#7: I Can (Not) Feel It Coming In The Air Tonight

Happy Friday!

Thanks to growing readership we've moved from TinyLetter to MailChimp and as such, our re-design is still in progress. Why wasn't it perfected before the newsletter went out? Well, some of us have day jobs, and (so many) children and dogs and wives to feed. But I love you, and I appreciate you, so here I am at 5 AM, in running tights, fussing around with CSS and scarfing down 100 calorie superfood bars. Just like I always pictured myself at 33. 

On to the news!

1. Is the big one coming? Yes. Will we know when? Probably not. Even though it's 2016? Yes. Why not? Here's why. Stop asking questions. - Wired

"Last year, a group of telecoms said that their cell networks could support an emergency notification system—but that they’d need to change the protocols they use to shuttle data around and switch out hardware in cell towers and phones. That’ll take, oh, around seven years, Given says. In the (very long) meantime, he’s considering other options, like outlets in TV or radio that might broadcast the alerts directly."


2. And the big one's definitely going to come, soon, we swear, because guess what, asteroids. (JK, it's global warming again). - Quartz

"So if Greenland starts seeing earthquakes, there’s a worry that we would see submarine landslides. One such landslide happened in Scandinavia about 8,000 years ago. It sent down a huge tsunami all the way across the Atlantic. Shetlands saw 20-meter (66-foot) waves, and Scotland saw [waves] six meters high. And Greenland has the same potential."


3. Global warming is ALSO making some really bad diseases (like Zika, which, btw, if you're reading this, definitely has a much better chance of infecting you than silly Ebola) even scarier. - Mother Jones

"In some regions of the United States, recent decades have brought longer, warmer summers and shorter, milder winters. That's played a role in the northward creep of tick-transmitted Lyme disease and seasonal flare-ups of the West Nile virus, which is carried by mosquitos. But the issue isn't simply the expanding range of those diseases; at warmer temperatures, mosquitos can speed up their life cycles, Beard explains." 


4. And, because it's a super dick, global warming is also responsible for greater global violence against women, who are literally just trying to carry water to their families. -- Huffington Post

"In the indigenous Xinca society of Xalapan, men often kidnap and rape young girls before marrying them, Lopez said, and for about a decade, the local women’s group had been campaigning to end this trend.
But in the last two years, groundwater was becoming scarce, because of weather changes and increased mining in the region. As women and girls had to walk further to fetch water, the number of kidnappings and rapes more than doubled over that period, local women said."


5. You might think VR is cool until we accidentally forget to use that power for good and become all-knowing cyborgs and, instead, just eat peanuts and wear haptic gloves all day and become useless. - The Guardian

"The way Harari sees it, humans have two kinds of ability that make us useful: physical ones and cognitive ones. The Industrial Revolution may have led to machines that did away with humans in jobs needing strength and repetitive actions. But the takeover was not overwhelming. With cognitive powers that machines could not touch, humans were largely safe in their work. For how much longer, though? AIs are now beginning to outperform humans in the cognitive field. And while new types of jobs will certainly emerge, we cannot be sure, says Harari, that humans will do them better than AIs, computers and robots."