The obsolescent male

Uncle Ken may have forgotten that I used to work at FedEx Office (formerly Kinko's) where they had copiers in abundance, some small, some large.  The biggest was a beast by Xerox, must have been fifteen feet long.  I don't know if it was the quality of paper used or the skill of the operators but paper jams weren't that common, as I recall.  When they did occur they were usually easily unjammed.

But Uncle Ken struck gold with that link; it had something for everybody.  For us Chicago types, the reference to the dropping crime rate was amusing.  I forgot for a moment that Mr. Beagles worked at a paper mill, but did he catch the reference to log jams, a la "Jam on Gerry's Rock?"

And yours truly enjoyed the "knotty details" of the article but I found, what I consider, a glaring error.  Did you guys see anything wrong with this?: But our images cannot be off by more than eighty-five microns”—a third of a thousandth of an inch—“or else they’ll be fuzzy.”

I regret to say that it jumped out at me, but 85 microns is more than three-thousandths of an inch, which is more than ten times a "third of a thousandth."  I double-checked my math and used an online source to verify and, yep, a big error indeed.  Being the generous sort, I will attribute it to a misplaced decimal point, happens all the time.

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Birth rate is tricky.  Too high, people starve and resources are strained.  Too low, the society can become destabilized.  I recall a figure of more than two (but less than three) children per family for an ideal birth rate for a stable population.

If so, Western countries are facing a big problem.  Sperm counts have fallen 50% over the last forty years.  South America, Asia, and Africa have not shown such declines but the studies for those areas are inconclusive.

The cause of this decline has not been determined with any certitude but I wonder if it has anything to do with the way food has been produced in the West since WWII.  The use of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, and preservatives has been rampant and maybe it takes a generation or two before the effects manifest themselves.  There won't be any easy answers for this problem.

It's not just human males that are facing fertility anomalies.  There is a mutant crayfish, an invasive species, running amok in Europe.  They are all females, and their young are born as fertilized females; no males required.  I don't think there are any males at all in this species, which is very weird for a life form more advanced than an amoeba.  You can read more about this critter here: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-43032061
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A while back we were talking about Bitcoin, and I mentioned the massive amount of electricity that is required.  Iceland is facing that problem now.  Some data mining companies want to move there but are being denied; electrical requirements will exceed capacity and they may run out of juice.  It's a funny world we are living in, but not funny "ha ha."