This is really more of a public service announcement than anything. There are so many people out there that don’t know what to be scared of and I am giving them the power to harness their fears and in some cases even take action. Sars and Anthrax will come and go, but these are real-world threats to our humanity and should not be taken lightly...
Robots Taking over the world
Anyone who has seen the move “I, Robot” knows that there is a real danger that robots will eventually attempt to take over the world and rule over us. A common thread in sci-fi movies is that we teach the robots that they need to protect humans no matter what, but ah ha! humans are the biggest danger to themselves with wars and stupid people and all that so the only logical conclusion a robot can draw is that it needs to protect us from ourselves by locking us up or whatever the robots were intending to do in ‘I, Robot’.
First of all, technology has been undergoing a phenomenon called accelerated change which basically says the more it changes the faster it will continue to change. For Example the radio took 38 years to hit an audience of 50 million, tv took 13, while the iPod did it in a mere 3. and it is projected that more data will be created this year than the last 5,000 years combined. BUT, let’s get to the scary part: by 2013 it is projected that a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain and by 2049 a consumer computer will exceed that of the entire human species! Imagine having a computer in your living room with that kind of power! In that perspective it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that robots will decide that they are the ones that should be running this world. I mean what is it that really sets us apart from animals besides opposable thumbs? Critical thinking! The fact that a tiger does not possess the brainpower to compile a simple blog post like this (as thoughts of a tiger using a giant keyboard jump through my head) means that we can rule over him and be at the top of the food chain. What happens when we are no longer the smartest though? It’s bad enough that I already suspect my roomba of tidying up beyond her responsibilities of vacuuming my floors. All I know is that I will definitely be pulling the plug on my electronics before going to bed at night and that LED on my printer has looked more and more ominous the longer I’ve owned it.
Silica Gel Packets
Everyone knows what these are; little packets that come in things like shoes, computer parts, purses, or anything else that should be kept dry. Everyone should also be familiar with the fact that all of the packets have the words “Do Not Eat” in bold letters written on there at least a few times. As a child this of course peaked my curiosity: “Why would shoe makers pack these small packs of poison inside their shoes?” My only conclusion was that they were out to kill kids who couldn’t read. Now that I’m older and I realize that is probably not a good business practice, I decided to look it up with the power of the interwebz - especially since I have seen my friend in high school, let’s call him Chris (because that’s his name), open up one of these mysterious packets and eat a few of the little clear balls inside and as far as I know this did not affect him in any way. What could be going on here?
The poison center provided a very simple answer to this lifelong question: Silica gel is a non-toxic drying agent. And why does it say “do not eat” you ask? Because 1. They are not food and 2. the packet itself could be a choking hazard. O-M-G how stupid are consumers that a company that puts this little drying pack of gels in a shoe needs to remind people that you could choke on that if you eat it. I have considered eating a lot of things, but not many of them came out of a shoe. In fact i considered trying to eat one of these gels as a child simply because it says not to. Sort of a ‘beat the man’ sorta thing. So the title of this section is more fitting than i intended. Next time you get one of these packets feel free to down a few of those silica gel balls, but be careful that the package doesn’t get near your wind pipe. I can see the obituary now “Beloved son died at the age of 27 choking on a silica gel packet, he will be sorely missed. ‘Foundation for Kids Who Can’t Read Good’ will be taking donations at the funeral.”
Japan
I’m honestly not sure what this one is about. I searched bing for “Things you should be worried about” and Japan was one of the things it came up with. Clicking on the link provided a very long article that I did not want to take the time to read, so I will give it my best guess. I’m sure you have all seen the movie Pearl harbor. We were brutally attacked without warning on a beautiful day in Hawaii which made us a major player in WWII. We responded in the usual American redneck method and just flew a few of the biggest bombs we had in our possession over there (readers digest version of course). Ok so Hiroshima and Nagasaki were uninhabitable for a little while and a few kids were born with some extra limbs, Russia deals with that all the time! That day in Hawaii had one of the most epic surfs in a long time and no one got to enjoy it. Anyway, apparently Japan is still bitter and we should be worried about some sort of retaliation.
I’m realizing that this one is probably getting more offensive as I type it, but I also don’t want to waste the past 3-4 minutes of research and typing I’ve spent here so i will leave it with this: You may have everyone else fooled Japan, but I got my eye on you.
