Three Weeks Until The End Of The World!

Have you started preparing for the apocalypse? If so, I congratulate you on your responsible preparedness. If not, I lambaste you for your irresponsible lack of preparedness!

This is serious, people! Unlike all of the other times I've warned of impending doom, this time the doom is ACTUALLY ABOUT TO IMPEND!

For those who care to know. I have begun my preparations for the end of the world and the post-apocalyptic nightmare that is to follow. From a source that shall remain nameless, I have acquired a year's supply of vintage Crystal Pepsi, which I have been informed will be a sought-after barterable currency in the world to come.

I have also stockpiled the obvious foodstuffs such as canned goods and canned noodles and can openers. And in case I need to perform emergency surgeries or harvest organs from the recently apocalypsed, I have a full supply of home medical supplies (most acquired legally).

And I also have four cases of cheap vodka with which to drown my sorrows for however long I survive after the world as we know it is cast into utter nightmarish disorder. These may also be useful to gain acceptance into one of the cannibal motorcycle gangs that will be roaming the world after the world has ended.

I now feel reasonably assured that I have taken adequate precautions to ensure my prolonged survival in the nightmare world to come. If you have not done the same, I can only hope that you will come to your senses in the next threeweeks.

Doom!

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Science: Time-Traveling Volcanoes Are Trying To Kill Us All!

A new article in ScienceNow today proposes an absolutely frightening idea: what if volcanic eruptions could travel in time?

The article is based on a recent study on the eruption of Iceland's Laki fissure in 1783-1784. In the study, which I didn't read because I was so terrified by the abstract, lead author Anja Schmidt of the University of Leeds and her et als ask the horrifying hypothetical: What if the eruption of 1783 were to happen today instead?

The results, as you might predict, are equal parts doom and gloom: travel disruptions, global air pollution, and 142,000 additional deaths of heart disease in Europe. These problems are in addition to the spacetime paradoxes that would be generated by the 1783 eruption having not have happened in 1783, all of which would cascade to create an awful mess of the present day.

This is certainly terrifying enough. But to follow this study's premise to its illogical conclusion, it implicates that all past volcanic eruptions are not bound by the constraints of chronology. You might think you're perfectly safe from, say, the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius or the eruption of Mount Krakatau in 1883. Not anymore! You could wake up tomorrow morning to find the Toba supereruption of the Upper Pleistocene happening in your living room!

In rare circumstances, the only honorable thing to do is panic. This, I think, qualifies as one of those circumstances.

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DOOM

As you probably know already, today is the end of an era.

STS-135, The last flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis.

The day when our possibly pod-cloned President single-handedly kills our manned space program, leaving us dependent on the Communists for access to our orbiting space weaponry on the International Space Station.

It's a sad day indeed.

I don't like to delve into doom and gloom too often on this blog, but there are no other words for this. We are, in short, doomed.

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WE ALL DIED!

If you are seeing this pre-recorded, auto-posted blog post, it means that the Texan-sized planet-killer asteroid MD 2011 has plowed into the Earth and obliterated all life on the planet, including The Math Skeptic. And with the apparent exception of you. So congratulations.

This tragedy should not have been allowed to happen. We should have known that this would happen one day, and been prepared by building a solid titanium shield circling the entire globe that would deflect planet-killers like this one. Most of all, we should not have relied on inherently unreliable mathematics to "predict" the orbits of randomly-moving objects like planets and asteroids.

To those few survivors still able to read this, I wish you luck re-populating the planet and restoring human civilization. Please try to maintain order so the world does not descend into dystopian chaos like in The Book of Eli. That movie was hell of depressing.

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WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE AGAIN!!!

If you spend as much time on the internets as I do, you have no doubt heard by now of asteroid MD 2011, which is scheduled to slam into our planet today and obliterate all plant and animal life. According to unsubstantiated reports I either read or dreamt up while falling asleep in front of a Stanley Kubrick marathon, this asteroid is carrying lethal amounts of the rare isotope Balthorium-G, which will shroud the planet in a radioactive cloud for 93 years.

