NUMBER 61

A story in the Christian Science Monitor about Chhewang Norphel, a seventy-something Indian man who builds artificial glaciers.

The idea is simple: Divert the unneeded autumn and winter runoff into a series of large, rock-lined holding ponds. As the days grow colder, the ponds freeze and interconnect into a growing glacier.

h/t Kottke

Just one entry from Oscar Wilde’s 1894 list of advice for successful young people, entitled “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”.

“Thousands of Americans—hardworking ordinary Americans like you and me—already have H1N1,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said during a press conference. “Now Obama wants to take that away from us.”

Here’s how you know you’re in too deep: you find yourself nodding as Robert Coll earnestly compares Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder to Robert Mugabe:

I can hardly give up on the Redskins; but like many other oppressed peoples worldwide, I can at least fall back into exile and await regime change.

It’s a cold day in Iceland. The collapse of the krona, the country’s national currency, has led to the unthinkable: McDonald’s is pulling out.

To be fair, there are only three such establishments in the entire country. And they’ve only been there since 1993. But one can’t help but wonder if McDonald’s—paragon of globalization run amok!—has ever given up ground before.

First, two of the biggest impacts in history happened within 300,000 years of each other—a geological eyeblink. Second, they coincided with one of the largest periods of vulcanicity in the past billion years. Third, one of them just happened to strike where these volcanoes were active. Or, to put it another way, what really killed the dinosaurs was a string of the most atrocious bad luck.

Seed’s eloquent description of the Higgs boson theory for the Large Hadron Collider’s string of bad luck:

Essentially, the theory is that the Higgs is so destructive that no possible future universe of ours contains one. Thus, any effort to find the Higgs in the present is doomed to failure.

Now that’s the sort of concision I was looking for the first time.

In the October issue of Scientific American, noted physicist Lawrence Krauss delivers a serious blow to Trekkies and rocket jockeys everywhere: we should probably stop shooting people into space.

The mayor of Moscow wants to take a proactive approach to snow removal.

The plan, unveiled last month, calls for shooting liquid nitrogen, silver or cement particles into oncoming storm clouds to dump the snow before it gets to the city.

Hm. Sounds just crazy enough to work destroy the Earth.

Chuck Klosterman does a short interview on the subject of interviews for the Washington Post’s Short Stack Blog.

The short, accident-marred life of the Large Hadron Collider has some physicists suggesting a real humdinger of an explanation: the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that scientists are hoping to produce with the collider’s help, is “so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”

How many Americans watch cable news channels like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News?

Fewer than 1%—on a good day.