Extra! Extra! The oil business is full of greedy, morally vacuous weasels who are going to destroy us all. What? You already knew? Well then, how about an account of all of the back room deals, willful and criminal ignorance of environmental consequences and the insane lengths to which people are willing to go in order not to give up the hydrocarbon dream. If that sounds like something that tickles your fancy, I highly recommend reading William Marsden’s Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesn’t Seem to Care)
. The book begins by relating the tale of Manley L. Natland and his grand scheme to extract the oil from Canada’s Oil Sands using a series of 9 Kiloton nuclear bombs detonated underground, and the hits just keep rolling from there. Marsden takes you on a journey of discovery that will haunt your dreams and fundamentally change your relationship with your car. Like a cow traveling through an abattoir, you’re stunned at the beginning, propelled through a labyrinth of atrocities only to arrive at the end and realize you’re completely screwed.
Know your enemy!
If an asteroid was on course to hit Earth, one of the best things to know, apparently, would be its composition. The strategy for dealing with it can change depending on what it’s made of. My guess is that it comes down to just how solid and strong it is, and thus how severe the measures taken have to be.
There’s an asteroid that’s a current candidate for Earth smashing, called Apophis. A roughly 0.00002% chance for a hit. In that unlikely event of a coming collision, we actually know what this one’s made of, based on meteorites similar to it that have already hit Earth. All to say, probably a false alarm. Then again, someone won the lottery today, and they had worse odds.
Read some more about it here.
I don’t like being watched. While it’s classic paranoid behaviour to think you are being watched, recent evidence has led me to think that I am, in some capacity. In bleak future world scenarios, the Big Brother scenes typically come up. Those with the means finding ways to track and watch us all, keeping tabs, keeping control… As technology advances, I like to keep an eye on who wields it most. I’m cautious, what can I say? I embrace technology, but I do fear it. Technological leaps are leaps worth making - carefully. So… what happened?
I spoke to a friend of mine recently, who told me that she had found a “siamese mushroom”. I thought that sounded kinda nifty. “Siamese mushroom.” I like to build web sites. After some good cognitive wiring, a radar now goes off in my head whenever I hear a domain-nameable phrase or expression. Siamese mushroom set off that alarm. I checked Moniker when I got home, and it was available. Hooray! I figured I’d wait a little bit and decide whether or not to buy. As with anything else, impulse is not a good reason to spend money.
Today is about a week later. I’m at work. While thinking about domain names, siamesemushroom.com popped into my head again. I realized that I liked it, and didn’t want to forget it, so I sent myself a Gmail, as I often do, for note-taking purposes. Subject heading: Domain Name Idea. Body: www.siamesemushroom.com. Maybe I’ll buy it when I get home, I thought.
I messaged my wife using MSN Messenger, asking her what she thought. She agreed that it sounded kinda funky, giving me the greenish light to go buy. Then, a couple of minutes later, she messaged me again:
“It’s a fake site. Link list.”
I checked the URL, and saw what’s there now. One of those waste of webspace piece of junk linkfarms, the scourge of any genuine domain name collector (for the record, I don’t have very many – I just appreciate, enjoy, and use them). How strange, I thought. I checked the whois info, and voilà! Bought today.
Today! Never mind the odds of searching whois info on the day a domain name is bought, but a day when I e-mailed the exact URL to myself? Memories of “Google’s getting creepy” articles flood back into consciousness. Don’t worry about the ads that pull keywords from your e-mail, they say. No one’s reading them, they say. I’m familiar enough with Google’s ad tools to know that it makes sense, but clearly this isn’t normal. I know this isn’t exactly a major incident, but it’s most certainly noteworthy.
What am I missing? Is there a hole somewhere? I’ve never searched the .com itself in Google, to avoid clicking on someone’s site and my search ending up appearing in their tracking info, just in case. Either something’s up with Moniker, MSN messenger, or Gmail (or my wife e-mailed her secret contact in the Caribbean, who bought it before I could). If this is somehow my fault, I’d like to know, and so should everyone else who operates at all like I do. I’m not suggesting that a domain name coincidence is evidence of the technologically dominant group tracking us in order to take us over and rule the planet, but I find the circumstances most certainly steps in the wrong direction. At a minimum, it’s a relevant, practical nuisance. Any thoughts? Other than that I should stop blogging and get back to work.