Of course, NASA and the usual crowd of alarmism-deniers is saying that there's no cause for alarm, and that this giant rectangular planet-killer is going to miss the planet and even if it were to hit us it'd be too small to reach the ground and would likey burn up in the atmosphere. Exactly what you'd expect them to say if they were covering up our impending doom in order to prevent mass panic. And since we already know from unstantiated and possibly apocryphal reports that NASA has instructed all employees to take contingency measures and report to the nearest FEMA resettlement camp, it MUST be true.

As always, the Math Skeptic would like to point out that this tragedy could have been avoided were we not so horribly dependant on numbers to predict the orbital paths of near-Earth asteroids. Unfortunately, it is far too late to do anything about it now. The only responsible thing to do is PANIC.

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Congress Caves In to the Numerist Agenda!

For more than 20 years now, the mathematicians and scienticians and assorted geeks in the nerd-o-sphere have been celebrating an unofficial secular sacrilegious holiday known as Pi Day every March 14th.

That is, it was unofficial until now. After what I can only assume was an elephantesimal lobbying effort by Big Arithmetic, Congress has gone and officially designated today as Pi Day for 2009.

This non-binding resolution just shows how pervasive the reach of the global scientifico-numeric cabal is in our government and society. As if it's not bad enough that we already celebrate a holiday named for a number on July 4th, but now we have to celebrate a holiday for an irrational number on March 14th.

Shame on you, Congress!

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WE'RE ALL DOOMED!!!!!!!!!

And it's not cause he's black, ok?

Let's just get that straight.

It's cause he's probably an android alien pod-clone programmed to destroy the global economy and send the world into conflict and chaos while simultaneously weakening our defense forces and promoting homosexualism to make it easier for the aliens to invade.

NOT because he's black.

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WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!

Well, folks, as I predicted, the Y2K "Millennium Bug" is already wreaking havoc on the globe. Shoppers in the UK are just the first victims. Beginning at midnight on January 1, 2000, power stations will literally shut down, airplanes will literally fall out of the sky, and nuclear weapons will literally launch themselves when their onboard computers reset to 1900 and create a General Fault Alarm.

Trust me, I know this stuff. I worked for computers.

Luckily, I've prepared for this eventuality, having spent the better part of the 1990s stocking up on canned goods and Crystal Pepsi. I've also created my own seed bank so that I can re-start agriculture after the Y2Kpocalypse, fortified my property with twelve-foot-high cinderblock walls, and stocked up on sandbags to launch at marauding attackers with my homemade trebuchet.

I'm prepared. I've been listening to me. Hopefully some of you have been listening to me as well, and have taken similar precautions.

I'll try to continue posting after the Y2Kpocalypse, but I make no guarantees, as both the Internet and the global power grid will be literally on fire. So if this turns out to be my last post ever, I wish you all blessings and luck for the future, however bleak it turns out to be.

The Math Skeptic, signing off.

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Incoming Comet A Harbinger of Doom?

Greetings, fellow Math Skeptics! On today's B.L.O.G. entry, I have some frightening tidings to report. It seems the recently-discovered Comet Kohoutek is coming to destroy us all. My source? None other than God himself. Speaking through David Berg, founder of Children of God Ministries.

When a man of the cloth says the world is going to end, it usually comes true. So we have good reason to be cautious.

God was a bit unclear about the date of the impending apocalypse, unfortunately, so Berg isn't quite sure when The End is coming:

IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE 21st (OF SOME MONTH). It either begins on the 21st or it ends on the 21st. Of course it'll be at its brightest--between November 21 and January 21, and really from December 11 to January 21 is the main course. Either that or December 21.

The obvious take-away message is that we must beware of all dates numbered 21. Which is fine for me - I beware of all dates from 1-20 and 22-31 as well. The fact that we use numbers to denote our days is a clear sign that our society has fallen into depravity and evil as a society. Also, homosexualism.

But I do fear for those unsaved among you who have not-yet learned to distrust numbers as I. The poor numeralists out there continue unabated in their digit-using ways completely oblivious to the cometary ruin they bring upon society.

I implore all my readers to heed David Berg's multiple warnings, and repent from their numeralist ways. If we all preach the gospel if numberlessness, perhaps the Great Comet Kohoutek will decide to spare us.

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