Sadly, the Robot Uprising just hasn’t gotten a lot of play lately, but that’s all changing thanks to The Flight of the Conchords on HBO. A YouTube clip of their performance of “The Humans Are Dead” follows the break.

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The word is that “organic” farming techniques leave soil able to fix about 30% more carbon than large-scale industrial farming techniques. When you’re “organic” farming, you plant winter cover crops and you don’t till the soil (turning it in order to mix in fertilizers, uproot weeds, aerate it).

I guess my organic garden isn’t organic, because I do use a roto-tiller to till it.
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The Boston Globe reports on the “Boston-Area Climate Experiment” at UMass Boston, an attempt to predict how New England’s climate will change as temperatures rise over the next century. Unlike some climate modeling experiments, this one isn’t running on supercomputers - it’s running on an old farm in Waltham, and is being conducted by controlling the actual environmental conditions of small plots of land.
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It’s not often that I get to mention gadgets on the Apocalypse Blog, but if all goes well around this time next Friday I’ll have a Jesus Phone - I mean Apple iPhone - in my sweaty little hands. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to blog from it, and will roam the world blogging about things apocalyptic.

Probably not so much (the roaming part, at least).

The apocalyptic element to the iPhone? It’s an article written by Josh Quittner wherein he waxes apocalytpic about the iPhone:

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People in the 70’s were, I think, more concerned with what it would be like after the end of world (despite the semantic issues involved in end) than we are today. Today we seem more concerned about how the world will end and less about what happens next (granted the idea that we even get a “next”).

We’ve talked about the seed banks here before, but now you can have your seeds and… read about them, too.
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The Onion reports on US President George W. Bush’s solution to global warming: the $100 trillion National Air Conditioner Initiative. This initiative would cover 90% of North Dakota with massive air conditioning unit which would devastate Canada.

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Brief update on bird flu: I’ve been quiet about it for a bit because it’s sad and boring after a while… but I’ll report a few things in the near future. Today’s report is about the death of a 5 year old girl from Wonogiri, Indonesia, who became sick after about 20 chickens near her home died suddenly.

Via: Indonesian girl dies from bird flu - CNN.com
[tags]indonesia, avian flu, bird flu, h5n1, pandemic[/tags]

Not content to create calculus and revolutionize mathematics, construct a theory of gravity and motion, and invent the reflecting telescope and create a theory of optics explaining the color spectrum, Sir Isaac Newton also calculated when the Apocalypse might occur.

Newton was a Christian who railed against “magical thinking” and Christian mysticism… he believed that the universe operated in a mechanical rather than magical manner - this belief was the foundation for his work in the sciences and natural philosophy. That didn’t stop him from analyzing the texts of the Bible - in particular the Book of Daniel.

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Not a giant alien come to eat the planet but this time it’s just the sun giving out on us. Danny Boyle, who also directed “Trainspotting”, “28 Days Later” and one of my favorite not-widely-seen films, “A Life Less Ordinary”, has a new film coming out called “Sunshine”.

Boyle seems to have a thing for quasi-SF films and thankfully he’s good at it. He’s also talked about coming back to direct a second sequel to “28 Days Later”, probably to be called “28 Months Later”, although “28 Weeks Later” may not have performed well enough to convince the studio to give the franchise a third go-around.
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We caught the opening of the new Fantastic Four film last Friday. The story is apocalyptic in that it concerns the destruction of our world at the hands of an alien presence called Galactus - the “devourer of worlds”. The original story, reprinted in black and white in “Essential Fantastic Four Volume 3″ or in color on the “Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer” DVD-ROM, has the Fantastic Four fighting the herald of Galactus - the Silver Surfer - who eventually turns against his master, but it’s only with the help of the alien Watcher (a gigantic bald man wearing a toga) who breaks his vow of non-interference and helps them gain the “Ultimate Nullifier”, the only weapon in existence which can stop Galactus.

Heady stuff for the 60s, one of modern comics’ most classic stories, and close to the plot of the new Fantastic Four film.
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