Each entry is no more than 140 characters… the maximum allowed per tweet.
I post daily journal entries from the second year in aftermath of the Zombie Apocalypse.
Only a relative handful of people have survived the first year. Food, vehicles, gasoline, medicine and supplies were relatively abundant during the first year. By the second year, gasoline (a highly refined product) has ‘gone bad’ and vehicles no longer run on it. Most of the ‘easy picking’ supplies have been exhausted. Specialized ‘city folk’ are now forced to exist in a hostile environment. Our world, at best, has been plunged back into the Dark Ages. For some survivors, they have been thrown back to the Stone Age.
Please check it out on Twitter and Follow it, if you like it.
Don’t regularly write blog articles about zombies and The Upcoming Zombie Apocalypse;
Don’t regularly use the expression ‘The Upcoming Zombie Apocalypse’;
Don’t refer to Walmart as ‘The Zombie Serengeti’;
Don’t have a large cache of weapons [2] in easy reach of their computer desks;
Don’t have a 3-month supply of food in the basement; [3]
Don’t have a dozen gallons of fresh water and boxes of Twinkies and Strawberry Pop-Tarts [4] in their apartments;
Don’t call Twinkies and Strawberry Pop-Tarts ‘The Official Snacks of The Upcoming Zombie Apocalypse’; [5]
Can’t speak for an hour straight on the most efficient/effective and least efficient/effective ways to kill zombies;
(The last thing a Georgia zombie sees)
The list goes on, as you can imagine.
Frankly, I don’t see how this interest of mine can be seen in any way as ‘unhealthy.’ If anything, it promotes emergency preparedness which, if done right, ensures survival.
(Yeah… I wish!)
And you can’t get much healthier than ‘not being eaten by hordes of living dead.’
So, back-off, buzz-kills!
You don’t see me kvetching about your ‘unhealthy interest’ in taking long walks and hitting little balls with sticks while wearing stupid gaily-colored pants.
[1] “You know, my brother once told me that nothing someone says before the word ‘but’ really counts.” (Benjen Stark, ‘Game of Thrones’)
[2] Off the top of my head (and looking around me): samurai blades, four (2 katanas, 1 wakizashi, 1 tanto); standard machete, one; bayonets, two (1 U.S. Indian wars, 1 French, WW1); Bowie knife, one; gurka knife, one; ‘Book of Eli’ machete, two (1 large, 1 small); ‘Eragon’ medieval dagger (Arya’s blade), one; billhook sickle/machete, one.
[3] With respect, that’s my mother, not me. I barely have a 6-week supply. Hardly anything, really.
[4] Twinkies and Strawberry Pop-Tarts are the official snacks of The Upcoming Zombie Apocalypse.
[1] For starters, George Lucas was born on May 14, 1944.Another point of interest is that all 6 Star Wars films were released in May.Episode II - Attack of the Clones was released on May 16, 2002.Episodes I & III - The Phantom Menace & Revenge of the Sith were released on May 19, 1999 and 2005.Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back was released on May 21, 1980.Episode IV & VI - A New Hope and Return of the Jedi were released on May 25, 1977 and 1983.Today and every May 4th has been considered an unofficially holiday by all Star Wars fans.The play on words of ‘May The Force (Fourth) Be With You’ is perfect for the month of May.
One of the things I’m following on Twitter is a series of tweets called Life After Z Day.
The premise is elegantly simple. The Upcoming Zombie Apocalypse has smacked us in the face like a bloody severed hand. Despite things hitting the fan in a major way, someone out there has access to Twitter and tweets his journal entries several times a day.
Here are a few examples from this month…
1 Apr: Sorry for the inactivity, my brother and I had run out of ammunition and canned food… We had to venture into the city.
3 Apr: What a night last night, we drove the rzr into a small town and broke into a boarded up bar… It’s funny to say, but I missed hangovers.
4 Apr: Hung over today, and my brother and I are being lazy and bunked down… but tomorrow we gotta get out and work on our fences.
6 Apr: Just after we had got to sleep the dog heard something and woke us up… It was a nomad walker cought (sic) up in one of our perimeter fences.
8 Apr: as soon as the door opened up i thought maybe there was a reason the door was locked from the outside.. thats (sic) when we heard the moans inside.
