Cycling On The Footpath
(You can see the post with images at http://www.chrisgreaves.com/BoggleMe/)
From “http://www.velomondial.net/velomondiall2000/PDF/TOMLINSO.PDF“:
(snip!) The type of pocket bikes zipping down the street weigh between 14 and 25 kilograms, stand less than 50 centimetres tall and cost just a few hundred dollars. Some can reach a top speed upwards of 50 kilometres an hour. (snip!)
In case you missed the earlier posting, I did a little data table showing the mass, speed and energy of a pedestrian and a pedestrian-on-cycle combination. Metric system.
| ped | bike | ped+bike | |
| MASS | 70 | 20 | 90 |
| SPEED | 6 | 50 | 50 |
| ENERGY | 1,260 | 24,375 | 111,875 |
Then I made a little chart. Dead simple. Mass and speed are below the radar.
Look at the impact, so to speak, of energy.
Don’t Brake – 2
We see it every day on the Don Valley Parkway northbound out of Toronto. The multi-lane freeway climbs the valley of the Don River.
We are passed, overtaken, by a vehicle going faster than us, which is braking while going uphill.
It makes no sense.
It is non-sense.
Or to carry on, the driver is making non-sense of their actions.
The driver is in-sane.
Converting the energy of motion into heat on the brake pads when there is perfectly good gravity all around to assist the slow-down is another way of sending money up in smoke.
Border Security
If any national agent is reading this, please relax. I’m not terribly pro- or anti- anything except logic.
“Canadians traveling to the U.S. for a day’s shopping, to visit relatives, take a holiday or on short-term work assignments would not be subject to the US-VISIT requirements.”
The text above is lifted from our local newspaper. It is a fairly typical paragraph buried in a longer item about the latest level of cross-border security measures. I am confident that a similar phrase appears in newspapers around the world, especially in locations close to national borders where there may be a significant number of daily crossings for reasons of business and work.
I am not coming out for or against cross-border security measures in this article; I do have opinions on it, but I will try to focus on the logic of the whole deal.
I think that if I were a locally (Canadian) recruited terrorist with one aim, that of hijacking an aeroplane and flying it into a U.S.A. building, at the time I crossed the border with my Canadian passport, I’d lie.
For heaven’s sake! If I plan to die tomorrow, why would I bother about lying at Lewiston?
“Purpose of visit?”.
“Just going to Buffalo for a day’s shopping.”.
“OK. Have a good day”.
Then what? At this point I am legally in the country (except for lying to immigration), in a car. I can drive to any place in the U.S.A., God bless them, and do whatever I want, be it hijacking an aeroplane, driving a car into a crowd, buying a gun and shooting lots of people, blow myself up. You name it. Carte Blanche, it is called.
Every time I see concessions for “valid” reasons, I laud the concessions, but hate the logic that assumes that the bad guys will respect the concession and play by the rules.
The simplest definition I have for a Bad Guy is “Someone who doesn’t play by the rules”.
Willie’s Knee
Willy slipped off the deck onto the lawn and broke his knee. How could that be? The lawn is soft, why should his knee break?
Here’’s why.
While the lawn is made of soft grass, the grass grows in the hard unyielding earth. Willie weighs 170 pounds if he weighs an ounce, so 170 pounds of Willie met the hard unyielding earth.
Try this thought experiment:
Imagine that you are lying on your back, legs flat, on the lawn, on the hard unyielding earth. Now imagine bringing one foot towards you so that your leg forms a triangle with the earth; your knee is raised above the level of your head.
Now let me drop a 170 pound anvil onto your knee from a height of three feet.
You don’’t like?
Of course not, but how different is that from Willie’’s mass dropping his knee onto the hard unyielding earth?
Global Warming 2
This is not about Global Warming (well, OK, maybe towards the end), it is about Logic. As usual.
On Monday, July 24, 2006 The Toronto Star quoted an Arctic resident as saying “Last June or May we reached up to 31 degrees for almost a week.”. Some northern residents blame global warming. “When you look back 20 years, it gets really hot a lot earlier.” they said. “When I was growing up I didn’t notice these kind of temperatures back then.”
Your primeval reaction will be to agree. “That’s right! I’ve noticed that too. It is much hotter now than when I was a kid”.
But that is terrible thinking. Here is why I pass judgment.
First: We are older now. When we were kids our bodies were more resilient. Now the heat we experienced fifty years ago saps our energies much more. You slow down as you get older.
