The Lair

So I’ve been a tad preoccupied with work recently. What else is new, you might ask… Well, when I stuck my head out of the gopher hole called work, peered around in a meerkat fashion … I discovered that there had been a beautiful little shooting war in Georgia.

So call me ghoulish, heartless or whatever but I happen to like Red Storm Rising and the bustup between Georgia and Russia seems to be the closest we’re going to get to conventional forces going at it. Despite getting a bloody nose in Chechnya a decade ago, the Russians won this one on the trot. Was anyone surprised? I wasn’t.

But then, I discovered The War Nerd. OMGWTF. VIDEO! Warporn!

It’s not every day that I can claim to being woken up by the sound of explosives. Exploding, as it were. So today was different. It didn’t sound like a flat tire (there was no whooshing exhalation at the end), it didn’t sound like some clumsy construction worker dropping a paint bucket. It sounded like a bomb and that’s what it was. At least in this instance, the paranoia about explody business turned out to be true.

A few glances out the window - traffic was stacked up on the bridge, but that’s not unusual for just before 0700 on a Monday morning. No ambulances. I opened up one of the large pane glass windows, just to hear the noises of the street below - but the blaring bus horns and traffic noises drowned out any other noises that I had expected to hear (like sirens).

No radio in the house. No TV either. The family had officially moved to the boondocks the day before and I was playing night watchman of sorts. Bare house. I was quite relishing the solitude. But voluntarily becoming a hermit in the urban sprawl has its drawbacks when there are flowerpots exploding nearby.

Wondered if I had imagined it all. No one seemed very alarmed that I could see.

First hint of something that might have gone wrong - vehicles on the northbound lane into Colombo were reversing out of the jam and taking alternative routes. Not the buses of course. The buses had no choice but to stick on the main road. But smaller vehicles were mounting the center island and doing frantic U-turns in the middle of the road in order to escape.

Couple of military vehicles head towards the traffic lights. They are moving unhurriedly, the soliders inside seem relaxed. The military vehicles are heading up the wrong side of the street, adding to the chaotic jam of vehicles streaming away from the main road. Couple of uniforms perched on top wave away the oncoming vehicles, but their effort seems desultory. There is no urgency.

I wonder aloud (on the phone) if I am possibly mistaken. Maybe it was a falling bucket of paint after all. Yes, the mobile phones still work, which adds to my suspicion that I had imagined the whole thing. A couple of minutes later, I got another call confirming an explosion.

Someone’s Monday morning had started off in the worst possible way.

It seems vaguely like something from a movie. Or failing which, at least a grander, larger scale version of a time capsule. Unfortunately, time capsules and archive footage usually serve to remind us of the awful hairstyles of the 80s and the cringeworthy aspects of our past. But this time, there’s pretty serious business afoot.

Way up in the arctic circle, there exists an island named Svalbard. (Yes, this Svalbard, as featured in the Pullman books). That’s the site of the “doomsday vault” (more properly, the Svabard Global Seed Vault). The wikipedia entry says that the vault was planned in 2005, I found a BBC link with some concept drawings.

The purpose of such a remote vault? No seedy business, I assure you (ok. C’mon. You had to know I was going there). The mission (via Wikipedia and also via an article in Nature)

… provide a safety net against accident loss of diversity in traditional genebanks. While the popular press has emphasized its possible utility in the event of a major regional or global catastrophe, it will certainly be more frequently accessed when genebanks lose samples due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts and natural disasters. Such events occur with some regularity. In recent years, some national genebanks have also been destroyed by war and civil strife. There are some 1400 crop diversity collections around the world, but many are in politically unstable or environmentally threatened nations.

The first set of seeds from Africa arrived yesterday. Go forth and … sprout?

And while this is an awesomely laudable cause, I do have this reminder from another field. There’s no point taking backups if you don’t test restoring the backup. How do these people know that the seeds are viable? (I mean, I’m sure there is some way - like taking temperatures from the germinating seeds or something). I haven’t found out how it happens yet, though.