Feel free to smash up a grey Ford ute with plain metal tray and rego PTX 820 if you see it, especially if there's a fucked up looking hick with long dark hair and facial hair driving it.

Yeah so that was screwed up, you guys can read my police statement for the rest of the story. Bascially I got attacked while in my car, some psycho punched in my window and started laying into me. There were witnesses and stuff so hopefully the fucker goes to prison and pays for my window. I'm not seriously hurt so don't worry, but yeah I can't be held responsible for my actions if I find that guy. Watch it if you see him though, he's a psycho most likely on drugs.

Peak Oil and the Future of Humanity

I was considering making an essay out of this, maybe I will later, but for now I'll just talk about it here.
So peak oil is coming, that's a certainty, and probably reasonably soon. At this time the global amount of oil left in the ground will have passed halfway and it will start to be harder to extract. As it becomes more difficult to extract, even though we'll have a lot left in total, production will decrease and we will start to experience a shortfall between global oil production and demand. A shortfall of around 5% in the 70's caused oil prices to quadruple. Our problem will not be temporary and will in fact become steadily worse as production slowly dies off. Pretty much all the experts agree on this much.
Now enough of the background info. The thing I find much more concerning than the fact that our entire society may collapse around us is the fact that it would probably never recover, or at least we would never again reach our current level of technology. It seems highly unlikely that we would ever again reach into space and have a chance of exploringing the universe. We would be trapped forever on our lonely planet in a vast cosmos.
The amount of oil it takes to lift a spacecraft into orbit is fairly gigantic, though I'm sure it's only a tiny fraction of the total usage. Clearly we can't do things this way forever, but for now it's all we have and if oil-driven society collapses before we figure out another way to do it then it seems to me that we would never again have the resources to produce such sophisticated pieces of technology as would surely be involved.
Lets just hope somebody can think of a global energy solution that can be implemented in time to save us from this fate. Too bad the world hasn't managed to unite by now, if we had we could implement draconian measures to quash all unnessecary oil usage and give ourselves a bit more time. There aren't really any solutions at the moment, biofuels, solar, wind etc. don't have anything like the energy output required, and take so much oil to construct and implement that the energy returns are fairly minimal anyway. Nuclear may help for a while but again it takes plenty of oil to build nuclear power plants and mine and refine uranium. Also that'd only be temporary, having enough power plants to power the world and all the machinery required to support itself without oil (electric bulldozers and mining machines?) would start to drain uranium deposits just like any other natural resource and leave us with enormous amounts of radioactive waste.
I guess with more development biofuels are the way to go, supposedly the CO2 produced on burning them is counteracted by the CO2 absorbed by the plants from which they are produced as they grow. We'd need a total fuckload of biofuel plants though.
Fusion would be nice if it worked. Solve just about everything.
So the world will go on burning many millions of barrels of oil every day because we don't know what else to do. We waste so much of it too, no-one lives near where they work, we move a tonne or so of metal around along with one person to get places, we cut down trees in tasmania, ship them to china where they make paper that gets shipped back here...
The commercial world must be rather screwed up for such things to be the cheapest options.
I don't want my descendants to be stuck on this planet forever.

...and the siiiiign saaaaid long haired freaky people, need not apply...

Check out this flower that was on the main english wikipedia page, it's pretty cool:



"A Dietes grandiflora, a plant in the Iridaceae family native to South Africa, but commonly cultivated around the world. Flowers in the Dietes genus differ from irises in having flowers with six free petals that are not joined into a tube at their bases.

Photo credit: Heath McKinley"
(Source: Wikipedia)

Essays

I think I might make another blog on which I will write assorted essays as the mood strikes me. Sometimes it's just good to consider some of the deeper issues of life in formal writing (or at least semi-formal). I consider these things often enough but it's difficult to get far since the mind wanders off when things get complicated, and also you end up thinking of the same thing lots of times because you forget about your previous ponderings. Plus essays would be a good record for the future and just a good read. You know, when you're old or dead then people can read back and learn from the things you've thought about. Or other people right now.
In any case I don't think such things are appropriate for this blog, they'd just take up a lot of space and be hard to find later.
Anyway I plan to discuss such things as:
- The people born blind and disabled known as "musical savants". I saw the thing they had on 60 minutes today about it and as a musician I assure you that the things these people can do are absolutely amazing, and they can't even pee by themselves. Actually it's more than just musical:
"The estimated prevalence of savant abilities in autism is 10%, whereas the prevalence in the non-autistic population, including those with mental retardation, is less than 1%." (http://www.autism.org/savant.html)
I find the mathematical case particularly amazing also, how they can multiple large numbers in their heads, figure out the day of the week of any date you give them and find prime numbers and square roots in seconds. Raises interesting questions about the untapped power of the human mind, doesn't it?
- The human soul, spirit and conciousness.
- Life, the universe and everything.
Hopefully I manage to find time to write about these things. It would be a shame not to.

edit: There are some really interesting articles on wikipedia about savants, in particular it is mentioned that at the University of Sydney researchers believe that they have stimulated savant-like abilities in test subjects by magnetically stimulating parts of the brain. (http://www.centreforthemind.com/whoweare/index.cfm)
That'd really be something amazing if they manage to prove that such abilities lie latent in all of us, but are "blocked" by our ordinary brain functions.
It may seem like now is a pretty boring time to live in, but really there are things that could happen in our lifetimes which will leave this world a very different place. Not all of these things are good, but some could shed light on the deepest mysteries of our existence.