LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #43:

I SKIPPED A BEAT

_“Sometimes we go back and repeat an old mistake just so that we can remember why we moved forward.”

~ Yung Pueblo_ Did you notice it? I catched a bug that is making its rounds in Vienna and the resulting 36 hours of sickness threw my schedule into a complete disarray.

Instead of last wednesday, I’m publishing this issue of Let’s be Fwends today, and I hope the increased waiting time is compensated by the decreased temporal distance of the next issue.

Slowing down earth would be a pretty bad idea (who would have thought?)

Sometimes, slowing down everything around you is a pretty nice idea, especially when you’re about to miss an important deadline (or are sick).

But sometimes, slowing down something is a pretty bad idea. And funnily enough, the 50ies and 60ies are a real treasure trove of bad ideas.

Here’s a really nutty story that shows how deranged cold-war thinking was:

In 1960, the Air Force had the glorious idea in case of a nuclear exchange; It wanted to slow down the earths rotation so that the incoming missiles would miss their targets.

The basic concept was to strap a thousand Atlas engines (the nozzle of one of them can be seen in the picture above, just to give you an idea of the size of the project) to the ground, and fire them as the missiles approached. The rocket engines would slow down the earths rotation, and the missiles would overshoot.

Here are two basic problems with the approach:

One, it is stupid. To be able to modify the earths rotation in any meaningful degree, you would need not 1.000, but rather roughly a million billion rockets. And they would burn propellant the equivalent of roughly 500 times the mass of the earth, incinerating basically - everything.

Two, it is pointless. If you would really be able to alter the rotation of earth, you would not alter the rotation of the atmosphere, creating hurricane-force gales around the globe that would do more damage than any nuclear exchange possibly could.

But they did have a cool name for the idea. It was called “Project Retro”. Very fitting, on multiple levels.

Writing xenophobic, racist, nationalistic fake news by hand is soooo 2016

This is how I imagine social media will look like in a year or two.

There’s an algorithm for that now.

Currently, it’s not published, but everyone involved seems to agree that it can be weaponised in the next two years.

Autonomous cars will probably coordinate to form spontaneous free-parking swarms

_Maybe a bit like this, but autonomous, self-organised and on purpose._Autonomous vehicles will probably double inner city traffic. The reason is entirely rational: Parking space in city centres is very expensive. So what would any rational owner of an autonomous vehicle do? Order it to either circle around the block until they return, or simply drive home and pick them up again later.

Aaaaand one not unlikely outcome is that these vehicles will simply gang up and form huge traffic jams to avoid parking fees while still effectively not parking, but also not incurring the costs of driving.

Celebrities now and then

Here’s a great instagram account juxtaposing different images of celebrities - mostly when young and when at the height of their career. I love Michelle Obamas image. Doesn’t seem like she changed a lot, does it?

Thanks for keeping up with my outrageously nonchalant publishing schedules, dear loyal reader! High-fives for sticking with it, even when getting stuck! 🎯