Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Um.


I read an article in New Scientist a while ago about this stuff and kind of fell into a mild panic about the state of the world. It seems all the sexy new technology we love so much (and a lot of the 'green' technology we'll be relying on to preserve our comfy lifestyles in a post-oil world) is totally dependant on a group of rare metallic elements that most of us have never heard of and of which we're running out. And instead of carefully recovering what we can from the carcasses of our 2-years-old-but-completely-redundant computers and mobile phones, we throw them over our metaphorical shoulders and buy new ones.
We live in a very interesting, very complicated world, I suppose.
Then there's this where you have an ongoing civil war in the Congo in which access to tantalum supplies is a crucial factor. Wow. We have no idea. I'm going to set fire to my brain.