There’ll be a total solar eclipse over the south Pacific Ocean this Sunday, a rare event. For those who forgot to charter a boat, check out this amazing stop-motion video taken in 2007 by a NASA satellite:

Through the eyes of submersible robots, I have watched with morbid fascination as millions of gallons of oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve seen poetic photographs of pelicans stained brown, and of waves of sludge staining the deep blue sea. And while I’ve heard a lot of talk about how horrifying it all is, what I haven’t seen is any sign that people are driving less, or even just driving in a more gas- conscious manner.

The tragic results of the 1989 oil spill,
somehow completely blamed on Exxon.

I live in Northern California, which many would claim is a giant refuge for hippies and environmental nutjobs. And yet the highways here are as packed as ever. And the byways? Nothing but jack-rabbit starts in a high-speed race between traffic lights.

Sadly, burning gas is still America’s favorite occupation. It’s a cheap thrill, dollar-wise, with prices rolled back to 2004. But what about the environmental issues? What about that gigantic spill? The response I’m hearing most often is, “It’s not my fault.”

For seventy-nine days and counting, 4,200,000 gallons of crude oil have been spilled per day. In the meantime, people have blamed BP for making cheaper and unsafe choices in the equipment used to construct the oil platform, and they’ve blamed them for being slow to react after the accident. People have also blamed ‘Big Oil’ for drilling in the seafloor in the first place. Hell, one person even told me the fault lied in, “The British.” All in all, we’ve found plenty of people to blame; pretty much anyone but ourselves. Mind you, this isn’t about dodging responsibility—these are people who genuinely, psychotically, believe in their own innocence.

Oh, and chances are that one of these people is you.

I mean, what do you think BP would be doing out in the middle of the
Now you too can be evil.
Wait, you already are…water drilling holes if you weren’t buying their gas? If you own a car, a motorcycle, or even a gas- powered lawn mower, then you own a chunk of blame for this tragedy.

How large a chunk? That’s up to you. Maybe you could drive less? Or be more conscious when you do. (Yes, you darling hybrid owners, you do pay the same lead-foot tax as the rest of us.)

Since more and more people are thinking about where their food is coming from, then why not their oil? I think a driver’s license should require knowledge of recent environmental disasters. Better still, we should be bringing exhibits around the country.

After all, how many vegetarians were baptised by a visit to the slaughterhouse?

Many Utah residents who thought there were investing in real
Is this making your mouth water?estate were, in fact, investing in new products like The Candwich here. According to the New York Times, a money manager named Travis L. Wright collected $145 million and invested it in his own company in order to develop snappy ideas like this.
 
 
 

The shape of so many foods that I love:

Bagel	Donut
Cheerio	Onion Ring
Fried Chicken	Cheesel

You may not remember back in 2006 when scientists nearly destroyed the planet. In fact, you might not have even heard about it.

The Ghost of Global Destruction Past

What happened was this: the smart guys over at Sandia National Labs were running a ‘routine’ test when they incidentally created gases in excess of 3,600,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s three point six billion degrees). For reference, that’s seventeen million times what it takes to boil water, or one point four million times what it takes to melt steel, or one hundred and thirty times as hot as the core of the sun. In short, it’s really stamping hot.

As if that wasn’t dangerous enough, this phenomenal heat wasn’t actually produced during the test, but after the machinery had been turned off—when it was supposed to be cooling down. As far as the scientists could tell, the heat was sustaining itself, generating more energy than had been initially put in. That is to say: they didn’t try to make it happen, and they weren’t able to stop it. I find that really scary. They found it ‘puzzling.’

“At first, we were disbelieving,” said project leader Chris Deeney, his English reminiscent of a 419 scam. “We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result.”

They repeated it. They had accidentally created an incomprehensible amount heat over which they had no control, and they kept doing it to see what would happen? I’d hate to have been a fly on that wall:

“Think it will grow bigger this time?” Tweedledee, PhD asks. “Maybe eat up the whole planet?”
“Nah,” Tweedledee, ScD replies. “But how cool if it seared through the dimensional barrier, loosing demons and bringing hell to Earth?”

So that was 2006, and somehow we’re still here. But, like a speeder that’s never been caught, science is still on the march. This time
The ironically named LIFE,
the cutting edge of apocalypse technology they’re building a ‘miniature sun’ right here on the surface of the Earth (you know, the planet that every complains we’re destroying). The idea is simple: take a 1.4-megajoule laser system, split it into 192 individual beams and then use those to ignite a forty ton block of uranium. Woah, yeah, nothing scary about a giant hunk of burning uranium.

You know, it’s always touching when those peace-loving scientists gather around their death-clock to moan about global warming, but the truth is, they’re the truly dangerous. We might be trashing this planet, but they’ll chuck the whole thing away for the chance to find something ‘neat.’