I found this article today - it’s one of those “it’ll-scare-you” type pieces that predicts doom and gloom…maybe. Still, a good read in light of the events of the last week.

The western flank of Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canaries is going to slide into the Atlantic one of these days: a diagonal fracture has already separated it from the main body of the volcano, and only friction still keeps it attached. “When it goes, it will likely collapse in about 90 seconds,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre at University College London. And when it goes, probably during an eruption, the splash will create a mega-tsunami that races across the Atlantic and drowns the facing coastlines.

Fortunately the nearest coast to the Canary Islands, where the waves will be around 300 feet (100 metres) high when they hit, is lightly populated Western Sahara. Few people living in the coastal plains of Morocco, south-western Spain and Portugal will survive either, but the waves will drop in height as they travel. The coasts of southern Ireland and south-western England will also take a beating, but by then the wave height will be down to about 30 feet (10 metres).

The real carnage will be on the western side of the Atlantic, from Newfoundland all the way down the east coast of Canada and the United States to Cuba, Hispaniola, the Lesser Antilles and north-eastern Brazil. With a clear run across the Atlantic, the wall of water will still be between 60 and 150 feet (20 and 50 metres) high when it hits the eastern seaboard of North America, and it will keep coming for ten to fifteen minutes.

Worst hit will be harbours and estuaries that funnel the waves inland: goodbye Halifax, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, DC. Miami and Havana go under almost entirely, as do low-lying islands like the Bahamas and Barbados. Likely death toll, if there is no mass evacuation beforehand? A hundred million people, give or take fifty million.

The last time the volcano erupted, in 1949, its whole western side slid 13 feet (4 metres) down towards the sea, and even now it is still slipping very slowly downwards. Given the scale of the catastrophe if the next eruption sends this mountain crashing into the water, Dr. McGuire is angry that there is so little monitoring equipment on La Palma to give advance warning: “The US government must be aware of the La Palma threat. They should certainly be worried, and so should the island states in the Caribbean that will really bear the brunt of a collapse.”

“They’re not taking it seriously,” McGuire concluded. “Governments change every four or five years and generally they’re not interested in these things.” It was a classic scene, revisited in every natural disaster movie: crusading scientist calls feckless governments to account, squalid politicos ignore the call. The science journalists couldn’t wait to get their pieces into print.

But hold on a minute. Haven’t we heard about this threat before? What’s new this time? Nothing, except that there hasn’t been a stampede to cover La Palma with seismometers. Now, why do you think that is?

Suppose that the governments whose coastlines are at risk, from Morocco to the US, did get a warning that Cumbre Vieja was waking up again. What would they do with the warning? Evacuate one or two hundred million people from the low-lying lands indefinitely?

They don’t know if there is really going to be an eruption (seismology is not that precise), or how big it will be, or whether this will be the one that finally shakes the side of the mountain loose. It could happen in the next eruption, but it might not happen for a thousand years.

No national leader wants to evacuate the entire coast for an indefinite period of time, causing an economic and refugee crisis on the scale of a world war, for what might be a false alarm. But nobody wants to ignore a warning, and perhaps be responsible for tens of millions of deaths. From a political standpoint, it’s better not to have the warning at all.

Natural disasters that can affect the whole planet are known to scientists as “global geophysical events” — gee-gees, for short — and they come in two kinds: ones you might be able to do something useful about, and ones you can’t. When governments are faced with the first kind, they can respond quite sensibly.

Since we first realised two decades ago that asteroids and comets smashing into the earth have caused a number of mass extinctions, a US government project has identified and started to track 3,000 “near-earth objects” whose orbits make them potentially dangerous. In another generation, we may even be able to divert ones that are on a collision course — and if there’s one gee-gee that you would want to prevent above all others, that’s the one. But there’s no similar remedy on the horizon for volcanos or earthquakes, or the tsunamis they might cause. On this one, we just have to keep our fingers crossed.

The FCC announced Wednesday that it would lift its restriction on cell phone useage in planes. As you can imagine, this has caused a flurry of stories on radio and TV promising, “It’s coming reaaaal soooon nooow, you’ll be able to use your cell phone on an air plane!”

Pardon me? I don’t want people to be able to use their cell phone on a plane. That’s just rude to everyone who has to suffer through one half of their conversation.

I feel qualified to make this statement because I was once a cell phone junkie too. There was a time - in the not so distant past - where I was never without my cell phone. I didn’t hesitate to hand out those seven little numbers to anyone who showed the slightest interest in the ability to get in touch with me at any time.

I carried my cell phone everywhere and I always had it near. I had home chargers, office chargers, travel chargers, car chargers and spare batteries. There was no chance I would not have a full battery and be able to make or take any call that was beamed, over the aether, to my phone.

Oh, I tried to be polite and not use my phone where it would have gotten me killed. Movie theaters, libraries and job interviews were right out! Almost anywhere else though was fair game.

I lived like this for about 4 years. Making and taking calls, being a “mover and shaker” and being universally available. There was a period of time in the late nineties where I didn’t bother to have a home phone. I was far ahead of the “no-phone-but-a-cell-phone” trend that’s so popular now. The only difficulty at the time was ordering a pizza from Pizza Hut, but since their pizza is terrible I actually came out ahead - no more Pizza Hut brand pizza!

