Doomsayer’s Breakfast

Last week, Ben McGrath’s article [abstract] in The New Yorker detailed how people who live life with glasses half-empty hold greater sway, captivate larger audiences, and seem to just generally ooze from the woodwork more often during times of social, political, religious, or economic crisis.

Well, here’s a doomsday scenario to cling to:  The New York Times published findings this morning that warn that anything less than lifestyle-changing reductions in carbon emissions, reductions that don’t have feasible technical solutions yet, will lead to an unstoppable feedback loop of climate change.  Scientists speculate that, because of the long-term nature of carbon dioxide’s residence in the bio-systems that drive climate, once the feedback loop starts, it may not shut off for 1000 years.

President Barack Obama seems, even if he didn’t read the article, to get the skinny of the problem.  In a statement today:

These urgent dangers to our national and economic security are compounded by the long-term threat of climate change, which if left unchecked could result in violent conflict, terrible storms, shrinking coastlines and irreversible catastrophe.  These are the facts and they are well known to the American people — after all, there is nothing new about these warnings.  Presidents have been sounding the alarm about energy dependence for decades.  President Nixon promised to make our energy — our nation energy independent by the end of the 1970s.  When he spoke, we imported about a third of our oil; we now import more than half.

Here’s the executive plan, as of this morning, January 27th in the year of 2009.

1. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan will provide infrastructure funding to maximize energy effeciency in government buildings, as well as for weatherizing 2 million homes.
2. Place new fuel efficiency standards to raise current levels to 35 mpg by 2011.
3. Attempting to allow states (California) to set fuel efficiency standards of their own, as long as they are above the national level, which was rejected by the Bush administration.

Paul Krugman, also writing in the New York Times, has argued that the Obama administration needs to hit the economic crisis hard, fast, and precisely, and apparently the same is true of the climate issue.  That is, if scientists and post-apocalyptic prophesiers are saying the same things in different tongues.

Science Fiction Refugee Future

Amanda had been reading Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide for a while and I was feeling some Ender-envy, so I decided to gradually re-read the Ender’s Shadow series, which focuses on another Battle School attendee, Bean.  Just last night I finished the first book in a fit of temporary insomnia.  I was intrigued by a seemingly minor detail, but one that undergirds the entire first section of the novel: that the Netherlands has become international territory and is essentially a dumping ground for the world’s refugees.  It is important to note a few contextual points that support this territorial restructuring.  Importantly, an invasion of hive-swarming, insectoid aliens has attacked earth and nominally united the world’s governments.  Also, the invasion has killed over 100 million and displaced many more.  Not only is the story set in the semi-distant future, but the cataclysmic attack has unnaturally increased the number of refugees.

Anyhow, bring on the unbridled thought experiment: what would happen to the Netherlands if it were set up as international territory in the present day, and the world’s refugees were sent there to be protected?

In 2008, the Netherlands was home to approximately 16 1/2 million people, whereas, according to National Geographic, the world hosts 35 million refugees.  In Ender’s Shadow, Card never explicitly shares whether the original Dutch inhabitants stay in the Netherlands or are transported out of the country.  Let’s assume that they stay, due to the fact that the public services and commercial sector would not only need to stay running, but would also need to be ramped up.  Also, in the novel, while a language called IF Common has become the spoken tongue, Dutch is widely used and a first language for many.  Someone needed to stay to teach everyone Dutch.  So, in our hypothetical post-invasion Netherlands, the population would rise to 51 1/2 million residents in an unprecedented amount of time.

According to the 2008 population statistics, the Dutch average a population density of 396 people per square kilometer.  If the population rose, due to the incoming refugees, to 51 1/2 million, the new population density would exceed 1,200 residents per square kilometer.  For the purpose of scale, Minnesota is more than 5 times the size the Netherlands, but Minnesota’s density is 25/sq. km., less than 1/5 that of the Netherlands.  The density of Minneapolis is 2,595/sq. km., Rotterdam, a large city in the Netherlands as well as the setting of the early chapters of Ender’s Shadow, packs 2,850 people into each square kilometer.

