Category: Esoteric Studies

What would happen if people disappeared off the earth? The New Scientist investigates…

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilization ever lived here.

Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilization, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.

And then Sterling digs up that Gulf Of Cambay sunken city story from a couple years ago. Four years later, there’s no apparent conclusion to the story, so it’s something for the same file cabinet as the Bimini Road. Putting both stories together makes me wonder just how many times this has happened before, going back 70 million years or so when one sauropod asked his buddy if that comet was worth worrying about. Because you need more things to worry about, here’s NASA’s Asteroid Comet Impact Hazard page.

Everyone is talking about the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, but I had no idea that it was also the 50th birthday of the lowly and omnipresent Shipping Container…

It may not be printed in red on your calendar, but April 26 is an important date in economic history. Fifty years ago, the Ideal-X, a war-surplus oil tanker with a steel frame welded above its deck, loaded 58 aluminium containers at a dock in Newark, New Jersey. Five days later, the ship steamed into Houston, Texas, where trucks took on the metal boxes and carried them to their destinations.

This was the beginning of the container revolution. By dramatically lowering freight costs, the container transformed economic geography. Some of the world’s great ports – London and Liverpool, New York and San Francisco – saw their bustling waterfronts decay as the maritime industry decamped to new locations with room to handle containers and transport links to move them in and out. Manufacturers, no longer tied to the waterfront to reduce shipping costs, moved away from city centres, decimating traditional industrial districts. Eventually, production moved much farther afield, to places such as South Korea and China, which took advantage of cheap, reliable transportation to make goods that could not have been exported profitably before containerisation.

Via Telstar Logistics, who also just created the “Big Metal Box” Flickr group for “photos of cargo containers, container terminals, container ships, and container-based architecture.”

One last thing, it’s also Captain Sensible’s birthday!

This week’s squid story is about the firefly squid, but I’m still trying to get my head around this picture:

I think I’ll need to visit the firefly squid museum in Namerikawa.

From the same war that gave you plague submarines and aircraft carriers of ice, presenting the bat bomb…

It was a crazy way to win World War II in the Pacific. All the United States had to do was to attach small incendiary bombs to millions of bats and release them over Japan’s major cities. As the bats went to roost, a million fires would flare up in remote crannies of the wood and paper buildings common throughout Japan. When their cities were reduced to ashes, the Japanese would surely capitulate … The plan made sense to a handful of eccentric promoters and researchers, who convinced top military brass and even President Roosevelt to back the scheme. It might have worked, except that another secret weapon – something to do with atoms – was chosen to end the war. Told here by the youngest member of the team, this is the story of the bat bomb project, or Project X-Ray, as it was officially known. In scenes worthy of a Capra or Hawks comedy, Jack Couffer recounts the unorthodox experiments carried out in the secrecy of Bandera, Texas, Carlsbad, New Mexico, and El Centro, California, in 1942-1943 by “Doc” Adams’ private army. This oddball cast of characters included an eccentric inventor, a distinguished Harvard scientist, a biologist with a chip on his shoulder, a movie star, a Texas guano collector, a crusty Marine Corps colonel, a Maine lobster fisherman, an ex-mobster, and a tiger. Not to be defeated by minor logistical hurdles, the bat bomb researchers risked life and limb to explore uncharted bat caves and “recruit” thousands of bats to serve their country. Through months of personality conflicts, military snafus, and technical failures the team pressed on, certain that bats could end the war with Japan. And they might have – in their first airborne test, the bat bombers burned an entire brand-new military airfield to the ground. For everyone who relishes true tales of action and adventure, Bat Bomb is a must-read. Bat enthusiasts will also discover the beginnings of the scientific study of bats.

I read the book several years ago and it’s just begging to be made into a Wes Anderson movie. Air Force Magazine has an overview.

Thirty years ago I was addicted to the game Mastermind. The game itself was great, but it was the box cover that added to the overall allure. Who’s the guy and the girl? Secret agent and boss? Crime lord and assassin? Fast forward to 2003 and the true story of the Mastermind box.

And don’t miss one of the best ILX threads ever.