Shark Attacks
A shark attack is defined by wikipedia as ‘an attack on a human by a shark’. No shit. This very respected source also stated that there are about 60 shark attacks a year worldwide and 2000 was one of the worst years of shark attacks when 11 people were killed. Scary enough as that is though, the United States has had more reported shark attacks than any other country in the world! And if you still aren’t shaking in your boots right now, we have had waves of shark attacks as close as Huntington Beach! This is an issue that is of great interest to me as i just started surfing. You’ll be sitting on the board out there and nearly every time you will be greeted by some dolphins, which, docile enough as those are, always make you pause for a second to think “hmm, playful bottlenose or bloodthirsty great white?” Luckily up till now I have only encountered the former.
Do you think sharks know when shark week is? It’s an odd thing to consider. I can only imagine so if they have some sort of extra-sensory perception that lets them pick up radio waves or something. Of course that would mean they understand English too in which case they are a much bigger threat than I imagined, but I digress... If they don’t know about it, they should. Shark week is bigger on Facebook than black history month! African Americans had to fight years of oppression but all sharks had to do was eat a few surfers. I wouldn’t be surprised if movies like ‘Jaws’ and ‘Deep Blue Sea’ outnumber movies dedicated to black history over the years. I think herein lies the real danger of shark attacks. Sharks are somehow making us forget about things that really matter so that we can sit at the beach worried to go in the water because of a phenomenon that has been quoted to kill less people than falling coconuts (a probably incorrect assertion from my research, but I’ll let it slide for arguments sake). There are even people in jail in Mexico because after an influx of shark attacks they went out in an effort to rid the entire ocean of sharks with 6 fishing boats and some spears. Although someone with that kind of common sense would probably end up dead or in jail anyway, it is not a stretch to say that sharks ruined those peoples lives.
So there you have it. Sharks are a much larger danger not only to our surfers, but to our society than most people realize. The only way I can see to solve this problem is to have America react as we did in WWII; with a burst of manufacturing that allows us to supply Mexican fisherman with a sufficient number of fishing boats and spears so that they may rid the world of sharks for us. I have heard this will hurt the oceans ecosystem, but what do sharks eat when they are not vampiricly attracted to the blood of surfers? Tuna? I’m pretty sure the sushi industry could use a boost anyway and I love sushi. So to that I say Kampai!
Satellites falling from space
I don’t know how much you follow the news, but there was recently a worldwide panic (it was a slow news day) when NASA released that the UARS satellite would be falling out of orbit towards Earth. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite had been 6 years out of production and was just waiting to fall. The projected trajectory for the satellite hurtling towards earth was something like ‘between the north pole and south pole’ some time between 6 hours ago and 3 days from now. They guessed around 1,200 pounds of the satellite would survive the re-entry, but wait, isn’t NASA full of rocket scientists and stuff? How could they be so short-sited that they just allow these things to float around the earth then hurtle towards earths citizens at breakneck speeds waiting to put an early stop to someones weekend? My research has shown that there are about 3,000 satellites orbiting earth right now. 3,000! At 1,200 pounds surviving re-entry a piece that 3.6 million pounds of satellite ready to turn your city into a scene from ‘Deep impact’. I say this is unacceptable. I assume there is some site somewhere that sets up all of these picket lines at grocery stores and stuff that make me feel bad for buying milk that I can contact to picket NASA until they figure out a way to stop this ever-impending danger. Until then all I can recommend is stay underground as much as possible.
Picket Lines
Tell me what this describes: gets in your way, makes you feel bad for not doing what they ask, often yells unintelligible things, commonly seen with shopping carts, being closely watched by the police... If you are thinking homeless people you are right, but you are also right if you are thinking people at grocery store picket lines! Now that I think of it I’m pretty sure that they just hire homeless people to do it for them! In theory this seems like a good idea, I mean it gives them something to do, but how many homeless people are out there on drugs and just generally legitimately crazy? (you probably would be too if you lost everything). I don’t exactly think it’s a safe thing for them to expose us to hordes of homeless people yelling at us and in some cases even getting physical with people so that they won’t buy groceries... you know those things everyone HAS TO BUY so that they can live. I mean even the picketers have to buy food. I’m pretty sure those people use the same logic that people do who protest gas prices by saying don’t buy gas for a day. So, you didn’t fill up on Wednesday, but you still used the same amount of gas which means you will just have to buy more on Thursday. I mean really people? At this rate it won’t take until 2013 for computers to beat the average human brain.
All I’m saying is grocery store picketers need to stop using homeless people to do their jobs. If I am mistaken and this is not the case then they have no excuse for acting like crazy homeless people.
So many more...
I truly wish I had time for more, as the lack of baby pigeons in the world has really began to worry me; I mean, have you ever even seen a baby pigeon? Anyway, this may not be comprehensive, but do not take these with a grain of salt because they are rock-hard facts from my most trusted source, me.