Second: What ten-year old kid spends summer vacation monitoring temperature records? All we wanted was for there to be no rain so we could ride our bikes or swim at the pool all day long. Bring on the HEAT! Summer time is for fun-in-the-sun for kids.
Third: Since we were kids we have been bombarded with warnings about ultra-violet light, skin cancer, and a host of other sun-related dangers. Whether or not these dangers are real, today we are made aware of them, and this colours our thinking, lending weight to an undercurrent of “sun equals hot is bad”, so that “hot days” become equated with terrible things about to happen.
Fourth: This whole business of human-memory records is at fault. “ … it gets really hot a lot earlier”. You will read too that “It was not so hot back then”, and this is borne out by weather readings that proclaim “Hottest July 18th since 1911”.
Of course!
In any span of a hundred years, one year is going to have the hottest July 18th of them all. Right now it might be 1911’s turn. But prior to 1911, perhaps the hottest July 18th in the previous hundred years was in 1812, and maybe it was hotter than July 18th 1911, in which case there would be an argument for global cooling.
Fifth: Try changing “When you look back 20 years, it gets really hot a lot earlier.” To read “When you look back 19 years, it gets really hot a lot earlier.” Is there much difference really in the implication? No. The implication is still “It was hotter back then”. Now try “When you look back 18 years, it gets really hot a lot earlier.” Different? Not really. Continue in this manner and you will arrive at “When you look back 1 year, it gets really hot a lot earlier.” Now that seems ridiculous. (You can try the same thing backwards, 21 years, 22 years etc.). There is nothing special about the number “twenty”, but clearly if we only go back one year, we have about a 50-50 chance that last year was hotter. Global Warming notwithstanding. In any short span we will see random fluctuations. And in any long span we will still see random fluctuations.
OK. Here’s what I think about Global Warming:
(a) Temperatures have been on a general rise since 11,000 years ago. That’s when the Wisconsin Ice Sheet melted, leaving the Great Lakes and an orphaned Ohio River.
(b) Prior to, say, 15,000 years ago, temperatures were on a general decline as we headed towards that two-mile thick chunk of ice atop Ontario. Prior to that they went up. Prior to that they went down. It is what they do.
(c) Regardless of whether or not Global Warming is a significant threat, I feel that humans are making too bad a mark on the environment. We burn too much, waste too much, pollute too much, and so on. I’m all for what the Global Warmists recommend – use less energy, reuse artifacts, slow down just a bit – but not at the expense of logic.
So, turn off that light when not in use. Re-use grey water for the house plants. Eat smaller meals more frequently and waste less food. And so on. You will, of course, read more at www.chrisgreaves.com/sufe.
There Are No Corporate Decisions
Again, someone lamenting Bad Corporate Decisions that, in this case, cause harm to the environment. (Sometimes it is causing Harm To Babies, sometimes To Animals, sometimes To Me).
There are no corporate decisions.
Corporations (and governments) can not make decisions.
Only individuals can make decisions.
Individuals can sway the minds of other individuals within the corporation, and if those other individuals are the governing body of the corporation, then they can change the course of the corporation.
But when a worker tosses good furniture into a 10-metre dumpster, that worker has made a decision – to obey the boss because the worker needs to keep their job. And the boss made a decision – that the office desk should be tossed.
Attacking corporations is futile.
Changing the way individuals think shows great promise.
P.S. But see also this article of Saturday, April 02, 2011
Crash That Claimed Three Lives
You have read this in your local paper this weekend, I am sure:
“Police continue to investigate a crash that claimed three lives on the ramp from Interstate 595 to the Airport. The driver apparently lost control and the vehicle rolled over and slammed into the concrete barrier along the ramp None of [the occupants] were wearing seat belts. The women were thrown partially out of the vehicle and were crushed by it. The man was thrown from the vehicle and fell onto the median of Federal Highway about 50 feet below.”
I have problems with this kind of report.
It was not the crash that claimed the lives.
It was the fact that none of the occupants was wearing a seat belt.
There is no second-guessing this one. The time has long passed to deny the what-ifs.
If we are prepared to believe that two occupants died because they were crushed between the vehicle and the concrete outside the vehicle, then we must be prepared to believe that they would not have been crushed had they been wearing seat belts.
Think carefully.
If they died because of something that happened to them when they were outside the vehicle, then simple logic tells us that had they been wearing seat belts, they would not have found themselves outside of the vehicle, and hence something could not have happened to them when they were outside the vehicle.
