With great pride and the promise of blood letting to come, Synthesis is happy to announce that we have 666 pages of Award Winning* blogs.

To commemorate this auspicious occasion we present to you our correspondent Grant Noblin’s review of Desaster’s new album, "666: Satan’s Soldiers Syndicate" on Metalblade Records.

*exaggeration

This actually made my heart jump for a second. If it’s not real, someone is a goddamn video editing wizard. Or whatever. I don’t know shit about video editing, so this could be child’s play. But it looks authentic. Check it!

Remember a few weeks back, when rice prices were rising to phenomenal levels and box stores stateside were rationing rice ahead of what the Wall Street Journal and many others were predicting would be an exponential further increase in price and mass shortages? Well it turns out that all was not as it appeared. For example, a “quirk” in WTO rules essentially forces Japan into buying American rice they don’t need, which has created a 1.5 million ton surplus of high quality American rice. While third world countries were rioting, Japanese pigs were eating their fill. But the unlocking of this surplus is now sending rice prices downwards, where they will probably stay for some time:

Rice prices nosedived today as Japan moved closer to unlocking its massive hidden surplus and bullish supply forecasts routed speculators.

The price collapse came as commodity experts called on Japan and the US to urgently unwind one of the biggest “invisible” distortions in global rice markets: a quirk of World Trade Organisation rules that obliges Tokyo to buy grain it does not need and effectively turns millions of tons of high-grade American rice into feed for Japanese pigs.

If that distortion were removed, said researchers at the Washington-based Centre for Global Development (CGD), and the 1.5 million tons of unwanted US rice were released from Japan’s storage silos, the crisis that has sent the price of the crop that feeds half the world would be instantly solved. Rice prices, suggested the group’s forecasts, could even halve between now and June.

Maybe the world’s not ending after all.

Today NASA announced that they’ve discovered a recent supernova - recent in geological terms (140 years ago). I do know that a “Supernova” is the term when a star explodes, but apart from that I’m not even going to pretend I know anything about interstellar physics. So let’s let the professionals discuss this one, shall we?

From Nasa:

The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent in the Milky Way. Previously, the last known supernova in our galaxy occurred around 1680, an estimate based on the expansion of its remnant, Cassiopeia A.

Finding such a recent, obscured supernova is a first step in making a better estimate of how often the stellar explosions occur. This is important because supernovae heat and redistribute large amounts of gas, and pump heavy elements out into their surroundings. They can trigger the formation of new stars as part of a cycle of stellar death and rebirth. The explosion also can leave behind, in addition to the expanding remnant, a central neutron star or black hole.

Sweet! You see, they did a much better job of explaining that than I. I could discuss how badass John Squire’s guest lead guitar playing was in Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova,” but that’s as close as I would get. I say let the techies and Trekkies handle this one:

From Wired News:

Scientists using a combination of radio and X-rays have found the most recent supernova remnant observed in our galaxy, located about 26,000 light-years from here. It’s the youngest, most energetic supernova we know and could shed light on just exactly how the stardust we’re made of — heavier elements and all — gets created. The finding also lends some support to astronomers’ calculations that there should be about three supernovae in our galaxy per century, although they still need to find dozens more similar supernova remnants to confirm their suspicions.

Here’s a video of a famous supernova.

The Fermi Paradox is defined as the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. In other words, in a universe as big, and as old as ours seems to be, the fact that we have yet to be contacted by a civilization advanced enough to reach us seems pretty improbable. It has been speculated previously that there must be some sort of Great Filter which prevents such life from arising, or reaching the technological level necessary to achieve interstellar communications. A recent article by Nick Bostrom in the Technology Review explores the possibility that this Great Filter is technology itself: that all civilizations eventually seal their own doom by way of technology, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or the Unabomber’s favorite, Gray Goo. To this list, Tim O’Reilly (aka the guy who coined the term Web 2.0) has added a far more tangible possibility: Peak Oil:

I’ve been thinking of Fermi’s Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history to know that catastrophes do happen, that societies fail to make the right choices, and that civilizations fail. What if the answer to Fermi’s paradox is not the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but merely the absence of high technology? The movie makes the case that the extraordinary flowering of our society has been driven by our profligate use of oil as an incredibly cheap energy resource — and one that won’t last. With haunting images of once vibrant oil fields that are now ghost towns, the movie is a thought-provoking counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth. If the movie’s contentions are correct, we’re truly caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either global warming or peak oil will lead to an urgent transformation of civilization as we know it, or our failure to transform quickly enough might well lead to the end of civilization as we know it. And if indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.

Those longing desperately to find prove of ancient civilizations on planets like Mars might want to think twice, since, as O’Reilly puts it “once we find evidence of primitive life elsewhere, we’ve narrowed the likelihood that the Great Filter is behind us, and increased the likelihood that it is still ahead of us, in some unknown disaster to come.” FUCKKKKKKKK

Remember that one time I posted a video of a flying humanoid figure that a “leading Mexican UFO researcher” had proclaimed to totally, unquestionably “real”? Well apparently, if you listen to the version of the video without the creepy X-Files music, you can hear a woman looking through binoculars tell the assembled crowd that it’s just a bunch of balloons. I don’t know though, I’m still holding out for proof that it’s an alien on a jetpack or a Carlos Castaneda-type Don Juan character on some gait of power shit…