Many of the refugees, I assume, would make their home in the larger cities, such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam.  The cities would be certainly ill-equipped for such a migration, but much less so than the suburbs and rural areas of the country.  I also assume that population growth would outpace development greatly, and the density of large cities would double, at least.  Rotterdam would become a hub of wanderers as dense as Rio de Janeiro (5,212/km. sq.), nestled in the bosom of Western Europe.   However, in the Ender-series, the invasion occurs at a point in the future when the invasion could be countered (respectably) quickly with a pan-galaxy war-fleet, and it must be assumed that the world’s population would not only be greater, but the number of refugees created by devastation would be exponentially greater.  Perhaps in the contextual framework of the Ender series, Rotterdam has become like modern-day Mumbai, with a population density of 22,658/sq. km.

NOTE: All assumptions are made without any formal training in population statistics or demographics.  Sorry.

Bedroom Updates

Thanks to Slog and io9 for reporting on the new “gamechanger”, truly the WMD of the sextoy industry, the RealTouch (not work safe).

According to the RealTouch website, the toy has five main internal components.

1. “A lifelike orifice that “tightens and squeezes to feel like actual penetration”
2. “Dual belt drives” that “simulate a wide variety of sexual positions”
3. A “lube reservoir” that “generates natural levels of wetness”
4. A “heating element” that “warms to actual human body temperature”
5. And finally, “servo motors” that “control precise belt movements for optimal pleasure”

In addition, the RealTouch can be plugged into your laptop or PC with a USB cable and synchronized with a number of company provided videos, and the toy will mimic the movements of the actor or actress (the videos are POV and available for both gay and straight men).  For all practical purposes we have reached virtual reality.  I wonder if the RealTouch can sense when the man orgasms, and whether or not the video will be cued up to respond accordingly?  If not, I’m sure they’re working on it for ver. 2.0.

In other news: alongside every other sector of the economy, Larry Flynt and the porn industry have called for an economic bailout of $5 billion.  Just as the American auto industry has been urged to pursue hybrid-electric technology, perhaps the people at Hustler could invest their stimulated package in technology like RealTouch . . . to bring the technology to every average Joe the Masturbator, at less than the $149.99 retail price asked by RealTouch (that doesn’t include the cost of purchasing the interactive videos).  Also, the female equivalent could probably be developed and sold.

Web 2.?

Two unique additions to the ever-inspiring user-generated World Wide Web 2.0.

1) Cell-phone novels:

In the winter fiction issue of The New Yorker magazine, Dana Goodyear writes about a hot trend in the Japanese publishing industry: cell-phone novels.   This is a medium largely created by pseudonymous, young Japanese girls and the end result is somewhere in between LOLcats syntax and community-theatre-Juliet-drama; albeit typically drawn from a nearly silenced group of people and often rooted in heart-breaking experience.  Don’t worry, however, Quillpill and Textnovel will provide the same service to creative would-be American novelists, 140 characters at a time.

EDIT: As commented by Stan Soper, the founder of the Textnovel website, submissions can be as long as you would like if you choose to update your novel with an MMS-equipped phone, with e-mail, or just through your web-browser.

This is an excerpt from a cell-phone story written by Ramsey called “The Dark Side of Love”, filed within the category ‘romance’:

Lying on the sofa and surfing through the channels she had no real interest in, Lauren finally let herself think what it wanted to think.

So she had behaved badly, abominably. She wasn’t proud of herself but it seemed that every time she had an encounter with her father and his family this evil streak in her couldn’t seem to contain itself. It just wanted to lash out and hurt them like that had hurt her.

Closing her eyes a single tear leaked out. She hugged the pillow tightly and squeezed back the rest of the tear.

She would not cry! She-would-not-cry!

So caught up in her own reverie Lauren didn’t hear the phone ringing until it started to ring the second time. She took a moment to gather herself before went to answer it.

She heard Professor Curtin on the other side. “Hello, Professor,” she said.

“Lauren, I have bad news,” said Curtin brusquely.

“What’s it?” Her tone turned sharp by the amount of stress she was under lately and the abruptness of his voice.

“The Board has decided to stop funding our project now.”

“What? Why?” Lauren was thrown into bewilderment. How could this happen after what they had just discovered? She said so to the professor and heard him took a deep sigh.

Unfortunately, the project is yet unfinished and we, the nail-biting audience, do not discover what Lauren does about her lack of funding or what sexual positions the Professor prefers.

2) Oh Jesus

So when I was at Karl and Asta’s on Friday night we happened across the AFI website, only to find a contest for fans to win a chance for practicallylikestardom.  Favorites:

“German is another one of those big things in my life.”  Also, check out the wicked ollie.

“College is way better than high school . . . and middle school.”