Now, something might have happened to them inside the vehicle had they been wearing seat belts, but it probably would have been less deadly than getting crushed between a heavy SUV and a mass of concrete designed to stop a heavy SUV going anywhere.
And it surely would not have been as bad as falling fifty feet onto a highway below.
If you want to play the what-if game, you can start by trying “Would the driver have lost control had he been wearing a seat belt?“.
Don’t Brake – 1
We see it every day.
We hear it first.
From somewhere the sound of engine noise increasing as a vehicle accelerates, seconds later we see the vehicle brake at the red stop lights.
I see the lights turn amber then red before the vehicle accelerates, I hear the vehicle accelerate, then see it brake at the red stop light.
Why?
It makes no sense.
It is non-sense.
Or to carry on, the driver is making non-sense of their actions.
The driver is in-sane.
Burning gasoline solely in order to convert the energy of motion into heat on the brake pads is another way of sending money up in smoke.
Cycling On The Footpath
From “http://www.velomondial.net/velomondiall2000/PDF/TOMLINSO.PDF“:
(snip!)Overall, the most significant secondary factor was cycling on the footpath or crosswalk. This behaviour was most frequent in collisions where the motorist was turning right at a red light (86%) or emerging from a private drive (81%). (snip!) In these situations it is clear that the cyclists would have been better off in the roadway.(snip!)
I’ve been a cyclist since age 10, in desert and urban areas, so I claim to know what it feels like to be cycling on a busy urban street and feel threatened. The temptation to cycle on the footpath is strong.
But cycling on the footpath can lead to death. It is easy to see why this might be:
Drivers are not expecting traffic at more than 4 Km/hour on the footpath. Reversing from my driveway I check visibility as far as I need to ensure I don’t run over a pedestrian walking towards me at 4 km/hour. I don’t anticipate a cyclist at 20 km/hour, I don’t extend my visibility by a factor of five.
Drivers making a right turn at stop lights have checked ahead of themselves for pedestrians. No pedestrians being evident, the turn is prepared and executed. Meanwhile a cyclist is bopping along at 30 Km/hour from the driver’s blind spot, and launches of the footpath into the intersection just as the driver has completed the glance-to-left. Wham! Death.
I’ve been a pedestrian since the age of 3. I walk at 4 KM/hour.
When I meet a cyclist on the footpath traveling at 20 KM/hour, I’m at a serious dis-advantage. The cyclist, traveling five times my speed has at least 25 times my energy. That’s because energy (½mv2) is proportional to the mass of the body and the square of the velocity. Five times the velocity, twenty-five times the energy. Factor in the extra mass of the bicycle and I’m at serious risk.
Which makes for a second reason for me wanting cyclists off our footpaths.
In the first place, cycling on the footpath is dangerous for them.
In the second place, it is dangerous for me.
Boy Drowns In Swollen Creek
“An 8-year-old boy drowned yesterday after he and his two cousins were swept off the banks of a creek, despite the heroic efforts of two men who dove in to rescue the trio. Two heavy rainstorms swelled the normally calm creek by more than half a metre and the strong currents hampered rescue efforts. The first passerby was able to grab the brother and sister. Despite the valiant efforts of the second man, the 8-year-old boy, who weighed 60 pounds, was swept away.”
Here is the high-school physics behind all this; teach this to your children, your friends, fellow-adults who wish to attempt heroic rescues: -
The energy of a moving body is given by the formula ½mv2, read that as “half emm vee squared”, where m is the mass of the body and v is the velocity.
If you remember nothing else, remember this: -
Energy is proportional to the square of the velocity.
Double the speed, four times the energy.
Triple the speed nine times the energy.
If the creek normally flows at a languid 3 Km/hour and after heavy rain it is flowing at 12 Km/hour, like it or not you have four times the velocity, so four-squared, also known as sixteen times the energy.
It’s not just flowing faster.
It has sixteen times as much energy available to sweep you off your feet.
Here’s the kicker: -
The mass of a flowing body of water is proportional to the velocity.
If the creek is flowing twice as fast as normal, then twice as much water is available at any given time, so there is twice as much mass.
Triple the speed triple the mass.
So the energy, composed of mass and square of velocity is actually proportional to the cube of the velocity.
If you remember nothing else, remember this:-
Energy of a flow of water is proportional to the cube of the velocity.
Double the speed, eight times the energy.
Triple the speed twenty-seven times the energy.
