Just checking my various news feeds here as I while away the last few minutes of a long work week…
I see that Roger Bergendoff, the crackpot who was making ricin only a stone’s throw from my house, has pleaded not guilty to charges of possessing a biological toxin and various weapons. That’s interested, considering his Vegas hotel room was full of nasty little toys. Maybe his logic is that he was in the hospital at the time those things were discovered, so he technically wasn’t in possession of them. Or something.
Meanwhile, in a related story, Thomas Tholen, owner of the Riverton home where Bergendorff was brewing his poisonous crap, threw Bergendorff out after he figured out what his cousin was doing down in the basement because he “feared for his family’s safety,” but he didn’t report Bergendorff to the authorities because he didn’t want to get in trouble himself for the guns and explosives that were stored on his property. Real heroic there, Tom. He faces charges for “falsely telling federal agents he knew nothing about his cousin’s production of ricin.”
Sticking with local news, a new report from the American Lung Association places Salt Lake and Logan, Utah, in its list of the top-ten most polluted cities in the country (at least when you’re talking about short-term particle pollution). Another Utah city, Provo, shows up at number 12. You know, when three of your state’s four or five biggest cities are in the top 15 most polluted cities nationwide… well, it makes a guy proud.
The problem is the Wasatch Front’s infamous “inversions,” the cold-weather phenomenon that occurs when high-pressure zones in the upper atmosphere trap stagnant air at the bottom of our mountain valleys… which, of course, are where all the cities are located. We’ve always had cruddy air in the wintertime because of those damned inversions, but it’s gotten much, much worse in the last couple of decades, a direct result of the booming population along the Wasatch. (Briefly, for my online friends who’ve never been here, just about all of Utah’s population clusters in a line that runs north-south through the middle of the state, snuggled up nice and cozy against the Wasatch Mountains, hence “Wasatch Front.”) I have a lot of reasons for hating all the development in the Salt Lake Valley that has transformed the rural pasturelands of my youth into a wall-to-wall (literally, since we’re surrounded by mountains) subdivision, but the fact that we can’t even see our beautiful mountains for a good chunk of the year now because the air is so filthy is right up there at the top of the list. If I could only turn back the world like Superman…
Finally, a Japanese company called Cyberdine has prototyped a robotic exoskeleton called HAL which is intended to help augment human strength or move paralyzed limbs. According to this article, the thing can even operate autonomously based on data stored in an on-board computer. That all sounds really cool… unless you’re a sci-fi fan, of course. Then you can’t help but think about that other Cyberdyne and HAL and it all becomes rather ominous, doesn’t it? Hell, the exoskeleton even looks vaguely like stormtrooper armor, complete with some glowing bits like in Tron! How can an autonomous exoskeleton that looks like a stormtrooper, is built by the creators of Skynet, and is named after a murdering AI not lead to some kind of trouble?
On these happy notes, have a good Friday, everyone…
