At the close of the event, after the long rows of ten-foot-high dominoes had been toppled and the fireworks went off, the symbolic screw-ups continued: even after the anniversary wall had fallen, visitors were not allowed to cross it. Instead the blocks — some, upon closer inspection, emblazoned with advertising from among others, easyJet, the local utility companies, and Scandlines — were cordoned off behind metal fencing and guarded.
In the end, the Cheese Revolution, with its horrid music, montages of whistling children, and real-life angels atop the buildings, left would-be revelers divided by a fake Berlin Wall shuffling along in the rain looking for a way out of a festival of freedom.
Time seems to think that the rocket that was launched is actually an Ares 1. It is not. Ares 1 only exists on paper and won't exist in reality for years. I guess Time magazine got carried away with all the noise and hype.
What was launched is an Ares 1-X - a one-off test article that differs in substantial ways from the real, production line, Ares 1. Ares 1-X is (was) a rocket cobbled together from pieces of old shuttle hardware, a borrowed avionics system that will not be used on the actual Ares 1, and dummy upper stages - none of which will ever fly again. Indeed, its first - and only - flight resulted in an unexpected upper stage trajectory, a parachute system malfunction, and heavy damage to its launch pad.
A great quote from SF writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snowcrash:
...this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
Spooky photos of The Brazilian blackout. Luckily the lights came back on. They always do, right?
The report also puts the breathless reporting of recent discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Brazil into a more sober context. BG’s Guara field discovered last month, for instance, contains 2 billion barrels of recoverable oil and was lauded as a ‘supergiant’, prompting some pundits to claim such finds would banish peak oil for decades. However, the UKERC argues that each additional 1 billion barrels delays peak oil by less than a week. To postpone the peak by a year would take 7 times what was discovered in 2007. “We’re unlikely to explore our way out of this”, says Sorrell.
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
Not a surprise. It's been a dirty little secret for many years that the OPEC countries added magical "reserves" in the late 80s in order to allow themselvs to produce oil at levels far above their OPEC quotas.
In the recent ASPO (peak oil) conference, one presenter gave a convincing presentation, in which he suggested that there was a newly found oilfield in the deep waters off Brazil which might contain ONE TRILLION BARRELS. To put that in context, humans have used one trillion barrels since the industrial revolution. Cancel the DOOM, you crazy DOOMERS!
It all sounded dandy until one audience member pointed out the following:
Given that URR (ultimately recoverable reserves) of any oilfield tend to be 40% of the reserves at best, and that the world uses 30 billion barrels a year, the discovery, if true, would only provide 15 years of current global oil usage. And that's not even factoring in the fact that the oil is in deep waters and hard to extract.
Oh yes, we are totally screwed.
911's legacy: cancer for the rescue heroes. Not to worry; I'm sure they'll get the best care the country can offer... oh shit.
A spate of recent deaths of New York police and fire officers who took part in the emergency operation at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks has heightened fears that it could be the start of a delayed epidemic of cancer-related illness.
Five firefighters and police officers, all of whom were involved in the rescue and clear-up at the site of the collapsed Twin Towers, have died of cancer in the past three months, the oldest being 44. Three died last month within a four-day period.
Those three were Robert Grossman, a Harlem-based police officer who spent several weeks at the emergency site and died of a brain tumour aged 41; fellow police officer Cory Diaz, 37; and firefighter Richard Mannetta, 44.
There was a great psychology study done at Cornell about a decade ago called the “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” The experiment proved that stupid people are consistently, pathologically unable to recognize their own mistakes. Their brains just weren’t wired for “learning from mistakes”; in fact, they were always convinced that they were always right, reality be damned.
The emboldened Taliban movement in Afghanistan turned down an American offer of power-sharing in exchange for accepting the presence of foreign troops, Afghan government sources confirmed.
"US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast," a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net requesting anonymity for not being authorized to talk about the sensitive issue with the media.
He said the talks, brokered by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, continued for weeks at different locations including the Afghan capital Kabul.
Saudi Arabia, along with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, were the only states to recognize the Taliban regime which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
Turkish Prime Minister Reccap Erodgan has reportedly been active in brokering talks between the two sides.
His emissaries are in contact with Hizb-e-Islami (of former prime minister Gulbadin Hikmatyar) too because he is an important factor in northeastern Afghanistan."
It's fair to describe Gulbadin as an important factor, given his habit of running over his enemies with tanks. Let me take this opportunity to say how much I admire and respect Mr. Hikmatyar as a statesman and leader - a fearless defender of Afghan national honour.
In completely unrelated news, I'll be travelling to Afghanistan next month on a fact-finding mission for the idleworm.com news bureau.
