Table of Contents

Announcements!!!

Ceralor uploaded a picture and recommends IE for viewing. Pixel  and Cumber arrive. Dragonpearl's parents return home. Djonnah Shiko returns.

Population

Rai points out a report just out that says the Earth cannot support it's present population. Beings are apparently consuming the resources of about 1.2 Earths at present. However, as the BBC story says, others have quite heavily criticised the report, because it apparently makes too many assumptions. He commetns that readers will see who's right in due course. All Rai can say is, he /hopes/ the study is wrong. <:=8)

Quote of the Week

-by Kitryn de Pluie

I'm built like a bear. An angry, dark-haired viking bear. With hazel eyes. Okay, so maybe not viking. But still a bear.

Pixel reports that he's always understood 'hir' to be an attempt to create a true gender-neutral pronoun. Hermaphrodity [1] is not implied. This was the usage in some of the soc.* newsgroups, at least. Some people use "xie" instead, although to Pixel, who studied Chinese for a while, that confuses things more since "xie xie" is "thank you" in Chinese. He comments that maybe readers should borrow from the Chinese, since their word for "he" is pronounced "ta" and their word for "she" is also pronounced "ta." They do have different characters when written so they're not quite perfect :). Wyrm refers you to: the Gender-Nuetral Pronoun FAQ He comments that it's a bit biased, but it covers most areas nicely.

[1] Yes, Pixel made that word up.

Editorial

Digital Dragon comments that drought through-out the world leads to less crops being available. More people being born means more mouths to feed, thus having to spread an already diminished supply of food due to things like drought, mismanagment, etc., over a broader area. Deserts are on the increase, so there is less and less land available for cultivation. Drought also plays a part in this, as well as Man's incessant need to put up more buildings thus sucking up other valuable resources in order to construct these buildings, which are meant to house all the extra people being born.

And where do you think all the food comes from? It has to be grown or bred somewhere. and there has to be enough to go around. Do the math. Somebody is going to lose out eventually. Malnutrition is just the starting point. People have more kids than they can affor is another.

When I was a kid, there were very few people in the area I lived. I went back 15 years later and the place had been developed into a residential area with shops and apartments and houses all over and beig utilised. Thats expansion. Where did all those people come from?

MistWing SilverTail reports that the U.S. happens to have a finite, but very large, pool of weirdness. Americans figure that if as much of the weirdness is concentrated in one place as possible, the rest of the country can get along in a more 'normal' environment. Early on, various places to used put it but it was soon realized that, by putting into the political arena, it could be kept in one place yet not saddle it on a permanent group of people. We forgot to factor in the 'proliferation factor'.

Snippets

Pyros informed Rai that a true pedant would point out that 42 is not necessarily the meaning of life, merely the the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, which may or may not involve "meaning". Rai replied, "Pedantry cannot occur effectively in a vacuum. Context is crucial, and it was fairly clear the context here was the Ultimate Question." ByrneWing starts a sing along of complete songs. Flame Stryke calls for a boycott of shampoo, preferring the real product. The Anvil scoots sideways for a different take at Arcaton. Mondariloth gets looked at alot.