EXTRAS

Tattoo | Blog Tour | Stranger Than Fiction

Tattoo

Do you need a tattoo? I think you do.

Send me your mailing address and I'll send you a tattoo. Just like that. I won't use your info for anything other than mailing you a tattoo. I won't keep it, sell it, rent it or do anything else with it to annoy you. I won't show up at your door, either (unless you invite me over.) I'll only send you the tat. Promise.

When you get your tattoo put it on and post a picture of it on my facebook page. Fun, wow.

SEND YOUR ADDRESS HERE: rixwrites@deborahrix.com

Stranger Than Fiction

When I was writing The Laws of Motion I did a lot of research because I didn't want to randomly make stuff up. At least not all of it.

Sometimes I got a bit obsessive, like wanting to know exactly where in the sky the sun would be on a particular day, at a particular location, in about 100 years, and how long the shadows would be and in which direction.

But I did find out a lot of interesting things, too.

SPOILER ALERT—If you haven't read EXTERNAL FORCES yet these links might be spoilers.

SLAVERY

Here's this scary calculator that will tell you how many slaves work for you based on your lifestyle. Salvery exists now, not just in my imagined future.

Calculator

ECLIPSE

There's a doohickey in my books called an espenak. I named it after Fred Espenak at NASA. I hope he doesn't mind. He made all the predictions in the Five Millennium Catalogue of Solar Eclipses—1999-+3000. It's pretty awesome—not awesome like, hey cool, but awesome like inspiring jaw-dropping awe.

NASA Eclipse Web Site

METEOR

In the 2025 of my future, a half-mile long meteor known as God's Fury crashes into the Arabian Sea. Here's what would happen depending on how far away you are.

100 miles—344 millisecond s for thermal radiation to hit you. 3rd degree burns on most of your body, newspapers and grass would ignite. 8 minutes to hear it, loud enough to be painful. 19 minutes for tsunami up to 433 feet amplitude

2000 miles—21/2 hours to hear it, 7 hours for tsunami up to 20 feet amplitude

4000 miles— 51/2 hours after impact the sound will be as loud as heavy traffic. 13 hours after impact the tsunami will have covered all of Europe, Asia and Africa and could still be up to 10 feet amplitude.

Simulate your own meteor strike. Now seriously, who doesn't want to do this?

Crater Impact Simulator
Impact: Earth!

RELIGION vs SCIENCE

I created a future where religious belief has corrupted scientific fact. Well, it's not so much in the future, it's happening right now.

Scientist Bill Nye debated Creationist Ken Ham in February 2014. Following the debate Ken Ham used Genesis to "debunk" Nye's arguments.
The debate

EUGENICS

In my future, one hundred years from now, eugenics is used to manipulate evolution, I call it Regenesis. Currently, we have Human Genetic Engineering. You can read all about it at Scitable, a library of scientific overviews from the folks at Nature.

Less than a hundred years ago the eugenics movement was building in the United States...

...followed by the Nazi Eugenics Programs.

And today...

"Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without required state approvals, The Center for Investigative Reporting has found." Read the article.

Who deserves to be born? "Positive selection" is here in a story from the New York Times.

HUNGER

The biggest indicator for food security is how many days a population can be fed on existing carry-over stock. Currently, the global average is somewhere around 74 days. And that's without a massive influx of refugees looking for food and shelter.

Info on hunger from the UN's World Food Organization.

"Food is the new oil and land is the new gold," says Lester Brown, an environmental analyst and president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. Read the article in The Guardian.

Check out this infographic on eating grasshoppers

OTHER STUFF

I didn't make it up, it's real. Inside Norway's 'Doomsday' seed vault, a story from National Geographic.

I did make some of this up, but not because it isn't possible. Genetic Use Restriction Technology is real and can create so-called Terminator Seeds or Suicide Seeds. They produce sterile crops, forcing farmers to buy new seeds for each harvest if they want the advantages these elite modified seeds can provide. This got me wondering what would happen if our food supply was controlled by a handful of global chemical conglomerates. Here's an article from Nature that I found interesting.

Recreating the influenza that killed 50 million people in the 1918 pandemic.