Super Cool Universe Sandbox Simulator

Digg this up and give the author some love: http://digg.com/pc_games/Fantastic_Universe_Simulator (and by the way, there's a video linked from the Digg article, so check that out too).

It's a pretty amazing project... everything is controllable via a WiiMote. I've seen this running on a huge projection screen, and it's frankly just dazzling. You could play with this for hours.

Especially the galaxies crashing bits...

Here's a screenshot of a physically accurate Saturn, with all of its moons:

A disturbance in the Force...

A shift... I can feel it... big things are afoot... No, I don't mean bigfoot... or that there's something wrong with my feet. Something is... different.

It's almost as if the date July 11th will have some kind of crazy significance to my life... the end of an era, maybe? A conjunction of all the major planets, and a few of the more eccentric asteroids for good measure, leading to apocalyptic earthquakes the likes of which the Pacific Northwest have never seen? Will the sun set and fail to rise? Or perhaps a plague of locusts will blot it out...

And then... some kind of strange crackling energy rippling through the dark corners of the cosmos. A new frontier awaits, sitting in the shadows, waiting... breathing.

Of course, that new frontier's going to open up on July 15th, and then spring like a viper on a ... er ... tree-mounted spring.

A new chapter of my life.

Should be fun :)

Toilet Paper and the Plastic Vortex of Doom

In 2004, I went to Peru on a whirlwind tour of Lima, Cusco and Maachu Pichu (you know, the place where the really cool lost Incan city is).

The city of Cusco, Peru. A place where Toilet Paper is PURE CONCENTRATED EVIL.

One of the things that struck me while I was there was the odd realization that toilet paper was almost taboo.

No, seriously. It was.

Apparently when the Western world decided to descend again on the Peruvians, and tourism took hold, one of the first sights that they saw was the incredibly scary one of large quantities of used toilet paper happily floating down the Amazon river.

Given that the Amazon was the source of all their water, and Maachu-Pichu especially is near the very beginning, needless to say they were a little perturbed by this turn of events.

Which is why in every bathroom you visit in Peru (except perhaps Lima), you're expected to stick the used paper in a little bin by the toilet.

Needless to say, this can be quite disconcerting to the Western traveller, but trust me, you'll get used to it.

What does this have to do with the Plastic Vortex of Doom?

Well, it's kind of the same thing, except on a much larger scale. Except instead of toilet paper floating down the Amazon, we now have a huge vortex (known as the North Pacific Gyre) which is filled with plastic bottles, plastic bags, and in fact all kinds of other plasticky things - mainly because, unfortunately, plastic doesn't biodegrade. At all.

In some places - and bear in mind that this gyre is the size of Texas, so "some places" are areas the size of cities - the tiny plastic fragments outweigh the plankton by a factor of 6:1.

This man fished all of this plastic out of his beard... er... I mean, the ocean.

As you can imagine, this is a bad thing - for the environment, and for us as a species. The plastic also soaks up all kinds of man-made toxins (PCBs, DDT, and lots of other three letter acronyms for PURE CONCENTRATED DEATH). And then, the fish eat the plastic. Because it's in their plankton.

You can see the documentary the screengrab above was taken from here. And I highly recommend that you watch it. Be warned - it's scary stuff (ecologically speaking).

As stewards of this planet we're whizzing through space on, we're not doing a tremendously good job. I must admit it gave me pause thinking about this as I put my tomatoes in a bag at the store today. I've already started using reusable bags for everything (when I can remember to bring them into the store)... but plastic is used in so much of our packaging and everything else in our lives, that I fear it's a losing battle.

Click to see the animation