Random Musings: October 2010 Archives
By now everyone knows how to survive a zombie apocalypse as a human, but let's face it, it's much more likely that you'll be a cranium-munching zombie and not one of the few "lucky" humans. Hence the new book from John Austin:
"Pop culture has trained the human race that when the zombie virus strikes, we die," he told AOL News. "That said, most books cater to the humans."Austin hopes to rectify that with a new book, "So Now You're a Zombie: A Handbook for the Newly Undead" (Chicago Review Press), a manual that explains everything a newly undead soul needs to hunt, fight and feed on the living.
He wrote the book out of a fit of compassion for folks who, through no fault of their own, are now tagged with the zombie label but have no idea of how to start procuring brains to consume.
"I thought to myself, 'Wouldn't it be nice, as a zombie, to have a guide with all the necessary skills?' " he said.
If I do get turned into a zombie humanity doesn't stand a chance!
Erin McCarthy explains why the AK-47 has been at least as influential as nuclear weapons.
The two weapons were designed simultaneously, and urgently, in Stalin's Soviet Union, and they worked together quite well. Atomic (then nuclear) weapons served to freeze borders in place and prevent total war, while the Kalashnikov percolated from state to state, army to army, group to group and man to man and became the principal firearm used for modern war and political violence, in all of its many forms. The West fixated, understandably and naturally, on nuclear weapons and their risks and developed an enormous intellectual, diplomatic and material infrastructure to deal with them and work against their proliferation. Meanwhile, the Kalashnikov—and many arms that complement it in the field—were doing the killing and still are. I sometimes ask people, when we talk about the big-ticket weapons as opposed to the weapons that actually see the real use: How many people have you known, or even heard of, who were killed by a submarine? How many by a nuclear bomb? The Kalashnikov, in actual practice over the past 60-plus years, has proven much more deadly than these things. But it gets a lot less official attention.
Everything you'd ever want to know about Tsar Bomba, the USSR's 100 megaton nuclear bomb. With video!
Google has offered a checklist to help you protect your Gmail account. Most of the suggestions can be applied to other kinds of accounts as well.
Whenever you hear someone say that "the situation has gotten so serious that the government has had to step in" you can be absolutely certain that the primary cause of "the situation" is, in fact, the government itself.
