Population will mightily increase, and the earth will be a garden.
Governments will be conducted with the quietude and regularity of
club committees. The interest which is now felt in politics will
be transferred to science; the latest news from the laboratory of
the chemist, or the observatory of the astronomer, or the
experimenting room of the biologist will be eagerly discussed.
…
Men will look upon this star as their fatherland; its progress
will be their ambition; the gratitude of others their reward.
…
Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed;
immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small,
mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas
which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will
become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all
the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the
forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of
systems, manufacturers of worlds.

–The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade, 1872

from Ewan’s posterous

Farrel Lifson, who started Politics.za (www.politics.za.net) in July 2003 to keep up to date with local politics, says that in the early days local blogs were few and far between. “I remember searching for South African blogs back in 2003, when I started mine, and having to sift through Google’s results trying to find one. I think at the time I managed to find two,” says Lifson.

I wonder if one of those was mine – I was using Blogger at the time (then run by Pyra before Google bought them out). My first post is dated September 2nd 2003, so it looks like I may have missed out being the first (at least still active) by a few months. This blog was never intended to be a business or attract readers, it is mainly an experimental way of record keeping and playing with new technology / software… looking back it seems my blogging premise was pretty accurate. Life was simpler then, but my reason for a fascination with online journals blogs is still the same.

When you read this journal–when you read any journal–keep in mind that there are a lot of people with something to offer you. I’ve come to believe that you can learn something from pretty much anyone who crosses your path.

Spanish authorities say the appearance of higher than normal levels of radiation in snails and other creatures shows there may be dangerous levels of plutonium and uranium below ground, and a further clean up could be necessary.

“We have to study the dirt, we have to look underground,” said Juan Antonio Rubio, director general of Spain’s energy research agency CIEMAT, which is carrying out an investigation with the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We don’t know what’s down there.”

That lead me to the story of Palomares (a fishing village in Spain near where the hydrogen bombs fell in 1966) and the story of humble but greedy fisherman Simó Orts.

After the bomb had been located, Simó Orts turned up at the First District Federal Court building in New York City with his lawyer, Herbert Brownell, formerly Attorney General of the United States under President Dwight Eisenhower, claiming salvage rights on the recovered hydrogen bomb. According to Craven:

“It is customary maritime law that the person who identifies the location of a ship to be salvaged has the right to a salvage award if that identification leads to a successful recovery. The amount is nominal, usually 1 or 2 percent, sometimes a bit more, of the intrinsic value to the owner of the thing salvaged. But the thing salvaged off Palomares was a hydrogen bomb, the same bomb valued by no less an authority than the Secretary of Defense at $2 billion — each percent of which is, of course, $20 million.”

The Air Force settled out of court.

Welcome to planet Earth. Escarglow, anyone?

[via Slashdot - Radioactive Snails Crawl Up From Beneath]