harmonicminer

It can be really, really dangerous to be an investigative journalist, investigating what Congress-critters are doing behind closed doors.

So, last week at my university, we had a drill.

The alarms blared, and the entire campus had to evacuate every building on campus and make for the parking lots.  In my group, we were told to make for the sidewalk on one side of the parking lot.

I’m trying to figure out what we were practicing to avoid.

If there was a fire, it would probably affect only one building, not the entire campus.  It’s a big campus.  I don’t think there’d be any reason for us to empty all the buildings, and just make it that much harder for the firetrucks to get where they needed to go.

If there was a sniper or active shooter, running for the outside would seem to make us better targets.  I think I’d rather lock my office door (which is heavy, metal, and thick) and take my chances.

If there was an earthquake, current doctrine taught by the experts is to get UNDER something substantial in the first three seconds, but not to try to run down halls and stairways, get into elevators, etc.  Besides…  would we go stand under power poles on the street when the quake and aftershocks were still happening, or might start again?

If there was a bomb threat for a building… well, I don’t know, but it seems to me that a bomber who really intended to do evil would threaten a particular building, then blow up a car bomb in the parking lot next to it, as soon as the building’s occupants had left the building…  for the parking lot.  Same thing applies if a building WAS blown up on campus…  smart killers will rig a few cars to go about five minutes later.    Sounds grim, I know…  but exactly that has been done in Israel, where bombs have been rigged to detonate within a few minutes of a first explosion, to kill emergency responders, people who think they’re safe now, the inevitable crowd of onlookers, etc.

Gas attack?  Hmmm..   I don’t see how the bad guys get every building on campus that way….  so if some building is attacked that way, as long as it isn’t mine, I’m not sure I think it makes sense to run for the parking lots.  If we’re under serious attack, the same logic applies as above…  gas attack a building, then blow up a few cars in parking lots a few minutes later.

So, I think I’ve decided.  If the balloon goes up again, I’m not heading down the stairs for the sidewalk by the parking lot under the power poles with the rest of the sheep.

I’m going across the street to Jack-in-the-Box, and order a Southwestern Grilled Chicken Salad.  I’ll be safe there, because Jack already blew up Jack-in-the-Box.  I saw it on TV years ago.  I don’t think he’d do it again.  And the terrorists sure won’t, since according to the FDA all that fast food is killing us anyway.  Why interrupt the punishment Allah has ordained for gluttonous Americans?  And let’s not even start talking about poison gas…

Or maybe I’ll just start telecommuting.  But maybe I’ll update Skype first.

Call this one a guilty pleasure.

Some serious physicists think they have good ideas about how to build interstellar spacecraft based on Dark power: Grand designs for interstellar travel

In August, physicist Jia Liu at New York University outlined his design for a spacecraft powered by dark matter (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1429v1). Soon afterwards, mathematicians Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland at Kansas State University in Manhattan proposed plans for a craft powered by an artificial black hole (arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803).

No one disputes that building a ship powered by black holes or dark matter would be a formidable task. Yet remarkably there seems to be nothing in our present understanding of physics to prevent us from making either of them.

Of course, there is the whole issue of Galactic cooling to be considered.  It seems that the galaxy may be heading into an ice age, and if we use up all our energy driving space craft all over the place, what will we have left to heat the planets?  The Greenland permafrost will get even frostier.  They’ll probably open a Wendy’s.

Anyway, if they do start steaming around the universe in black hole driven starships, they’d better be careful not to drive right off the edge of everything into another universe.  There might be monsters there.  Or even worse, environmentalists.  You know how that will go…  they’ll start berating us for using up non-renewable resources like black holes and dark matter.

Then somebody will make a movie about the heat-death of the multi-verse and terrify everyone at the Intergalactic Preservation Cosmological Commission, and before you know it, someone will want to tax black hole harvesting.

And that will only be the beginning.

It appears that our sister galaxy, Andromeda, has been eating the Local Group out of house and and home.

Our nearest major galactic neighbor is a cosmic cannibal. And it’s heading this way eventually. Astronomers have long suspected Andromeda of being a space predator, consuming dwarf galaxies that wander too close. Now, cosmic detectives are doing a massive search of the neighborhood and have found proof of Andromeda’s sordid past: They’ve spotted leftovers in Andromeda’s wake.

Early results of a massive telescope scan of Andromeda and its surroundings found about half a dozen remnants of Andromeda’s galactic appetite. Stars and dwarf galaxies that got too close to Andromeda were ripped from their usual surroundings.

“What we’re seeing right now are the signs of cannibalism,” said study lead author Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. “We’re finding things that have been destroyed … partly digested remains.”

Maybe, by the time Andromeda shows up at the Milky Way’s doorstep for dinner, the Solar System will have managed to sneak out for a smoke or something, and can stay off the menu.

Maybe we can get Al Gore to establish a NASA study group to figure out what capitalism has been doing wrong that has left Andromeda so hungry.