17MAR08 – The dilemna with honey bees is working its way up to birds – there’s evidence of that in the Northeast United States. Several days ago, a beloved blogger died in his sleep while preparing to cover more tech-news for the rest of us. As if cerebral fungi migrating from species to species up the food chain wasn’t enough to contend with, I went to B&N and got, “How To Survive 2012,” by Patrick Geryl.

This last week, I’ve been designing five websites simultaneously and pushing the X-Files type of studying to some unbearable limits. Briefly, several bloggers have died in recent months. They all covered VOIP and telecom stuff and they all travelled more than the average human. This led me to remember the honey bee problem. That led to some pretty wacky stuff about space travel and an underdeveloped theory of Einstein’s.

Something I noticed on a network repair trip to Washington, D.C. was the consistently odd behavior of birds. They’re recently spending more time attacking their own reflections. Half the cars in my Dad’s neighborhood had bird poop along either side of the side mirrors. I saw a pigeon sit, stupified and still on the grass even as a wire haired terrier was preparing to rush it. The window beside the center of the network repair I was performing was being tapped by a female cardinal. The car I drove to the job was perched upon by a female cardinal that constantly pecked at and head-butted its reflection in the passenger side mirror.

At first, all of these observations alone seem like cosmic humor; a funny, isolated incident or two, or three. Until I started calling friends yesterday asking about birds in their neighborhoods, no one up north thought about it. Now, it looks as though I’m getting the ball rolling on a trend – birds in the Northeast are losing their little bird-brain minds. What do birds eat? Bugs. The honey bee dilemna is suspected to be the effect of some peculiar fungi that alters bee chemistry. Medicine is chemistry – just ask moldy bread. If, in these Winter months, birds are eating fungal ladden lost honey bees since other yummies are hibernating until Spring, I see no reason why fungal infections cannot also be infecting birds as a result.

Anyway, I’m asking friends to observe more clearly and take pictures when able. I didn’t take pictures because I didn’t know there was a trend occurring.

END OF TIMES

December 21, 2012 is something I heard about only recently and was terrified by. You can’t really see it coming and you surely cannot stop it if it does come. My wife asks, “where do we go and what do we do?” I thought, well, it’s only four more days to Christmas and it sure would be embarassing to be caught on the 25th of December wrapped in bubble wrap and boarded up inside the house with a hoard of cash, water, canned beans and a shotgun with no presents to give away. I imagine that would look pretty silly.

The end of the World has been predicted, with amazing accuracy, time and time again. I want to believe, but I’m a huge, stoic, skeptic. What I can’t ignore is that humans are incredibly tiny after all is said and done. Fooling around with magnetic fields on a planetary scale will make Earth burp, twitch and then pick up a new pattern. For humans, that spells absolute catastrophe. I certainly don’t doubt that patterns exist in nature. This includes, Sol, our Sun. Even my religion, Western Science (religion meaning what you look to for answers to the big stuff) says that turmoil on the Sun folows a cycle. Our own 200-year-long observations show 11-point-something year mini-cycles growing into an as-of-yet observed larger cycle.

Okay, I get that. “How To Survive 2012,” has ONE pillar. In late December, 2012, the Sun’s larger, eleven-thousand-year cycle will be SO STRONG, that it causes Earth to flip its poles. I get that too, but what if doesn’t happen? Do you want to be the moron in the bubble wrap who didn’t buy Christmas presents?

A lot of very interesting science from thousands of years ago does indeed point to and agree that 2012 is going to be a hell of a something. But Western Science has already said that the Earth, due for a flip, hasn’t flipped for nearly a million years. This, despite the fact that the Sun may indeed flip every 11,000 years. So the skeptic in me says, “the Sun could flip, cause some havoc as it’s obviously done before, and still not flip the Earth.” “HAVOC” includes worldwide blackouts, northern lights in South Carolina, military rule, daytime curfews to avoid extreme UV, the end of many forms of communication, the loss of thousands of smaller organisms and species and the potential re-drawing of nation-state borders in poorer parts of the World where resources and technology are already strained.

That’s pretty big. As a matter of fact, that’s about big enough for me to handle. Bigger than that, and I don’t sleep.

WHY IS 2012 SO SCAREY?

Continued in the next post…

DINARIUS Bryan's old Digital Interest blog