Last night, we did something dumb. It didn't seem dumb as we thought of it, but in retrospect, it was. What we did was to rent The Day After Tomorrow, take it home, and watch it.
In case you don't recall, TDAT is a film about the extremely rapid onset of a new Ice Age over the northern hemisphere, the result of callous disregard for the effects of global warming. Dick Cheney (actually, a virtual clone) plays a nice supporting role as the hard-nosed politician who has no use for these fanciful notions -- he's more interested in handling the real-world problems that have cropped up, including torrential rains and a suite of tornadoes that have devastated Los Angeles. Its only later, as the thirty-foot-deep flood waters are surging through the canyons of New York City, and the cataclysmic drop in temperatures is turning all that water into ice and snow, that he begins to think again. Of course, by then, it's far too late.
We watched this movie, as I said, last night, when the temperature outside was in the mid-teens. As the movie went on, the room got chillier -- and I could not have told you if it was an actual temperature drop or the effect of seeing all that snow and icy wilderness on the screen. But whatever it was, I had bad dreams during the night -- dreams in which frost and cold played a major part. Eventually, I got up, unable to sleep, and decided to read some blogs, where I found an interesting article on the Institute for the Future's site about something they called Liquid Information. It led to a demo on the CNN site, where, among other things, I found this.
And then I couldn't sleep at all.
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