Doomsday scenarios in 1959 and 2008

Jeff Poor of the Business & Media Institute covered the presentation on April 10 in “World News with Charles Gibson” of a piece on the high increases, in the last year, of the cost of food worldwide. ABC noted that 80% of the income of third world people goes for food, in contrast to 10% for America, leaving one to figure out who gets really destroyed if the cost of food goes up 150% (or more).

Poor talked about the problem of obtaining biofuels from food crops: “Those biofuels are in fact a large part of the equation,” ABC correspondent David Muir added. “Many farmers around the world, who once grew wheat and rice, now grow corn and sugar cane instead to produce ethanol, a more lucrative market.”

Apart from the ABS News discussion of world wide foot shortages, one of the more depressing presentations recently was the choice of PBS to broadcast "On the Beach" the night before Easter 2008. What were they thinking? -->

In this 1959 doomsday classic, a U.S. submarine led by Capt. Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck) surfaces near Melbourne, where the passengers learn that nuclear war has wiped out most of humanity. And it won't be long before radiation kills the Australians as well.

Also depressing is discussion of a recent IBM patent application -->

IBM wants to patent a means of responding to hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves, solar flares, flooding, terrorism, war, pandemics, and other situations where you would hope companies aren't worried about patents.

See published application 20080077463, System and method for optimizing the selection, verification, and deployment of expert resources in a time of chaos, Robert R. Friedlander, Hennessy, Khan and Kraemer.

First claim:

A computer implemented method for finding skills and resources for a chaotic event, the method comprising:

organizing skills data for the chaotic event;
responsive to receiving an identification of the skills and the resources required to manage the chaotic event, determining whether the skills and the resources are available;
optimizing the skills and the resources based on requirements and constraints, potential skills, and enabling resources to form optimized skills and optimized resources;
verifying availability of the optimized skills and the optimized resources; and responsive to a determination that the optimized skills and the optimized resources are unavailable, reoptimizing the optimized skills and the optimized resources.

Does anybody think this is innovative? If so, sign in below -->