Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So Rachel is about to get on a plane to Chicago and then Toronto, Badur is sourcing hardware and dealing with the police, and Jon has been figuring out the details of how to rebuild the array (sounds good). Those are a few of the people who will be deserving all our thanks (especially Rachel and Badur who are on the front lines, most of all Rachel) once we've got this all fixed. If we're really lucky it might even be tonight that everything comes back online.

I'll be posting “casual updates” like this here, and as I have more solid details, I'll update the starting entry on ModBlog as well (and watch for a Christmas shopping entry there later today by the way).

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Anyway, other than that, while processing images this morning I watched Supervolcano which asks the question of what would happen if Yellowstone erupted (as it does about every 600,000 years, with the last eruption being 650,000 years ago)… It's quite possible for there to be an eruption large enough to kill a billion people and [whatever number comes after 'trillions'] of animals. It's happened before and statistically it must happen again.

I was thinking about it, and I kind of hope this happens. Now, before you tell me how terrible that is, let me tell you a fact: you are going to die soon, and so am I, and there's nothing that can be done to stop it — at best it can be delayed. So really, for that brief period that I'm alive, I'd like it to be one of the most interesting periods in human history, if not in geological history as well… So far odds are looking good that I will get my wish.

I'll post more pictures in my next entry of our morning, but here's a quick photo of the beach down the road from our house in La Paz, BCS, Mexico… If you click the link, it will enlarge to a 1280×1024 image (suitable for using as desktop wallpaper if you want).

If you look at sperm counts in humans, on average the older the man is, the higher the sperm count is. However, as young men become old men, they do not experience an increase in sperm count. The correlation is not with the age of the man, but with the time period he was born. It is believed that this is due to exposure to artificial hormones in food while still in the womb — as the level of hormones, pesticides, and so on in our environment has increased, our fertility has decreased.

Instead of solving this problem by making our environment cleaner, healthier, and safer, we instead balance out the effects of reduced fertility due to pollution with about $8 billion a year (and that's just in the United States) dealing with the problem using fertility drugs and other methods. Personally I like the me so horny nasal spray. That said, I'm not looking forward to all the spam I'm going to get for it soon. It may however result in a whole lot more of this, which I will not be complainy about.

Brief interjection: Fabulous.

Anyway, there's a tower in Taiwan called the Taipei 101. It's currently the world's tallest skyscraper at 1667 feet, and weights about 700,000 tonnes. Think about the Earth's anatomy. To over-simplify, it's like an orange — the peel is solid rock and dirt, and below that is lava. Push a pin into an orange and it doesn't take a lot of pressure to rupture the peel… Like that pin, Taipei 101 has been putting enormous concentrated force on the Earth's crust and is breaking through — it has re-opened an ancient fault line in Taiwan and so far has been linked to several earthquakes.

In response to Taiwan's mega-tower, other nations have vowed to build even larger skyscrapers. Right now oil billionaires are constructing the Burj Dubai. They're expecting to finish this 2,300+ foot monstrosity in 2008, making it the tallest structure of any type ever built by mankind. The foundations' concrete alone weighs over 110,000 tonnes, with the total weight being in the range of a million tonnes.

As a point of trivia, the tower is being built by Osama bin Laden's family. You have to wonder which branch of the family is going to be the more destructive one for humanity in the long run.

Oh, and in more real world terms did you know that Halliburton/KBR workers in Iraq are getting paid only $150 a month, and they're working twelve hours a day, seven days a week? Oh, and they don't even get paid — the money is wired home to the families of these walking corpses… Ah, capitalism. That said, if they're mercenaries from America rather than slaves from Sierra Leone, they're making $1000 a day. And they have body armor that works, unlike the US Army.

Yeah, these days, it helps to be crazy.

But don't worry, you are immortal.

Grr. I had something I wanted to post about but I can't remember.

Update: Oh wait, now I remember the other “you should think about this” point. When your body is threatened by disease, microbes, or injury, it responds with leukocytosis — the immune system, recognizing that the body is at risk, sends out white blood cells to destroy the invasion and keep you healthy and alive. There is however a “non-at-risk” leukocytic response — it also happens when you eat food. For a long time it was assumed this was a normal part of eating, but then it was discovered that with raw (or slow-cooked) and unprocessed foods, there was no leukocytosis.

To put that in the clearest of terms, your body responds to cooked and processed food in the same way as it does to poison. Human physiology was simply not designed (err, I mean evolved) to consume what we eat as modern man. Click the picture below to check out various examples of “before and after” shots from we like it raw, one of my favorite food blogs.

Michael makes a few amazing raw food dishes, and I wish I was in a place that I could eat more of my food raw, but it's really a big and somewhat limiting commitment if you're the only one that wants to try it in a household… Someone should put out a cookbook for this context — raw dishes that can be split at a final stage of preparation and presented both raw and cooked for different diners.