10 Apr: we came across a sworm (sic) of walkers, and in the middle of the swarm there was an SUV with what looked to be two girls in trouble…
11 Apr: We have been busy all day patrolling the perimeter of the farm, there was an abnormal amount of walkers caught on the fence…
11 Apr: But I suppose these days there is no such thing as ‘normal’.
Some days, there is only one entry… or two. Other days, there can be several. April 10th had about 30 entries.
It’s like reading a diary. Or rather, reading a journal over the shoulder of the person writing it, while he is writing it.
I’m hooked… like a walker on a barbed wire fence.
Check it out.
If, like me, you a zombie kinda person and you tend to drift on over to Twitter whenever you’re bored and have a few minutes to spare… give Life After Z Day a go.
I have to confess to a question that has been much on my mind of late… one that has been weighing heavily upon my soul.
Could a ‘Death Star’ really destroy a planet? Is it even physically and scientifically possible? Could a small moon-sized battle station generate enough energy to destroy an Earth-sized planet? I mean, really?
(That’s no moon. It’s a space station)
Luckily, or maybe not, the physics geeks over at PhysOrg.com have looked into this profound and troubling question and have come to a disturbing conclusion.
As I discovered in a recent article, a paper by David Boulderston (University of Leicester) sets out to answer that very question and it seems the answer is… YES!
Well, isn’t that just lovely.
First, for the uninitiated and/or those who have been hiding in a cave for the last 35 years, here’s Death Star-101…
According to Star Wars lore, the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station, or Death Star, is a moon-sized battle station designed to spread fear throughout the galaxy. The image above shows the Death Star as it appeared in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). The Death Star’s main weapon is depicted as a superlaser capable of destroying planets with a single blast.
(Plan of DS-1 Orbital Battle Station)
Boulderston claims that it is possible to estimate how much energy the Death Star would need in order to destroy a planet with its superlaser. Taking into account a whole lot of assumptions in order to come up with the energy requirement (e.g. assuming Alderaan [the target planet in Star Wars IV] did not have any sort of planetary “deflector” shield and that the planet is a solid body of uniform density, using the idealized sphere model based on Earth’s mass and diameter, etc.), it was possible to determine the gravitational binding energy of Alderaan, using a simple equation of:
U= 3GMp2
————
5Rp
Where G is the Gravitational Constant (6.673×10-11), Mp is planet mass, and Rp is the planet’s radius. Using Earth’s mass and radius, the required energy comes out to 2.25 x 1032 Joules. Using Jupiter’s data, the energy required goes up to 2 x 1036 Joules.
Piece of cake, no?
(I find your lack of faith… disturbing)
According to Star Wars lore, the Death Star is powered by a ‘hypermatter’ reactor, possessing the energy output of several main-sequence stars. Boulderston asserts that, given that the power output of our Sun is about 3 x 1026 Joules per second, it’s a reasonable assumption the Death Star’s reactor could power the superlaser.
Put another way, since the Death Star’s main power reactor has the energy output equal to several main-sequence stars, even if Earth’s exact composition were used in the equation above, the required energy to destroy a planet would only be affected by a few orders of magnitude – well within the Death Star’s power budget.
So… the bottom line, according to Boulderston, is that wiping out a planet like Earth is no sweat… but if the Death Star wanted to take on a planet like Jupiter, that would be a much taller order but ultimately do-able.
Can’t wait for the Evil Empire to come up with their next nifty gadget, the Sun-Buster 3000!
In a recent article, the nerdlings at LaughingSquid.com have taken this gem out of mothballs and blown away the dust on an invention which, while perhaps ahead of its time in the mid-twenties, is a product that is ripe for our time!
The Isolator!
(Inventor and science fiction writer Hugo Gernsback wearing his invention)
As LaughingSquid writes, “The Isolator is a bizarre helmet invented in 1925 that encourages focus and concentration by rendering the wearer deaf, piping them full of oxygen, and limiting their vision to a tiny horizontal slit. The Isolator was invented by Hugo Gernsback, editor of Science and Invention magazine, member of ‘The American Physical Society,’ and one of the pioneers of science fiction.”
“These images are from the July, 1925 issue of the long-defunct magazine ‘Science and Invention’, which was edited by Hugo Gernsback, who later became famous as a pioneer in the field of science fiction. He also invented this contraption which, to my mind, nicely illustrates the folly of taking an excessively narrow approach to solving a problem.”
So, kids… Ask Mom and Dad for your very own Isolator!
You can get good grades AND be cool… both at the same time!
