. When the sensors are tripped, the gun fires a projectile to its exact location. The weapon can be turned off and on at any time, and apparently it can even fire ‘less-lethal’ projectiles, whatever that means. Military types will be happy because they gain inexhaustible coverage of the minefield as long as the sensors remain intact, and humanity on the whole will be happy because we’re no longer sowing the earth with perpetual, indiscriminate death. Once the gun is gone, so is the minefield.

Not like it’s going to be adopted, though, so long as landmines cost pennies and are so very effective at the maim-not-kill objective that helps to make them such a terrifying weapon of war.

When we add new posts to this website, they all get secretly tagged and categorized so related posts can be read together.  That’s how the “similar posts” thing at the bottom of each article works.  What you may not know is that one of our most popular categories is “anal fisting”.   It started after Pavel wrote a bit about the sudden rise in the popularity of anal fisting in the Czech Republic, but has quickly become the catchall category for reports of the world going to hell.  I was on thestar.ca today, and found the ultimate example of anal fisting.

A school board in California has banned the Merriam Webster Dictionary after complaints about the entry for “oral sex.”  That’s right.  We’ve moved beyond censoring classic literature and science textbooks to censoring a book of words - a book that inherently cannot advocate anything.  The school board has now promised to scour the dictionary for other inappropriate terms before returning a modified version to the schools.  I’m going to suggest they just go whole-hog and use Google’s China censoring software so they can get rid of anything pertaining to liberty or free thought in addition to pornographic references.  And with Google threatening to withdraw from China, I’m sure some unemployed software engineer would be more than happy to modify the program for California.

To me, the saddest part of this tale is that it appears that the majority of parents down in Cali are in support of this move.  I think someone needs to go on an anal fisting crusade down there and try to loosen up some of those tight asses.

Last night I watched a relatively recent documentary called Food, Inc. which takes a critical look at the American food industry and its transformation over the last 50 years or so.  It was pretty mind blowing and worth recommending (I’ve set a small personal goal to tell everyone to watch this film) as it’s full of terrifying, revealing and interesting interviews and studies.  I would say that I was a moderately aware consumer prior to watching the film, attempting to buy local, organic produce when possible, only buying meat from my local butcher and cooking as much as I reasonably can.  To say that Food, Inc. has reaffirmed my desire to live this way would be a massive understatement.  One thing it does as an informational film is to explain why ethical, healthy eating in 2010 is barely feasible for a vast majority of our population.  You won’t believe the grip that corporations have on this industry in the United States (and by extension, Canada).  I’ll let you pass your own judgments on the movie but do me a favour; watch it, and let me know what you think.   That neat little link down there will get you to the trailer.

Almost forgot to mention, not that I would ever condone piracy of any sort, but I have heard that it’s available somewhere on youtube…

That title seems like it should be on The Onion, but the Internet is a strange place. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, a local bearded man spent 2009 without driving or riding in a car. The story itself is kind of a fluff piece, but far more interesting is a glance at the comments section. I would have expected most readers to offer up a somewhat dismissal, if genuine, “good for him,” but there’s a full gamut of comments ranging from militant derision of his accomplishment, to standard right-wing hate blather towards all things that might potentially fall under the umbrella of ‘Democratic.‘

Are people so terribly threatened by anything that falls outside their small range of ‘normal’ behaviour?

The Earthrace, a biodiesel-fueled trimaran that broke the world record for circumnavigating the globe, was recently sold to the Sea Shepherd Society and renamed the Ady Gil, acting as a symbolic flagship for the marine conservation group. Historic clashes between the Sea Shepherds and fishermen have not always been peaceful; the group espouses a brand of vigilante justice in order to protect sea life from those fishermen who don’t abide by international treaties and cannot face legal retribution for their actions in unregulated waters.

The latest spectacular meeting between whalers and the Sea Shepherds happened today, when a Japanese ship fired upon the Ady Gil with a water cannon before ramming it, destroying the composite bow of the highly sophisticated $2 million vessel. A full article is available at the Times.