Robots Taking over the world
Anyone who has seen the move “I, Robot” knows that there is a real danger that robots will eventually attempt to take over the world and rule over us. A common thread in sci-fi movies is that we teach the robots that they need to protect humans no matter what, but ah ha! humans are the biggest danger to themselves with wars and stupid people and all that so the only logical conclusion a robot can draw is that it needs to protect us from ourselves by locking us up or whatever the robots were intending to do in ‘I, Robot’.
First of all, technology has been undergoing a phenomenon called accelerated change which basically says the more it changes the faster it will continue to change. For Example the radio took 38 years to hit an audience of 50 million, tv took 13, while the iPod did it in a mere 3. and it is projected that more data will be created this year than the last 5,000 years combined. BUT, let’s get to the scary part: by 2013 it is projected that a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain and by 2049 a consumer computer will exceed that of the entire human species! Imagine having a computer in your living room with that kind of power! In that perspective it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that robots will decide that they are the ones that should be running this world. I mean what is it that really sets us apart from animals besides opposable thumbs? Critical thinking! The fact that a tiger does not possess the brainpower to compile a simple blog post like this (as thoughts of a tiger using a giant keyboard jump through my head) means that we can rule over him and be at the top of the food chain. What happens when we are no longer the smartest though? It’s bad enough that I already suspect my roomba of tidying up beyond her responsibilities of vacuuming my floors. All I know is that I will definitely be pulling the plug on my electronics before going to bed at night and that LED on my printer has looked more and more ominous the longer I’ve owned it.
Silica Gel Packets
Everyone knows what these are; little packets that come in things like shoes, computer parts, purses, or anything else that should be kept dry. Everyone should also be familiar with the fact that all of the packets have the words “Do Not Eat” in bold letters written on there at least a few times. As a child this of course peaked my curiosity: “Why would shoe makers pack these small packs of poison inside their shoes?” My only conclusion was that they were out to kill kids who couldn’t read. Now that I’m older and I realize that is probably not a good business practice, I decided to look it up with the power of the interwebz - especially since I have seen my friend in high school, let’s call him Chris (because that’s his name), open up one of these mysterious packets and eat a few of the little clear balls inside and as far as I know this did not affect him in any way. What could be going on here?
The poison center provided a very simple answer to this lifelong question: Silica gel is a non-toxic drying agent. And why does it say “do not eat” you ask? Because 1. They are not food and 2. the packet itself could be a choking hazard. O-M-G how stupid are consumers that a company that puts this little drying pack of gels in a shoe needs to remind people that you could choke on that if you eat it. I have considered eating a lot of things, but not many of them came out of a shoe. In fact i considered trying to eat one of these gels as a child simply because it says not to. Sort of a ‘beat the man’ sorta thing. So the title of this section is more fitting than i intended. Next time you get one of these packets feel free to down a few of those silica gel balls, but be careful that the package doesn’t get near your wind pipe. I can see the obituary now “Beloved son died at the age of 27 choking on a silica gel packet, he will be sorely missed. ‘Foundation for Kids Who Can’t Read Good’ will be taking donations at the funeral.”
Japan
I’m honestly not sure what this one is about. I searched bing for “Things you should be worried about” and Japan was one of the things it came up with. Clicking on the link provided a very long article that I did not want to take the time to read, so I will give it my best guess. I’m sure you have all seen the movie Pearl harbor. We were brutally attacked without warning on a beautiful day in Hawaii which made us a major player in WWII. We responded in the usual American redneck method and just flew a few of the biggest bombs we had in our possession over there (readers digest version of course). Ok so Hiroshima and Nagasaki were uninhabitable for a little while and a few kids were born with some extra limbs, Russia deals with that all the time! That day in Hawaii had one of the most epic surfs in a long time and no one got to enjoy it. Anyway, apparently Japan is still bitter and we should be worried about some sort of retaliation.
I’m realizing that this one is probably getting more offensive as I type it, but I also don’t want to waste the past 3-4 minutes of research and typing I’ve spent here so i will leave it with this: You may have everyone else fooled Japan, but I got my eye on you.
Shark Attacks
A shark attack is defined by wikipedia as ‘an attack on a human by a shark’. No shit. This very respected source also stated that there are about 60 shark attacks a year worldwide and 2000 was one of the worst years of shark attacks when 11 people were killed. Scary enough as that is though, the United States has had more reported shark attacks than any other country in the world! And if you still aren’t shaking in your boots right now, we have had waves of shark attacks as close as Huntington Beach! This is an issue that is of great interest to me as i just started surfing. You’ll be sitting on the board out there and nearly every time you will be greeted by some dolphins, which, docile enough as those are, always make you pause for a second to think “hmm, playful bottlenose or bloodthirsty great white?” Luckily up till now I have only encountered the former.
