Technology is incredible, it just keeps getting better. Unfortunately there is also a dark side to technology and I think most of us realize this by now. Sometimes companies use technology to do something we might not like. First let me say I like Facebook. It gives us a chance to talk to many other people we might not have met in our daily lives. Some of these people are in the remote corners of the world. Many organizations use it to allow their members to communicate with each other either live on line or through messages. The problem is Facebook presents not only personal information some less than bright people put up, but it also gives people the chance to say things about others with may not be true or prudent to say, depending on the circumstances. Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of data which could conceivably be used in a way we wouldn’t like. It also presents a tempting target for hackers as do many other types of sites. Sometime this data can also be very helpful and Facebook is now using it to develop the most accurate population density maps in history. Some are saying this is going to usher in the AI age of cartography.

I am very sad to say a Gallop International poll was conducted across 65 countries and questioned over 66,000 people and it asked the question of what country posed the greatest threat to world peace and the majority answered the United States. I guess we make the rest of the world nervous. This is what happens when a country is consistently at war. People in many other countries think they might be next, especially if they are in the Middle East. This is a very sad state of affairs. After World War II, there was no other country which was loved as much as we were, but it didn’t take long for this feeling to fade. When others see us spending as much on weapons and the military as the next 10 countries in the world, they wonder why. What they don’t seem to realize is we are spending so much, because we are being ripped off on what we pay. We may be spending more than the next 10 countries, but we are only getting the value of less than half that. Let’s hope the next administration will decide not to interfere with other countries to bring them down, even if we don’t like their regimes.

If there was a nuclear blast taking place anywhere on this planet we would hear all about it, but what about a blast which was of the same magnitude which was not nuclear? I think I can answer that question and the answer is apparently not. Here is the reason I say that, I say it because it just happened in February 2016. A fairly large asteroid crashed into the ocean with the force of a nuclear weapon and hardly anyone knows about it. Why is this? I can’t say for sure, but I think the reason is the government doesn’t want to panic everyone. We never heard about this meteor being tracked and it possibly was a surprise. If it was, it shows the weakness in our tracking systems for near earth objects. This means we are vulnerable at any time to a meteor collision. When one astronomer was asked about this he replied things like this happen several times in a year. Since the earth is mostly water, more hit the water than land. Even when land is hit, much of the land on this planet is unpopulated, even with the billions of humans living here.

Scientists like nothing more than to conduct experiments. Sometimes we ordinary people look at the experiments and or its results and wonder why it was conducted in the first place. This brings me to an experiment which was conducted to replicate what an early bird which lived during the time of the dinosaurs would have looked like. Early birds did not have beaks as they do today, they had snouts and their heads resembled those of a dinosaur. Scientists believe there were dinosaurs first which evolved into birds, so they decided to see if they could alter a chicken embryo to recreate the face of an early dinosaur like bird. The scientists said they didn’t start out to create a dinosaur chicken, but wanted to see how the beak developed. What they got was a chicken with a head which looked like a dinosaur and had the teeth to prove it.

There is a crew of computer programmers who are hard at work creating a self-generating universe and it is so complicated even the programmers don’t know what will be created in some instances. The project is going to be put into a video game and from what I have heard will make the game have the most incredible and unpredictable terrain. The terrain will have some very real attributes such as a curvature like the earth. Time will pass as the pseudo-planet rotates and so will the light. There are over 600,000 lines of code to create this planet. It may turn out this code will find other uses besides creating planets for games.

We have talked about global warming many times and January 2016 was the hottest month ever recorded, but something strange has happened. The warming is not happening uniformly over the entire planet. The hottest areas on earth are said to show the biggest increase in temperature with the exception of the Arctic which is warming up very quickly. The arctic sea ice is down by over 400,000 square miles according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “We’ve looked at the average January temperatures, and we look at what we call the 925 millibar level, about 3,000 feet up in the atmosphere and it was, I would say, absurdly warm across the entire Arctic Ocean.”  The National Snow and Ice Data Center is reporting more than a 13 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature for this time of year.