No wait!
There’s more!
If the creek is normally four inches deep, and runs twelve inches deep after a rain storm, that gives it triple the depth.
Three times as much water available at any time to sweep you off your feet.
If the creek is flowing three times its normal speed (27 times the energy) and is as well three times as deep, think eighty-one times as much energy.
One 8-year-old-boy might fight another 8-year-old-boy and win.
No 8-year-old-boy can or should hope to beat eighty-one 8-year-old-boys.
Now you know why trucks get swept away trying to cross the creek when the creek is flowing strongly. “It’s only twelve inches, we can get through that”.
Wrong!
Now you know why police use fire-hoses to knock down unruly crowds.
Take another look at the creek once the floods have died down. Did you ever wonder how those huge boulders came to be there?
Now you know. Try lifting one of them. Of course you can’t.
But if they were under water, they’d be lighter than the volume of water they displace, meaning less work for you to do to move them along.
But in the main, they get carried their by the energy in the water when the creek is flowing in flood.
Just like an 8-year-old-boy who is swept off his feet.
Another Airplane Crash
News arrives of another airplane crash, this time with tragic results.
As a technologically-inclined person I am greatly disturbed by this.
The days of brute-force controls are gone (“He yanked back on the control stick until his knuckles were bleeding …”); all is controlled through electrical signals, as are most of your motor-car controls -– certainly the steering and gear change mechanisms.
Why then can we not detect pilot failure (as we do for railway locomotives) and assign a test-pilot to land the airplane? Or a robot for that matter?
When Things Have Gone Wrong, why do we rely on plastic oxygen masks dangling in front of a comatose pilot? How frustrating is it for a trained jet fighter pilot to watch helplessly from fifty feet away, knowing that he’d have a chance of a landing, if only he could obtain the controls. And yes, I know that a fighter jet is different from a passenger jet. Haven’t you ever fantasized that you’d be the heroic passenger who gets instructions from the control tower and saves lives?
Where are the gizmos that allow us to shut off car engines wirelessly? Why aren’t we controlling airplanes remotely, especially in times of incapacity?
I’ll bet that the answer this time is economics, not legal-political. There is a price to retrofit low-cost remote controls on every paid-passenger aircraft, and the price will be huge in terms of dollars. It can’t be a serious legal-political problem. The U.S. alone ought to be embracing this as an anti-terror option. “You can’t steal our planes, because we hold the remote control”.
You are a passenger on an airplane. You’ve learned or reasoned that the pilots are dead or unconscious. How do you feel about a trained test-pilot half-way around the world bringing your aeroplane in to land on a long runway by video-control, with emergency personnel standing by?
Better than making another hole in another mountain, I bet.
More thoughts on technology
On Saturday I drove from my home, alongside one of Canada’s busiest highways, to the north of Toronto, up one of Canada’s busiest highways. You’ve seen what I saw -– a vehicle in the fast lane passes a slower vehicle, then signals to change into the slower lane, and changes into the slower lane. Leaving the turn signal indicator blinking uselessly.
Less-than-uselessly, because those of us seeing the indicator assume that another lane-change is about to take place, and we base our decisions on a lie.
I wondered what would happen if, after 60 seconds of turn-signal activity, the car’s computer switched off the radio, which I assume has drowned out the noise of the signal repeater. Or it could make a noise if the radio was not on. Either way, the driver would have an audio signal that something needed attention.
I regularly watch emergency vehicles tweet their sirens behind drivers who appear oblivious of the noise. Could it be that they too have their radio cranked up so loud that they can’t hear the siren through the closed-window air-conditioned car?
Could the emergency vehicles send a signal to cars within 100 metres or so, so that radios would be temporarily subdued. Again, the sudden loss of signal ought to be enough to alert a driver that something, somewhere, needs extra attention.
Global Warming
On Jun. 30, 2006 The Toronto Star reported that “Global warming will be the greatest crisis facing humankind in the year 2020, according to a national poll of Canadians …”.
Now, the national poll may be accurate in that it asked Canadians and recorded their answers.
The sad truth is that Canadians are routinely told that Global Warming is a problem, and that it is a human problem. That’s an easy issue to debate. I believe that Canadians are merely parroting what they have been told.
I also believe geologists who tell me that the Wisconsin Ice Sheet was responsible for the sharp about-turn in the Ohio river just NW of Pittsburgh, and that the Wisconsin ice sheet began melting about 11,000 years ago. That is, for the past 11,000 years we have been moving from a 2-mile thick layer of ice over what is now Toronto to power cuts as all the air-conditioners are switched on.