NASA: polar caps continue to melt. Will the AGW "skeptics" give this datapoint the same weight as the recent "the earth is cooling" report from 3 weeks ago?
My dimpled arse they will. "The thinker 'thinks', the prover 'proves'".
Most people are unaware that we're in something of a golden age for robotic space exploration (click for links):
I saw a preview screening of "CoLLapse" - a movie based around a 2-day interview with Mike Ruppert. It's quite a film - but most interesting is the attention that MR has been receiving - interviews with the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Don't miss it if it plays near you.
Directed by documentarian Chris Smith ("American Movie"), the film consists mostly of Mr. Ruppert speaking about the dangers of peak oil and the looming catastrophe that declining oil reserves could bring. The film opens Nov. 6 in New York and on the new video-on-demand channel FilmBuff.
"The power of 'Collapse' is that Ruppert ... never sounds like a crackpot," Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman wrote after the movie's Toronto International Film Festival premiere in September. "You may want to dispute him, but more than that you'll want to hear him, because what he says—right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia—takes up residence in your mind."
The oil bourse is intended as an exchange market for petroleum, gas, and petrochemicals in various currencies, primarily the euro and Iranian rial, and a basket of other major currencies.
I've been working furiously on The Film. It's almost done - at least the animation. 4 scenes left on the main body, and then a final pass to buttress some weak links, which will add another 2 or 3 minutes (or 4 weeks of work, roughly). I've found a major conductor to provide the music, and have had some expert input. It's looking good. I've been too burned out to post much, or even answer any emails. FYI, so far this year, my earnings have come to less than $6000. Most of my energy and time has been sunk into this project. Bear with me - as it should be fun when it launches in the first quarter of next year.
Here are some screenshots from sequence 2:
Reconstructed from the 1940s short "Why Play Leapfrog", your grandad (and why he was tougher than you pantywaists):
Energy slaves behind every modern American:
Different kinds of fuel:
Many drills needed to find one reservoir:
EROEI in the early 20th century - 100 barrels found for the energy equivalent of every 1 used:
Searching in deep waters (we're all in deep waters now):
The statue of Liberty...
...next to the amount of oil we use in a year (1 cubic mile):
The average american driver uses their body weight of oil a week:
Percentages of oil used in electricity generation vs. transport:
Coal mountaintop removal:
Conventional Natural gas production and extraction:
Those who have been following the site for a while will know that I've been working on a large scale animated project about oil and resource depletion. I began the project (slowly) about five years ago. As I worked on it, it grew - and is now over 20 minutes long. The final film will be just under 30 minutes. The first 4 sequences are complete, give or take a scene or two. Only the final sequence remains - it will be about 7 or 8 minutes long. If I can maintain the current production rate, I should be finished with all the animation sometime in November/early December. There'll still be some work to do after that - final narration, proof reading of the script by someone with expertise in the field, post production, etc. I'm hoping to release it early next year - tentatively sometime in February.
I've been going bananas with the visuals - and it's turning out far better than I expected. Walt Disney coined a term called "plussing" - i.e., take a scene that you're perfectly satisfied with, and push it a lot further than you thought possible. That's what I've been doing the past week, and the results have been most pleasing (see previews below).
In addition, I created pages for the script, with citations for every line - as people will certainly have questions. That was a full weeks work - pretty tedious going.
Well, so that you know that I'm not a total wastrel, here are some of the best shots from sequence 1. I'll post some stills from the later sequences over the next few days.
Title screen, over the seething surface of the Sun:
The late cretaceous Earth:
Vertical pan, showing the canopy of a Greenhouse forest:
Pan down to dinosaur ambling through the vegetation:
Plate tectonics open rifts in the Earth's crust:
The new oceans are filled with colossal algal blooms, which thrive in the heat (this is the formation of oil sequence):
I'm delighted with the way this sequence has turned out - adding some simple gradients and simple facial expressions has turned this from on OK shot into a memorable one:
The algae die as they're poisoned by sheer numbers. I'd like to vary some of the faces to add a bit of variety - different angles and expressions - but ONLY if there's time left when everything else is done.
Meet our modern day algae:
Another shot which was greatly improved by simple lighting tricks - adding gradients with complimentary colours to the background wall has given this shot a texture and atmosphere that was missing before.
Same here - originally I'd coloured these scenes in simple flat colours - the scene worked, but was utterly flat. A basic gradient on the ground, and a toplit illumination suddenly provides a dramatic effect for very little cost. The narrator explains that in the 1960s we found 6 barrels of oil for every one we used:
Whereas today we find 1 barrel for every 3 to 6 that we use:
Ah, the joys of modern technology:
Ending with a financial collapse (animated in Summer 2007, btw):