Usually in incidents like this, there are two distinctly different sides to the story, but the true outcome is pretty obvious here. Take a look at this video footage taken onboard the Japanese ship:

And if that’s not convincing enough, here’s the view from another Sea Shepherd ship.

Update: The Ady Gil has confirmed to have sunk while attempts were made to tow it to safety. Efforts were made to take fuel, oil, and batteries off the ship before she went down. Sad.

God damn it’s cold today.  Fox Glacier felt like a tropical holiday compared to this shit.

I have an electric toothbrush with a rechargeable battery; it uses a clever little inductive charger as a base, and worked very well until recently. It wouldn’t retain any charge for a few subsequent uses, so I figured that the nickel-cadmium battery in it had bitten the dust.* As it happens, the design is quite decidedly sealed, and the manufacturer definitely does not endorse battery replacement. Frustrated at the prospect of throwing away a perfectly good chassis and motor (and of paying $30 for a new one, when all I needed was a $5 battery), I decided the only sensible thing to do was to hack it, Instructables-style. I figured I could even replace the NiCd with a high quality nickel-metal hydride one, and my toothbrush would be even better than a new one.

The instructions say “Caution! Opening the handle will destroy the appliance and invalidate the warranty,” and they are probably right. I am not a patient person, and so I managed to mangle it quite nicely while disassembling it (though with the aid of a Dremel, I did learn how I might be able to take one apart properly in the future). Adding to my frustration though, the battery they used wasn’t anywhere as exotic as the pair of 2/3A’s that I thought I was going to need to solder together. It was a single lowly, ubiquitous AA.

Now realistically, there are a lot of reasons for a company to design a toothbrush that’s sealed. It requires fewer parts, which means less (expensive) tooling when manufacturing. It also improves the reliability because you can gasket a sealed unit very thoroughly. Ultimately, the cost savings mean you can deliver a high-quality product at a reasonable price. While the company could readily produce a design with a replaceable battery and sell it for a few dollars more, it’s not really in their economic interest, because the $30 replacement cost is low enough that most consumers won’t think twice about buying a new one. Planned obsolescence is a cash cow for manufacturers, but frustrating as hell from a sustainability point of view, and there’s no easy way to reconcile the two angles. As it is, the other components are definitely robust beyond the life-span of a single battery, and because there’s no way to recycle the co-moulded plastic/rubber case, you end up with a tremendous amount of waste for a high-end product that is designed to be disposable.

This is the kind of challenge that faces any product designer with a conscience, and right now, there is little incentive for manufacturers to change their ways. Designing products for disassembly and recycling would increase costs, and the vast majority of consumers would likely throw it out, anyway. For product design to truly become sustainable, we either need a material revolution or we need to radically change our model of consumption. One way to do this is to make manufacturers responsible for end-of-life disposal of products. While this sounds like a ridiculous proposition to North Americans, the idea has been embraced by the European Union, which has begun introducing measures to make manufacturers accountable for their waste. If phased in properly, such initiatives can allow smart manufacturers with a cradle-to-cradle mentality to save money. One such success story is Interface, a carpet company which has vowed to eliminate any negative environmental impact from its products by 2020; as it has implemented new techniques for recycling its products at the end of their lifespan, they have actually managed to reduce their costs. It goes to show that, yet again, sustainable development often makes equally as much sense from a financial point of view as an environmental one.

*In the end, it turns out that the outlet that the charger had been plugged into in the bathroom had tripped its switch, and stopped working. Once I reset it, it worked again, so I’m pretty sure that the battery in my old toothbrush was decidedly alive and well for at least another few months, and this whole exercise was for naught. So it goes.

While I’ve publicly laughed off the hacked climate e-mails from the University of East Anglia as trivial notes taken out of context by denialist rhetoricians, I must say, this e-mail shakes me to my very boots. I just don’t know what to trust anymore.

