In this week's LA CityBeat, I have a new media column about all the screens one, in theory, needs to handle all the stuff that's coming at you whether you like it or not.
"As droughts reach record levels from Atlanta to Australia, no one is asking the tough question: What happens when there is not enough water to go around?"
Thus read the subhead on the Alternet story forwarded by Iggymak, and after that the examples abounded, as in...
"Over the last decade, 15 to 20 percent decreases in precipitation have been recorded. These water losses have been accompanied by record temperatures and increasing wildfires in areas where populations have been growing rapidly. A fierce drought has settled in -- of the hundred-year variety. Lawns can be watered but just for a few hours a day (and only by bucket); four-minute showers are the max allowed. Car washes are gone, though you can clean absolutely essential car windows and mirrors by hand."
Click here for the whole story, but it always struck me that water crisis might even break up nations. A terrible future crunch could come in the US South West where two expanding cities – Los Angeles and Las Vegas – occupy approximately the same desert and depend on common water sources. I may not live to see a favorite paranoid fantasy -- nuclear war over water between California and Nevada -- but that's not to say it couldn’t happen around 2040.
The secret word is Evian
CRYPTIQUE – Fish fuck in it.
UK Steve sent us this quite mind boggling story from Wired. (And wouldn’t you just love to have that lab in which to play?
Lene Vestergaard Hau can stop a pulse of light in midflight, start it up again at 0.13 miles per hour, and then make it appear in a completely different location. "It's like a little magic trick," says Hau, a Harvard physicist. "Of course, in all magic tricks there's a secret." And her secret is a 0.1-mm lump of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate, cooled nearly to absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a steel container with tiny windows. Normally — well, in a vacuum — light goes 186,282 miles per second. But things are different inside a BEC, a strange place where millions of atoms move — barely — in quantum lockstep. About a decade ago, Hau started playing with BECs — for a physicist, that means shooting lasers at them. She blew up a few. Eventually, she found that lasers of the right wavelengths could tune the optical properties of a BEC, giving Hau an almost supernatural command over any other light shined into it. Her first trick was slowing a pulse of light to a crawl — 15 mph as it traveled through the BEC. Since then, Hau has completely frozen a pulse and then released it. And recently she shot a pulse into one BEC and stopped it — turning the BEC into a hologram, a sort of matter version of the pulse. Then she transferred that matter waveform into an entirely different BEC nearby — which emitted the original light pulse. That's just freaky. Hey, Einstein may have set that initial speed limit of light, but he only theorized about BECs. "It's not breaking relativity," Hau says. "But I'm sure he would have been rather surprised."
And while in a science mode here is a funny but damning video on Windows Vista
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