SKIRMISHER

Someone who happened to be at the wrong time and place when the tsunami hit Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga last Tuesday videoed the incoming doom from what seemed like a “safe” spot — at least safe enough for the video to survive and appear on the interwebz.

As you can see from this (hopefully) bullshit-free illustration (click to enlarge), the approximate surface area required to power the world with nothing but solar panels is totally picayune compared with the benefits: zero carbon emissions, partial independence from oil, and basically new places on which draw your gang’s graffiti. But still.

Not to rain on everyone’s parade, but isn’t it fun to not forget that Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day, long before all that caring about the environment stuff, murdered his girlfriend and stuffed her body in a trunk in her apartment?
Just a little irony with which we can spend Earth Day.

Magnus Larsson proposes creating a 6,000-km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone by “infecting” desert sand with Bacillus pasteurii. The microorganism solidifies loose sand into sandstone, and the resulting wall is supposed to block the advancement of the desert.
Clarifying the biochemical process through which his project could be realized, Larsson explained in a series of emails [...]

Scientists discovered a thick layer of solar particles inside Earth’s magnetic field that shouldn’t be there in the first place, which means there are huge [previously unnoticed] breaches in our planet’s solar defense. That could mean huge global problems hitting us in the next period of solar activity to begin in 2012. Now that’s action.
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Scientist Ron Ace has proposed what he calls the most “practical, nontoxic, affordable, rapidly achievable” and beneficial way to curb global warming and a resulting catastrophic ocean rise — by spraying humongous amounts of seawater into the air to “build” a “colossal refrigeration system with a 100,000-fold performance multiplier.”
“The Earth has a giant air-conditioning problem,” [...]

A property development in Milano Italy has come up with Milano Santa Monica, a small eco-compatible city designed around the requirements of energy conservation and bio-architecture. Hey, it uses solar panels to produce warm water and photovoltaic panels on windows to produce electricity.
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Discover Magazine has this list of 10 amazing things the sky can do, and by “do” it doesn’t mean in the “do the lunch lady” sense. But maybe you’ll got there.
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Toronto City Council voted on Tuesday to ban the sale of plastic water bottles on all municipal premises from City Hall to golf courses by 2011.
Stuart Green, spokesman for Toronto Mayor David Miller, said the plastic-water-bottle ban, along with other measures, is all part of the city’s plan to divert 70 per cent of Toronto’s [...]

You may have to wait a coupla years till the world ends properly in 2010 as the Large Hadron Collider’s repairs, initially thought to last only two months, will actually take that said time to be complete.
Coming online in September, the LHC blew a transformer that controlled its cooling in preliminary test firings.  Without the [...]

The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn’t find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.
Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. [...]

Above is a police dashboard video of the meteor that streaked across Canada’s sky the other day [news here]. Nobody found meteor fragments, but we suspect it’s that General Zod again and his crew.
And BTW, below is a nice video compilation of meteor crashes everywhere,

This is an excerpt from the documentary “Unchained Goddess” produced by Frank Capra for Bell Labs for their television program “The Bell Telephone Hour,” which warns about global warming in 1958. That’s 19-fucking-58, people. Fifty years, and long before Al Gore “invented the Internet” and his “Inconvenient Truth.” If somebody could make that warning and [...]

The detection of extra dimensions beyond the familiar four—the three dimensions of space and one of time—would be among the most earth-shattering discoveries in the history of physics. Now scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., are designing a new experiment that would investigate tantalizing hints that extra dimensions may indeed exist.
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Physically destroying the Earth is hard.
What would it take to vaporize the planet? Let’s define vaporization as blowing it up so hard that it disperses and cannot recollect due to gravity. How much energy would that take?
Think of it this way: take a rock. Throw it up so hard it escapes from the Earth. That [...]

A 16-year-old girl in Madhya Pradesh in India killed herself after watching news about the possibility of the end of the world, following the Large Hadron Collider experiment in Geneva that began on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the world is still okay in its usual fucked up way. Yes, it didn’t end.
{Photo: “Gordon Freeman” may just make your [...]

This computer simulation — presumably based on very realistic parameters — shows what happens to the planet if a 500-km asteroid fucks it up big time. Great bed time video clip for them kids to inspire them to add “Dear God, please protect our dear planet from motherfuckingly huge stones from Satan” to their bedtime [...]