From: ernst.kattweizel@redcar.ac.uk
Sent: 29th October 2009
To: The Knights Carbonic

Gentlemen, the culmination of our great plan approaches fast. What the Master called “the ordering of men’s affairs by a transcendent world state, ordained by God and answerable to no man”, which we now know as Communist World Government, advances towards its climax at Copenhagen. For 185 years since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working towards this moment.

The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master’s initial thesis - that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the atmosphere - had to be accepted by the scientific establishment. I will not bother you with details of the gold paid, the threats made and the blood spilt to achieve this end. But the result was the elimination of the naysayers and the disgrace or incarceration of the Master’s rivals. Within 35 years the 3rd Warden of the Grand Temple of the Knights Carbonic (our revered prophet John Tyndall) was able to “demonstrate” the Master’s thesis. Our control of physical science was by then so tight that no major objections were sustained.

More resistence was encountered (and swiftly despatched) when we sought to install the 6th Warden (Svante Arrhenius) first as professor of physics at Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to project the Master’s second grand law - that the infrared radiation trapped in a planet’s atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and chemical science to sustain the second law.

Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the instrumental record. Securing the consent of the scientific establishment was a simple matter. But thermometers had by then become widely available, and amateur meteorologists were making their own readings. We needed to show a steady rise as industrialisation proceeded, but some of these unfortunates had other ideas. The global co-option of police and coroners required unprecedented resources, but so far we have been able to cover our tracks.

The over-enthusiasm of certain of the Knights Carbonic in 1998 was most regrettable. The high reading in that year has proved impossibly costly to sustain. Those of our enemies who have yet to be silenced maintain that the lower temperatures after that date provide evidence of global cooling, even though we have ensured that eight of the ten warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001(10). From now on we will engineer a smoother progression.

Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret nuclear power stations around the Arctic Circle, attached to giant immersion heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the world’s glaciers.

Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world’s wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world’s biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations of farmers, gardeners, bird-watchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.

The co-operation of these governments requires unflagging effort. The capture of George W. Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly-capitalist governments remain apprised of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of compliant states, the Master’s third grand law has been accepted: world government will be established under the guise of controlling manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.

Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse’s head turned up in James Hansen’s bed, appear to have staved off the immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus?

Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and terrify.

Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the Temple of the Knights Carbonic.

Today marks 150 years since Charles Darwin published his revolutionary Origin of Species.   I don’t really know how to properly emphasise the significance of this book.  It did for biology what Newton’s discovery of gravity did for physics: it gave the field a framework, an ability to relate all living organisms to one another.  And it’s so simple.  Huxley, arguably the most prominent biologist of the day, probably said it best after first hearing Darwin’s conclusions: “How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that.”

It’s just that brilliant.

Signs throughout Southeast Asia warn of explosives left over from the fucking retarded history of the place

As I commented on during my time in Laos, it’s interesting how a few countries are really taking the lead in dealing with removing mines and unexploded ordinance from conflicts of old.  Well, a bunch of scientists (grad students working on a side project by the sounds of things) from the University of Edinburgh have come up with a remarkable new tool that should really help all those overworked and underpaid people toughing it out one bomb at a time.  It’s a great story of how pure research can lead to all sorts of unforeseen applications.

I guess this is also a story about the marvels of genetic engineering, and the awesome things it can let us do.  These scientists in Edinburgh have been developing a procedure they’re calling “BioBricking,” essentially figuring out how to build bacteria able to respond to whatever cue the designer desires.  In this instance (one of the first instances, but here’s to hoping that there will be many more), bacteria have been programmed to glow in response to explosive residues.  For the cost of pennies, crop-dusting style aircraft can spread these bacteria in solution over fields thought to contain mines or other UXO - these fields will then glow green where the bombs are.  All the crazy work of digging the bombs out by hand and maneouvering the hundreds of pounds of explosive safely to a detonation area would remain, but the hardest part would be so much easier.

This lab is also working on a bacteria that will glow in response to arsenic.  I’m sure the other possibilities are virtually endless.  Good on ya, Prof. Elfick, and all your grad students.

There are probably bombs in this Laos field. Good luck finding them.