I believe too the geologists, using tools they’ve borrowed from the physicists, who tell me that parts of the Laurentian Shield surrounding Hudson’s Bay are still rebounding from the weight of ice.
It’s a slow process, is geology.
There should be no doubt that over the past 11,000 years there has been a trend towards warmer times. 11,000 years is not a blink in the eye of humankind, let alone mammalian-kind, let alone invertebrate-time. It is about 0.000275 PERECENT of the life of our planet. Whoosh!
Yesterday it rained heavily here in Toronto. Today there is not a trace of cloud on the radar maps.
If my time interval is too short I should be screaming that we are all heading for a terrible drought, but hang about and we’ll have another massive thunderstorm next week, part of a major road will be washed out, and we can all scream “flooding!’ at the top of our lungs.
Choose your time interval and place your bets, or start your arguments. But to say “Global warming” without specifying a time interval is ridiculous.
Part of the debilitating argument is that human kind is to blame. And that we humans should do something about it.
That too is an easy argument to demolish. Let’s look at it carefully and logically.
If humans cause Global warming, then humans must have been doing something thousands of years ago, right?
No? Ah!
So you think that it’s not humans as such, but the industrial effect of humans – cars, machines, jet planes and so on. That is to say “The industrial revolution”, but what sparked that?
Population growth; no more, and no less.
Humans by themselves can’t cause global warming, but perhaps humans in large numbers have an effect.
If so, then the problem is not humans, but “population growth of humans”, and so the solution would be to reduce and diminish the population and its growth. That will take time, but it could be done.
But it won’t be done, and so we must look at what else will be happening.
Long before the planet’s temperature rises another 1 degree Celsius on average, long before London finally disappears under the waves, we, humans on this planet will have run out of fresh water. We don’t have enough, it’s not in the right places, and we waste it.
Long before massive droughts and floods spark mass migrations, we will have wars about who has the rights to fresh water.
Canadians seem to be concerned about “the environment, pollution and the need for new energy technologies”, somewhat concerned about “health care” and “Quebec separation”
The poll came close to a true concern, but sheered off tangentially with “asked whether the glass is half full or half empty, a whopping 82 per cent took the optimistic view and said half full.
Wrong.
Utterly wrong.
Canadians are sandwiched between a large supply of fresh water and a thirsty well-armed nation; well-armed economically as well as in the military sense.
The poll is not looking so far ahead that “it ends up in the realm of science fiction.”
You think not?
Make a chart of population growth over any interval further back from 1900. What do you see?
Now make a chart of temperature rise, from any factual or hypothetical source. What do you see?
Which of the two seems to be out of control?
Population growth alone is capable of sparking a war from each and every misery known to man, from stress, noise, thirst, hunger, space, you name it.
As human numbers rise, tempers flare. Think “road rage” but not on the shoulders of a highway.
Think Road Rage across every nation on the planet.
Driver Dies In Accident
You’ve read this in your local paper this weekend, I’m sure:
“A 39-year-old Rnohhtura man was killed early Monday morning after his truck lost control in Durham Region, police said. The driver of the vehicle was heading south, at around 12:30 a.m. Monday when he lost control when trying to change lanes. The car swerved onto the gravel shoulder and flipped over. Neither of the vehicle’s occupants were wearing seatbelts, police said. Speed and alcohol are believed to be factors in the accident, police said. A 22-year-old man who was a passenger in the truck suffered minor injuries.”
Yes, I’ve scrambled the names.
I read this in my dictionaries this weekend:
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998): Accident: An event that is without apparent cause, or is unexpected.
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1935): Accident: An event that takes place without one’s foresight or expectation.
The Winston Simplified Dictionary (1929): Accident: An unexpected or unforeseen event.
Webster’s English Dictionary (2003): Unexpected occurrence.
New Webster’s Dictionary (1994): Accidental: Happening by chance.
There is nothing in the newspaper report to hint at lack of foresight or expectation.
We have all been minding our own business and exclaimed “Just LOOK at that idiot …”. We exclaim our prediction, and that means there is foresight.
Police said no seat-belts; police said alcohol, speed. Come on! Really! Who is surprised?
I remain firmly convinced that there are no accidents on the roads. None. Not one. Zero percent. Not 0.00001, but a big fat ZERO.
