To help keep the Andromeda strain swine flu away, you should take a swine flu shot.

Ingredients:

• 4 cl of Red Opal (Icelandic salmiac-menthol vodka)
• a squeeze of lemon juice
• freshly ground black pepper

Enjoy!

Another Sunday to play with big numbers.

Anyone who has been to London must have noticed the numerous cameras observing you, like some strange proto-Orwellian social experiment.

Why have they built such a system? The theory goes: to reduce crime, and create safety, etc. But practice tends to disagree.
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The Christian conservatives of USA recently had one of their echo chambers of retarded thinking taking place in Washington.

BBC reports of a great fear – the direction where Mr. Obama is leading the country:

From the podium, Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor stoked the audience’s fears with a joke about a man who goes to sleep in America and wakes up, after a year of Obama, to find himself living in Sweden.

To many foreign ears, the thought of waking up in Sweden might seem rather appealing, but to this fiercely patriotic crowd it would not have made much difference if Mr Cantor had substituted Sweden for North Korea.

According to this article, executives travelling to China are advised to buy a separate mobile phone to be used only in China. This is to avoid spying and to work around corporate espionage.

The timing of the article is to create media noise for the upcoming (?) US-China trade war. Howeeeeeever, that’s not the most interesting part of that article. This is:

Mark Bregman, chief technology officer at security firm Symantec said he left his MacBook Pro behind in the US and took his MacBook Air whenever he flew to China. Bregman said he only ever used the Air in China and re-imaged the machine every time he returned home.

Interesting? Very much so: the CTO of one of the biggest providers of anti-virus/security products for Windows doesn’t even use Windows himself! He uses an Apple MacBook. That tells you something, doesn’t it?

The barber of Sevilla, as reformulated by Russell, as reformulated by Wikipedia:

Suppose there is a town with just one male barber; and that every man in the town keeps himself clean-shaven: some by shaving themselves, some by attending the barber. It seems reasonable to imagine that the barber obeys the following rule: He shaves all and only those men in town who do not shave themselves.

Under this scenario, we can ask the following question: Does the barber shave himself?

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Suppose that a huge space rock is detected, and it’s heading for collision with Earth! Humankind is given a warning 19 hours in advance.

After that, bang. Massive destruction. Everyone dies. End of the world, Game Over.

The question is: what would you do? Is there anything to do?

Would you panic? Would you just kick back and watch the fireworks? Something completely different?

To answer, reply with a comment.

Continued from part 1…

(Note: Asteroids which move about close enough to Earth to potentially impact it are also known as NEOs, or “Near-Earth Objects”)

If an asteroid larger than a certain threshold hits the Earth, not much will be normal anymore. It will take tens to hundreds of years to recover from such an impact.

What can we do? How could we protect ourselves?
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Swine flu, nuclear war, changing climate, VEI-8 level eruption of a supervolcano and LHC-generated mini black holes are not the only things which threaten the existence of humanity.

An interesting paper by Mr. Jason G. Matheny, called “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction” (last draft) notes that there is so far no analysis done of the cost-effectiveness of reducing human extinction risks. He provides a method of analyzing the cost-effectiveness of protecting against a mass-scale catastrophic event, using as an example case the threat of an asteroid impact.
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My friend came to me about a great new idea he had. I shall paraphrase our discussion:

-”Yo. Why is reality so hard?”, he asked.
-”I’ve no idea. Why is reality so hard?”, I replied.
-”It’s because there’s too many things to keep track of. I have a solution: micro-feng shui.”
-”Micro-feng shui? But isn’t micro less?”
-”Everything micro is good. For example: microchips. Very good.”
-”OK, so how does it work?”
-”Step 1: reduce spatial complexity. From now on, view the world as a planar space and ignore all height differences. That’s 30% less complexity. Then, step 2: happiness.”

Considering what’s published nowadays in various self-help books, packaging this idea into a 400-page book would probably reach New York Times bestseller list very fast. Not to mention the creation of some sort of a pseudo-religious movement, enabling my friend to be showered in non-Zimbabwean paper currency.

Iran is currently undergoing riots and violent demonstrations as a result of irregularities in the recent presidential vote. Thus Iran is all over the news, in good and in bad.

Recently Nokia-Siemens Networks got some (unwanted?) publicity from many sources after having sold “network snooping equipment” to Iran.

The sad thing is that while people are so pumped up by evil ayatollahs oppressing the people of Iran, they mistakenly think that spying on the citizens is something so terrible that it can only happen in some sort of backwater evil clerical dictatorship, and that such snooping is not even possible to do elsewhere.

That is false. This kind of functionality exists today in basically ALL GSM networks, in ALL countries you can think of. Yes, this means also your country.

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