So the FCC may lift their ban on cell phone usage in the friendly skies but we need to pray that the FAA doesn’t lift their restriction. Ahh, what’s that? The FAA? Yep, there are actually two bans on cell phone usage in the air. The FCC’s ban was to ensure that ground interference was minimized and the FAA’s ban was to ensure that the radios in the cell phones wouldn’t cause a problem with the air plane’s electronics. The media isn’t making a big deal about the FAA angle.

Fortunately for us all the FAA’s commissioned study results aren’t due until 2006. So we should have at least another year of peace and quiet in the great blue yonder.

There is nothing quite as disconcerting as the feeling you’re all alone, in the deep, dark cold of cyberspace. No page views are registered in your access.log, no visitors are commenting on your witty insight.

Well, there is something more disconcerting than just thinking you’re all alone and that’s rock solid proof that you really are alone in cyberspace!

Some people are scared to bare their soul, their inner thoughts and opinions to the world. If they only take a look at Alexa they would know that - really - no one cares what they have to say. The odds of organically growing a large following are pretty slim without some good word-of-mouth or snazzy viral marketing.

Pretty soon you’ll be hearing, “Hey buddy, can you spare a hyperlink back to my blog?” from wannabe bloggers desperate for someone to come and read what they have to say.

Sad isn’t it?

By the way, I don’t suppose you could spare a hyperlink back to my blog could you? You know, just until I get back on my feet?

During a rather lively discussion on the topic of Vanilla Coke today (I am strongly for it, he is strongly against it) and other flavors that can be added to the fizzy, sugar-water that is the most popular brand in the Milky Way and several lesser galaxies.

I was arguing in favor of cherry Coke, but only if using real cherry syrup–not that God-awful pre-cherried stuff when my friend mentioned suicides…

A suicide–for those of you not familiar with the term–is a mixture of all the soft-drink choices a fountain has to offer. You just put a squirt of each in your cup until it’s full. Surprisingly there is damn little on the Internet about making suicides, maybe the name has something to do with that? Whatever the reason, and whatever the lack of information on the Internet; an informal poll of my friends reveals this meme seems to be embedded into the minds of twenty-some things.

The mere mention of a suicide brought back fond memories of fifth-grade skating parties. We seemed to have one about every eight weeks. We went to a dinky little roller-skating rink with a small arcade, a dance floor that we all stayed the heck away from (in the fifth grade, girls have cooties big time) and a grungy little food counter.

The food was mostly of the hot-dog and popcorn variety, the candy selection immense! In-fact with your skate-party-admission-ticket you could get a hot-dog, popcorn and coke for $1.75. The coup de grace of the evening was making a suicide because although it was a grubby little place they had a staggering array of nozzles on their soft-drink fountain! There must have been 8 or 10 selections and nothing was diet! It was an orgy of caffeine and sugar, and there were usually no adults around to tell us we shouldn’t mix every flavor together.

And mix flavors we did! Ye gods, we were the kings of the skate-rink and the cola was our servant! If we were feeling especially plucky, we would approach the counter and ask for a squirt–maybe even a double squirt–of cherry syrup to add to the sugary goodness.

Ahh…those were good times. And while the skating rink has since been turned into Triangle Auto Body my memories of my youth and those fifth grade skating parties–and suicides–will remain.

Good times…

Money is a powerful thing. Surprisingly, fake money is a pretty darn powerful thing too. And even though I know that I’m playing cards with fake money I still let myself get rattled when I make dumb mistakes or other players make dumb mistakes and win when they shouldn’t.

So I’m playing poker against a bunch of raising-on-nothing morons and I’m playing tight. Sure, it’s not real money but there is no reason to be stupid about it. I win a few hands and I’m feeling pretty good when things just all go to shit.

After being dealt a few fair hands thing just turn cold. Now, this isn’t an uncommon thing to happen, card will go cold from time to time. After I lose a few hands to mediocre cards I start to think about taking my (fake) winnings and moving on. But it just eats me up inside to move on when I’m losing. I feel like I should be able to leave the table a winner!

I bet into some hands that I have an okay chance at…and I lose. I bet into some more hands — these are some iffy cards — and I lose. Now I’m sitting at my desk telling myself, “Okay, I’m not going to go on tilt…I’m not. I’m just going to play one more hand and then I’ll leave…”

I think it was somewhere after my tenth hand from when I said I would leave that I actually was booted out of the table with no money. I went all in (a paltry 40 chips) on a King Four (off suit no less) figuring a Hail Mary play was my only option. Mary wasn’t on my side.

As I sit and think back on the game I realize that I could have walked about from the table about 700 chips up. I could have walked away even when I lost my 700 chip winnings. I realized I could have done a lot of things, but I ultimately did what bad poker players everywhere do…I let my greed and my fear of losing cloud my mind and I let myself make irrational decisions.

I figure that the word “could” is one that is bandied about quite a bit by players after going on tilt. There are a lot of things that could have happened, but what did happen was that I made some dumb decisions…