A second Revolution Donuts location has opened here in Atlanta. I now live right between the two of them, no more than a three-minute drive to each. I like donuts. Revolution Donuts makes new and magical contributions to the donut genre. It’s a problem. I do have some self-control, but it’s in situations like this—faced with an embarrassment of plenty—that my imagination runs toward the hypothetical opposite. I’ve written about which insects you can eat when civilization stops producing donuts. This time, I decided to go full-toddler diet and learn what non-food items I could eat … [Read more...]
How to Escape a Nuclear Detonation
My focus on this blog has primarily been fantasy and sci-fi silliness, so it’s hard to give real advice and have it be taken seriously. But I promise the following is real. That's not to say it's an entirely serious post. I don’t think nukes are about to rain from the sky or that you should start underground bunker drills. However… during a different min-career I pursued (long ago), I sat through many briefings and hearings on the subject. A bit of advice from a RAND group stuck with me, and I thought I’d share—mostly because the physical and social science aspects were so … [Read more...]
Meditation: My Quest to Do Nothing
I have a busy mind. I concede that “busy” isn’t necessarily bad when it comes to brains—they’re designed for it—but there is such a thing as too busy. In any given 10-second period, my brain pings through the following thoughts/images/concepts (or something similar): What will I eat for the rest of the day? The Plaza Theater should play Big Trouble in Little China. Robots that look like turtles. Bread. The global coffee shortage is coming. It can’t really be 2016. Can it? Problems with leadership succession helped bring down the Roman Empire. Robots that look like … [Read more...]
Treasure Hunting and the Known Unknown
Treasure hunting: we’ve all thought about dropping everything and pursuing it full time. For me, it was mostly during my Indiana Jones fantasies as a kid. (He was an archaeologist, I know, but I think he managed both.) It’s wonderful to know that bits of the ancient past are still out there, buried underground or tucked behind unbroken walls. They are still finding rooms in Tutankhamun’s tomb—and presumably going inside even though it means death by shaving. I don’t run through the forest playing Indiana Jones anymore (well, rarely). But once a year or so, the story of a new … [Read more...]
What’s in Your Survival Kit?
It goes by many names. Survival kit. Go bag. Ok, maybe just the two. But this is what I want: a kit that contains everything a person needs to survive (for a time) without access to modern infrastructure, technology, or emergency services. Something that keeps you alive long enough to get help, if there is such a thing as help to be gotten. I don’t have one, so I’ve decided to make one. A survival kit can save a lost hiker, but I prefer to think of it as a “world-fall-down-go-boom” kit. Aside from societal collapse, I’m not sure what scenario I would use it in. There is no … [Read more...]