Tick Tock

Just a quick time check here from the studio where it's five minutes to midnight, which turns out to be a good thing for those of you who were asleep, but not so much for those of you with insomnia. Especially if the reason that you're staring up at the ceiling because you're worried about the end of the world. Scientists decided to keep the Doomsday Clock where it's been for the past year. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists considered the current state of nuclear arsenals around the globe, the slow and costly recovery from events like Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and extreme weather events that fit in with a pattern of global warming. "2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States, marked by devastating drought and brutal storms," the scientists wrote in a letter to the President. "These extreme events are exactly what climate models predict for an atmosphere laden with greenhouse gases."
This one's a little more complex than "spring forward, fall back."  It's also a little disturbing to think that, back in 1991, we were sitting pretty at seventeen minutes to Armageddon, but I guess that losing twelve minutes over the past twenty-two years does seem like a pretty good deal. Oh for the days of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. If you remember the early 1990's, when things were slow and oh-so-mellow, that was the least scariest time to be alive since the Atomic Scientists first set their clock in 1947. At least we're not hanging at two minutes 'til midnight, as we were in 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear devices within nine months of each other.
I guess I'm glad that the Mayans were happy to carve their calendars in stone.