Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So a couple people said to me that I'm getting too old or too sick to handle the nitty gritty work of BME and that I should retire or take a break. No way! Outside of anything else, pain is what powers me! Anyway, in part because of all the time he took off to manage BMEfest, Phil had fallen a bit behind on image submissions, so I decided to help get caught up… and I processed about five thousand emails on Sunday and then a couple thousand more on Monday… So it's good to know (it really did make me feel good to know my brain still twitches fast) that I can still do it — and if Phil ever gets hit by a truck while on a crazy unicycle adventure all is not lost.

The bar on the corner is closing after 52 years! I took that rainbow photo as we had god knows how many pitchers last night (is Michael a bad influence on me, or is it the reverse?) — if my stomach is any indication, it was a lot, and the fact that I woke up at 5 AM lying in the basement, not entirely sure why I was there, backs up that binge-drinking theory. The good news is that over the last two months I've managed to pretty much totally quit drugs! Anyway, the cook has had the same job at Joe Mercurys for half of that period… I can't imagine how scary it would be looking for work after being a minimum wage cook for one's whole life. Although I guess it's less scary than looking for a job after a lifetime of being a high paid union metal stamper or something because the stakes (that is, the mortgage commitments) are higher.

There's another big update getting posted shortly, and then I'll start another one with a few thousand more, and tomorrow morning I'll do a few more hours before Phil takes over in our crazy image processing relay race — the goal is to get caught up so that images get posted within a day or two of submission, so you won't have to wait — after all, what is the internet for, if not instant gratification…?

After that I've got a mountain of great stuff for ModBlog so probably by about noon tomorrow that'll be all fired up again, and I'll try and queue enough that it'll last through my surgical downtime as well.

So I got food poisoning yesterday. Serves me right for using mayonnaise from a street vendor I suppose. In any case, that meant two things. First, it meant that I spent quite a while in my washroom reading Six Degrees (a book about climate change) among other unpleasant things, and I was up late watching the BBC Planet Earth special on polar regions…

Err, let me also say that I'm crazy tired so I hope I haven't made any glaring errors.

If our global temperature rises by about two degrees (400 – 500 ppm of CO₂), which is the current “best case” scenario projected by most science folks, it's being proposed that this could totally melt the southern glaciers (if the temperature is sustained — other projections suggest that we'd have to add a few more degrees to see this happen), which means that a four mile thick pile of ice the size of the United States gets poured into the ocean. Outside of the other hellish things that would happen, this means twenty five to seventy metres of sealevel increase… I was wondering what that would look like so I downloaded a bunch of topographical maps…

I'm sure I made some mistakes in rendering the map, but that's about a thirty metre increase, so on the “better case of the worst case” end of things if I'm understanding what I'm reading and doing… If you want to look at the map at higher resolution I made a few versions:

• Topographical (current)
• Topographical (future)
• Vegetation (future)
• Vegetation (future, with current continents' outlines)

Since that level of climate change displaces the vast majority of the world's major cities, I guess we'll see massive war and resource conflict do us in long before, but yeah… it's definitely an interesting period to live through (if we live through it), isn't it?