...pompeii shmompeii

So a volcano erupted and wiped out an ancient city in 79 AD.

Boring.

I'm not going to spend $20 at the Melbourne Museum to see a bunch of broken pots. How much can we really learn from plaster casts of corpses and reenactments of people in togas being smothered by rivers of molten rock. It burns OK!

Far more interesting is the much less 'celebrated' 1997 eruption of the Soufrière Hills Volcano and consequent destruction of the city of Plymouth on the Carribean Isle of Monserrat. Same shit as Pompeii, but only 12 years ago, so none of the romance I guess.

The remains of Plymouth - 1997

As with the town of Rabaul on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, 1994. Same deal, only Papuans died instead of sexy, swinging Italians, so no interest there either.

The edge of the Rabaul Caldera - 1994

The most amazing in my opinion is that of the eruption of Mt. Pelee on the island of Martinique in 1902. The eruption killed the entire population (30,000 people) of the capital city of St. Pierre. There were just two survivors - Louis August Cyparis, an Afro-Caribbean man who only survived from being locked in a poorly ventilated dungeon at the time of the eruption, and another bloke hiding on the outskirts of town. Louis went on to become an international celebrity and did all the talk shows etc.

St. Pierre after the 1902 eruption of Mt. Pelee

Sure we all like a bit of disaster porn, but if we want to actually learn something about catastrophic volcanic eruptions, we'd best fix our gaze on more recent events. We may even be compelled to help some of the victims still suffering in the aftermath of such events.

I'm Derryn Hinch.

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...kittinger

In 1959 a bloke named Joseph Kittinger hopped in an air balloon and took off skyward. Nothing unusual there, except he took that balloon higher than any manned balloon had ever been before. He took it 31,300 m (102,800 ft) above sea level... that's 33.1km above the ground! Then, he did something only a human would do. He jumped out.

Four minutes and 36 seconds later he had fallen 26km, through −70 °C temperatures at up to 988km/h, before his parachute opened.

Kittinger takes the plunge in 1960

Humans are fascinating because we do some really crazy things, some of them in the name of one of our favourite favourite inventions called 'progess'. Kittinger jumped so they could make fighter pilots safer or something. He actually did the balloon thing three times. He also raced speedboats, flew 483 missions in Vietnam and was shot down and became a POW, so he probably makes a mean rice paper roll too.

Joseph William Kittinger II

b. 1928
Patriot and Complete Nutjob

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...weird science

I went to the Star Wars: Where Science meets Imagination exhibition at Scienceworks last weekend.

Couldn't see much science though, just massive piles of overpriced Star Wars(TM) merchandise. The niblings spent more time in the giftshop... though they did have a really cool model of the Millenium Falcon, but for $18???


I think they need better fungineers at Scienceworks.

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