Tombits…

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/08/2011 (5335 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hungering for change

“A statesman,” opined Oscar Wilde, “is a dead politician. We need more statesmen.” The world’s most populous democracy would find itself with a vast contingent of statesmen, by Wilde’s definition, if a reformer named Kisan Baburao Hazare gets his way. Anna Hazare, as he is popularly known, advocates special courts for corruption and punishment up to and including the death penalty on conviction. And India’s politicians are a notoriously corrupt group. Hazare is on a hunger strike to compel New Delhi to bring in a tougher version of proposed reform legislation. His methods are reminiscent of Mohandas K. Gandhi, another wielder of the hunger strike, though Anna appears to be somewhat fiercer than the Mahatma. But like Gandhi, the 74-year-old Hazare has galvanized tens of thousands of supporters. He had the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — and the rest of the Indian parliament, too — in a panic by midweek. Singh met with all parties in Parliament, which called on Hazare to end his hunger strike and recommended that lawmakers debate his draft of an anti-corruption bill. Hazare said he’ll continue the strike until his version of the bill passes. Critics have accused Hazare and his supporters of blackmailing the government and subverting Parliament. But contemporary critics said as bad and worse about Gandhi. And the prize is huge if Hazare succeeds in his goal. It’s well-known that poverty is the handmaiden of corruption. If Hazare can reduce its influence in India, his country could well replace China as the world’s next leading economy.

 

In space, nobody can hear you chew

Who among us has not, having been given the task of transporting the casserole from stovetop to table, tripped over the dog and spilled the whole thing on the floor, to the dismay of everyone present except the dog? You have not, you say? Never mind, there are some of us who have done it multiple times. But perhaps nobody has done it in as spectacular a fashion as Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. On Wednesday, it launched an unmanned supply ship named Progress. Its mission was to carry more than 2.5 tons of oxygen, food and fuel to the International Space Station. But Progress failed to reach orbit and instead made a nosedive into Siberia, with an explosion that blew the glass out of the windows of houses along a path 100 kilometres long. This was especially bad news because the U.S. has ended its space shuttle program and the American ships are no longer available to deliver the groceries. There are three Russians, two Americans and a Japanese on board the space station, which orbits 350 kilometres above the Earth. So will the six astronauts have to take shallow breaths, put on extra socks and go on a fashion model’s diet? Apparently not. The shuttle Atlantis delivered supplies last month, so the astronauts are in no immediate danger. A Russian space analyst estimated there were two to three months’ supplies on board, which would translate to about three weeks’ supply for the Americans if they’re like the ones we saw at the buffet earlier this year. Late this year, a commercial company in California plans to launch its own rocket and supply ship to the space station. In the meantime, Europe and Japan are expected to pick up the slack.

 

One book will end, one will keep going

Back in 1899, rumour has it, the U.S. Commissioner of Patents Charles H. Duell said it was time to close the patent office because everything that could be invented had been invented. Actually, he said no such thing, but many people maintain he did because it makes such a good story about the need for educated people to be more humble, like the unschooled rest of us. So we mostly agree that the patent office will be doing business for years to come. But what about closing the book on the Earth’s living species? It’s been 250 years since the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus devised a formal system for classifying all our fellow creatures, so is it not nearly time to stamp the job complete? Nowhere near, says a Dalhousie University scholar with the felicitous name of Boris Worm. I say felicitous because it turns out, if his study is correct, we’re pretty well done finding all the big animals like mammals and birds, but we still have a long way to go with simpler creatures like protozoa, diatoma and, one supposes, worms. Except for the sasquatch and the roc, that bird that so tormented Sinbad the Sailor, the mammal and bird classes are a done deal. But Worm has determined, in a way you and I cannot understand but that sounds persuasive to his fellow scientists, that the 1.2 million species classified so far are but a fraction of the total, which he figures to be 8.7 million. A dedicated scientist can hope to classify several dozen — not hundreds or thousands — in a lifetime. So it seems Linnaeus’s book will be growing thicker for a long while. Unfortunately, there’s another factor at play. Extinction rates, Worm says, are 10 to 100 times their natural level. The natural level, scientists say, is one species in a million per year, or about eight or nine annually. If Worm is right, it’s now more like 87 to 870 a year, and picking up speed. So at some point in the future, which I can’t calculate but Prof. Worm surely could, the extinction rate and the classification rate will intersect and we can write “30” at the bottom of Linnaeus’s list. As for the patent office, here’s betting it will still be open for business and getting busier all the time.

— Buzz Currie