Stephanie Pappas for Discovery News reports that “More of America is a Disaster than Not”: “The Secretary of Agriculture has declared 218 more U.S. counties to be drought disaster areas, bringing the total number of American counties designated as disaster areas (mainly due to drought) to more than 50 percent.”
Bryan Bender at the Boston Globe reports how Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson has assembled a report on every bomb the US has ever dropped since WWI(!!!), “a compilation that, at the click of a mouse and a few keystrokes, reveals for the first time the sheer magnitude of destruction inflicted by the US and its allies from the air in the last century.” Going by the name: Theater History of Operations Reports (or THOR), this hyperarchive of US military violence is truly staggering. “One particularly relevant example: From October 1965 to May 1975, at least 456,365 cluster bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, according to the records analyzed.”
Via io9, this 6-minute trailer for Cloud Atlas looks pretty incredible.
William Beutler just informed me about a really interesting project he has recently begun. Infinite Boston is a tumblr blog that will present photographs from approximately 50 locations around Boston that are referred to in DFW’s Infinite Jest. Now, if someone could do that for Tucson . . . (where I grew up and went to school. . .). A couple samples:
In “The Universe Could Tear Itself Apart Sooner than Anyone Believed,” George Dvorsky looks at recent theories about the Big Rip and how the Universe may have a much shorter projected life-span than physicists originally imagined.
Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen’s new documentary, Into Eternity, looks like it might be pretty fascinating. The film follows the construction of the Onkalo Waste Repository at the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olikiluoto, Finland. Probably gonna watch it this weekend. The trailer:
On NPR‘s website, Robert Krulwich reports on this unearthed video of 5 men standing under a nuclear explosion.
There is a “Nuclear Vault” at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. (Archives and Nukes. . . .)
And I just found this excellent blog, Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, run by Alex Wellerstein.
So, on a bit of a personal note. I’ve been writing about the apocalypse in Pynchon a lot. While writing, or more likely making a sandwich, I find myself humming a little ditty. But the humming is only one note: the tuba, trombone (perhaps french horn) blast that is repeated three or four times in the following. In the game, this is the sound of the aliens’ lasers. For me, this note has come to feel like the sound of contemporaneity itself.
Came across a piece in the latest Harper’s talking about a project from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Walden, a game. I sorta can’t believe that anyone is making this. Like, didn’t some advisor at USC try to dissuade the makers of this? Or, did the team maybe, like, reread Walden and think, hmm, perhaps Thoreau was thinking something different than a video game (even one that looks like it admirably emphasizes contemplation rather than play). But seriously . . . .
Mark Halper has reported in The Guardian that American company Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc. and Tehran’s Islamic Azad University are banding together to pursue that nuclear holy grail: nuclear fusion power.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 