Do you think sharks know when shark week is? It’s an odd thing to consider. I can only imagine so if they have some sort of extra-sensory perception that lets them pick up radio waves or something. Of course that would mean they understand English too in which case they are a much bigger threat than I imagined, but I digress... If they don’t know about it, they should. Shark week is bigger on Facebook than black history month! African Americans had to fight years of oppression but all sharks had to do was eat a few surfers. I wouldn’t be surprised if movies like ‘Jaws’ and ‘Deep Blue Sea’ outnumber movies dedicated to black history over the years. I think herein lies the real danger of shark attacks. Sharks are somehow making us forget about things that really matter so that we can sit at the beach worried to go in the water because of a phenomenon that has been quoted to kill less people than falling coconuts (a probably incorrect assertion from my research, but I’ll let it slide for arguments sake). There are even people in jail in Mexico because after an influx of shark attacks they went out in an effort to rid the entire ocean of sharks with 6 fishing boats and some spears. Although someone with that kind of common sense would probably end up dead or in jail anyway, it is not a stretch to say that sharks ruined those peoples lives.
So there you have it. Sharks are a much larger danger not only to our surfers, but to our society than most people realize. The only way I can see to solve this problem is to have America react as we did in WWII; with a burst of manufacturing that allows us to supply Mexican fisherman with a sufficient number of fishing boats and spears so that they may rid the world of sharks for us. I have heard this will hurt the oceans ecosystem, but what do sharks eat when they are not vampiricly attracted to the blood of surfers? Tuna? I’m pretty sure the sushi industry could use a boost anyway and I love sushi. So to that I say Kampai!
Satellites falling from space
I don’t know how much you follow the news, but there was recently a worldwide panic (it was a slow news day) when NASA released that the UARS satellite would be falling out of orbit towards Earth. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite had been 6 years out of production and was just waiting to fall. The projected trajectory for the satellite hurtling towards earth was something like ‘between the north pole and south pole’ some time between 6 hours ago and 3 days from now. They guessed around 1,200 pounds of the satellite would survive the re-entry, but wait, isn’t NASA full of rocket scientists and stuff? How could they be so short-sited that they just allow these things to float around the earth then hurtle towards earths citizens at breakneck speeds waiting to put an early stop to someones weekend? My research has shown that there are about 3,000 satellites orbiting earth right now. 3,000! At 1,200 pounds surviving re-entry a piece that 3.6 million pounds of satellite ready to turn your city into a scene from ‘Deep impact’. I say this is unacceptable. I assume there is some site somewhere that sets up all of these picket lines at grocery stores and stuff that make me feel bad for buying milk that I can contact to picket NASA until they figure out a way to stop this ever-impending danger. Until then all I can recommend is stay underground as much as possible.
Picket Lines
Tell me what this describes: gets in your way, makes you feel bad for not doing what they ask, often yells unintelligible things, commonly seen with shopping carts, being closely watched by the police... If you are thinking homeless people you are right, but you are also right if you are thinking people at grocery store picket lines! Now that I think of it I’m pretty sure that they just hire homeless people to do it for them! In theory this seems like a good idea, I mean it gives them something to do, but how many homeless people are out there on drugs and just generally legitimately crazy? (you probably would be too if you lost everything). I don’t exactly think it’s a safe thing for them to expose us to hordes of homeless people yelling at us and in some cases even getting physical with people so that they won’t buy groceries... you know those things everyone HAS TO BUY so that they can live. I mean even the picketers have to buy food. I’m pretty sure those people use the same logic that people do who protest gas prices by saying don’t buy gas for a day. So, you didn’t fill up on Wednesday, but you still used the same amount of gas which means you will just have to buy more on Thursday. I mean really people? At this rate it won’t take until 2013 for computers to beat the average human brain.
All I’m saying is grocery store picketers need to stop using homeless people to do their jobs. If I am mistaken and this is not the case then they have no excuse for acting like crazy homeless people.
So many more...
I truly wish I had time for more, as the lack of baby pigeons in the world has really began to worry me; I mean, have you ever even seen a baby pigeon? Anyway, this may not be comprehensive, but do not take these with a grain of salt because they are rock-hard facts from my most trusted source, me.
Oooh, I get to be your first commenter. So well written, hilarious, somewhat true. Found a new blog to follow (yes, I have many)!
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