A couple of years back a cow fell on a car as the car emerged from a tunnel. Unforeseeable by the driver, for sure, but not by the farmer. Not an accident. Not even an accident waiting to happen.
A collision.
A collision is defined as any event that finds any part of the vehicle other than the tread of the tyres, in contact with anything other than the defined driving area of the roadway. For most of us that is the bitumen to the left of the white line, to the right of the yellow line.
You stray outside those lines, it is by definition a collision. You graze a post, it is a collision. You run over a pop can, it is a collision. Any contact with a pedestrian or cyclist is by definition a collision.
There are no accidents.
There are only collisions.
And that means that every one of them, one hundred percent, are foreseeable and therefore are avoidable.
It’s time to put the insurance companies out of business.
Start by writing to your local newspaper, radio and TV stations.
Global Warming 3
On Jun. 30, 2006 The Toronto Star reported that “Global warming will be the greatest crisis facing humankind in the year 2020, according to a national poll of Canadians …”.
Now, the national poll may be accurate in that it asked Canadians and recorded their answers.
The sad truth is that Canadians are routinely told that Global Warming is a problem, and that it is a human problem. That’s an easy issue to debate. I believe that Canadians are merely parroting what they have been told.
I also believe geologists who tell me that the Wisconsin Ice Sheet was responsible for the sharp about-turn in the Ohio river just NW of Pittsburgh, and that the Wisconsin ice sheet began melting about 11,000 years ago. That is, for the past 11,000 years we have been moving from a 2-mile thick layer of ice over what is now Toronto to power cuts as all the air-conditioners are switched on.
I believe too the geologists, using tools they’ve borrowed from the physicists, who tell me that parts of the Laurentian Shield surrounding Hudson’s Bay are still rebounding from the weight of ice. It’s a slow process, is geology.
There should be no doubt that over the past 11,000 years there has been a trend towards warmer times. 11,000 years is not a blink in the eye of humankind, let alone mammalian-kind, let alone invertebrate-time. It is about 0.000275 PERCENT of the life of our planet.
Whoosh!
Yesterday it rained heavily here in Toronto. Today there is not a trace of cloud on the radar maps. If my time interval is too short I should be screaming that we are all heading for a terrible drought, but hang about and we’ll have another massive thunderstorm next week, part of a major road will be washed out, and we can all scream “flooding!’ at the top of our lungs.
Choose your time interval and place your bets, or start your arguments. But to say “Global Warming” without specifying a time interval is ridiculous.
Part of the debilitating argument is that humans are to blame. And that we humans should do something about it.
That too is an easy argument to demolish. Let’s look at it carefully and logically.
If humans cause Global Warming, then humans must have been doing something thousands of years ago, right?
No? Ah! So you think that it’s not humans as such, but the industrial effect of humans – cars, machines, jet planes and so on. That is to say “The industrial revolution”, but what sparked that? Population growth; no more, and no less.
Humans by themselves can’t cause global warming, but perhaps humans in large numbers have an effect.
If so, then the problem is not humans, but “population growth of humans”, and so the solution would be to reduce and diminish the population and its growth. That will take time, but it could be done.
But it won’t be done, and so we must look at what else will be happening.
Long before the planet’s temperature rises another 1 degree Celsius on average, long before London finally disappears under the waves, we, humans on this planet will have run out of fresh water. We don’t have enough, it’s not in the right places, and we waste it.
Long before massive droughts and floods spark mass migrations, we will have wars about who has the rights to fresh water.
Canadians seem to be concerned about “the environment, pollution and the need for new energy technologies”, somewhat concerned about “health care” and “Quebec separation”
The poll came close to a true concern, but sheered off tangentially with “asked whether the glass is half full or half empty, a whopping 82 per cent took the optimistic view and said half full.
Wrong. Utterly wrong.
Canadians are sandwiched between a large supply of fresh water and a thirsty well-armed nation; well-armed economically as well as in the military sense.
The poll is not looking so far ahead that “it ends up in the realm of science fiction.”
You think not?
Make a chart of population growth over any interval further back from 1900. What do you see?
Now make a chart of temperature rise, from any factual or hypothetical source. What do you see?
Which of the two seems to be out of control?
Population growth alone is capable of sparking a war from each and every misery known to man, from stress, noise, thirst, hunger, space, you name it.
As human numbers rise, tempers flare. Think “road rage” but not on the shoulders of a highway.
Think “Road Rage” across every nation on the planet.
