Save the planet: put your dick away

I do wish that the species homo sapiens would collectively grow up, wake up and smell the morning coffee. Also, smell the nasty smell coming from the pretty sandpit that spawned them and realise just how much they've been shitting in their own playpen.

It pisses me off, quite frankly, to hear all this specious nonsense that's currently being bandied about on the subject of climate change. No, wait, don't lynch me yet. See, I agree with the 'experts' that it's happening. It's bloody obvious that it's happening! In fact, it was bloody obvious from the start that it was going to happen at some point; the only question was when. You burn more and more, releasing the exhaust into the atmosphere (where the hell else can it go?!), and of course it's going to reach a saturation point, especially if you reduce the system's capacity to remove the pollutants.

But what pisses me off in particular is humanity's blatant and total inability to trace back to the root of the problem

THEMSELVES.

THAT MEANS YOU, YES.

Is that clear? It's about as clear as I can make it on here.

Back when the human population was limited by such things as high infant mortality, puerperal fever and the inability to grow obscene quantities of victuals, this wasn't such a problem. But then medicine improved, along came sulphanilamide and all those other wonderful drugs that were dished out by the handfuls in the postbellum period (causing another set of problems, natch), the amount of food blossomed... and we lived longer, for the most part. And, indeed, in much of the Western world we were encouraged to have children. That's where the Baby Boomers and Gen-X come from.

And, here in Britain at least, we're still encouraged to keep breeding. The number of young people walking around with children who are still children themselves beggars belief. I want to slap them and encourage them to take up some other occupation besides fucking themselves raw with anything that's handy -- I mean, are they really so stupid that they can't think of anything else to do besides smoke, drink, whinge and fuck?!

But back to the main thread of this. The point is that the root cause of global warming is humanity's inability to accept that it's overpopulating the planet. It needs to get over itself, and the religious imperatives laid upon it, fast. Better still, now. Industry has grown to such an extent that it's largely mechanised and automated. In the UK now there are roughly 60 million people - that's far too many! 300 million in the US - why?! There's no requirement for so many humans, and all they are doing is draining the resources of the planet.

Have you ever seen Earth from space? Have you? No? Well, go and look at her. She's beautiful. Get onto Google Earth, if you can't find a picture, and look at her. See how small she is in the middle of all that space. See how small you are... and consider how much damage you're causing to that planet that's so much bigger than you are, and still so infinitesimally, excruciatingly tiny in the midst of all that black nothingness around it. Remember: it's your home. It's our home. It's all of our homes... It gives you air to breathe and food to eat. It gives you the beauty of sunrise and sunset and the majesty of thunderstorms. There are places of heart-stopping beauty and creatures of divine ugliness.

For the love of the planet, fucking stop breeding. Fuck if you must, but stop breeding. Reduce the head count.

Just think: if humans were rabbits, they'd be culled. (Anybody remember myxomatosis?) At current levels, humans are nothing more than a macroscopic parasite. And I'm waiting for Dame Nature to come up with her sulphanilamide, and sort them all out.

Night thoughts

Strange what comes to you when you're staring at the ceiling and trying to go to sleep.

I don't sleep easily, and never have. One of the downsides to this is near-constant mild fatigue. One of the few upsides is that it gives you lots of time to think about random things that the Real World (tm) keeps your mind from wandering on to. A little light prompting is required, of course, and that night it was a trailer on the BBC World Service about a programme exploring the nature of infinity, from the point of view of mathematics. Infinity, it said, is a concept and not a number, and as a result isn't quantifiable, and, arguably, doesn't exist.

Fascinating and heady stuff for 01:59 BST, I'm sure you'll all agree.

So, there I was, pondering the nature of infinity through the six electromechanical chimes (five short, one long) of the BBC hour signal.

If infinity doesn't exist (thought I to myself), then it's nothing, and since nothing is zero then ∞=0.

... how profound, wizard!

Then my mind meandered a little further, well off the beaten track and into the forest of the far beyond.

Remember those two rules we were taught in primary school or thereabouts, by our maths teachers and our calculators?

1. The result of dividing any number by itself is 1; n/n=1.
2. The result of dividing any number by zero is infinity; n/0=-E-, said our calculators; 'Cannot divide by zero' says the computer. Rubbish, of course you can, but you just can't work with the result.

Anyway, back to a sleepless night in my lair.

If you divide infinity by 1, I thought, then the obvious answer is infinity: ∞/1=∞, logically. Similarly, 1/1=1, and o/1=0. On that I agreed with myself.

What if you divide by infinity? Well, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says that, given as infinity is such a large number, any number divided by it is going to be as near to zero as makes no odds, so we get 1/∞=0, 0/∞=0 and ∞/∞=0. Which doesn't make sense, really, since we know from statement 1 above that any number divided by itself yields a quotient of 1; so ∞/∞=1.

That's treating infinity as a number. Treat it as a concept, as per the World Service, and we get ∞/∞ → 0/0= ...

... and there my mind stopped, caught in a paradox. What do we get?

Any number divided by itself yields a quotient of 1. (Check.) But any number divided by 0 yields a quotient of infinity. (Check.) And any number divided by infinity yields a quotient of 0. (Check.)

So if ∞/0=∞ and ∞/∞=0 (or 1), does that mean that 0=1=∞?