If leaders may lie, then who should tell the truth? Days before George W Bush and Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, I called the White House and spoke to Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, to urge that United Nations weapons inspectors be given more time to confirm or deny the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Should they be able to confirm finding such weapons, I argued, dismantling the threat would have the support of virtually the entire world. Ms Rice demurred, saying there was too much risk and the president would not postpone any longer.

On what grounds do we decide that Robert Mugabe should go the International Criminal Court, Tony Blair should join the international speakers’ circuit, bin Laden should be assassinated, but Iraq should be invaded, not because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, as Mr Bush’s chief supporter, Mr Blair, confessed last week, but in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein?

The cost of the decision to rid Iraq of its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering, beginning in Iraq itself. Last year, an average of 6.5 people died there each day in suicide attacks and vehicle bombs, according to the Iraqi Body Count project. More than 110,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since 2003 and millions have been displaced. By the end of last year, nearly 4,500 American soldiers had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded.

On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague.

Global warming is often called “global weirding”, and the factors that have lead to this bovine sugar high are absolutely weird. Global trade and subsidies has combined with food science to create a glut of cheap sugar enhanced with cheap artificial flavorings and colors. Although the original article does not mention the specific brand of candy, from the photos it appears that they’re “rainbow belts” that, strangely enough, list corn syrup as their second ingredient after sugar. Not to mention that cows are ruminants. Even a “normal” diet of corn is fatal, over the long-term, for an animal that evolved to eat nothing but grass.

Consider: We are animals who can digest milk. But only because we first domesticated milk-bearing animals. When we did that, just a few thousand years ago, we genetically engineered ourselves

But who knows what language its discoverers will understand in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years—or even if they will be human beings? Holtorf points out that a much earlier attempt to warn off future excavations, the Egyptian pyramids, were looted within a generation. “The future will be radically different from today,” says archaeologist Anders Högberg, who is also from Linnaeus University. “We have no idea how humans will think.”

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The sapphire disk is one product of that effort. It’s made from two thin disks, about 20 centimeters across, of industrial sapphire. On one side, text or images are etched in platinum—Charton says a single disk can store 40,000 miniaturized pages—and then the two disks are molecularly fused together. All a future archaeologist would need to read them is a microscope. The disks have been immersed in acid to test their durability and to simulate ageing. Charton says they hope to demonstrate a lifetime of 10 million years.

The city can be seen as a machine for living in, and one of its mechanisms is this: if I live in the city, an ambulance is fifteen minutes away, but if I live in the country, it’s fifty minutes away. Corrections to those numbers, like traffic density and stresses on the health provider, apply to both, but the simple fact is that the hospitals are in the big towns and cities, and the closer you are to the hospitals the better your chances are. Until the weather drowns the comms system or the land you’re on starts to slip due to a year’s worth of saturation or your town just ends up underwater. I paraphrased Bruce Sterling’s bit, while I was on my feet at the gig: the cities will be filled with old people who are afraid of the sky. But I recalled something else. Since the 1960s, Russia has been guaranteeing good weather for its Red Square parades and state holidays by controlling the weather. Here in England, in fact, it’s long been held that the Russians have pushed their rain this way. No-one ever called them on it, of course, because they were entirely capable of sending things larger and harder than rain through the air towards us instead. Also, obviously, we’re paranoid about rain. What is the international legality of that? I mean, if you could exert serious control over weather. Is there a legal framework for saving your cities from destructive weather by pushing that weather somewhere else? What’s the right of response if you find yourself suddenly deluged by the rainfall that nature had originally aimed at a city that couldn’t take it? Saving Wales by chucking eight feet of water at Ireland?

As Gregory Clark has shown, for most of human history, as clever people have been inventing things, their new ideas could travel no faster than horses or ships could carry them. Research by Richard Duncan-Jones showed that information of major world events moved at an average of 1 mile-per-hour for most of the last 2000 years, from the Roman Empire to the early American empire, until the invention of the telegraph for the first time allowed complex information to move faster that people (speaking of disruptive!). In other words, if an “iPhone” fell through a worm-hole onto the head of some Spanish guy in 1000 AD, news of this incredible event wouldn’t even reach China for five months.

For this reason (and because there was no such thing as an airplane in the 18th century) the most famous inventions of the industrial revolution some took DECADES to gain a foothold in other countries. The cotton mill, invented in 1771, took 20 years to get to the United States, Clark writes. Watt’s steam engine took 30 years to get to India. The steam railway, invented in 1825, reached the U.S. by 1830, but history doesn’t show its adoption in Sweden or Portugal for another 30 years. Part of this lag was trade laws and a protectionist British government, which clung jealously to its tech talent. But even with spies lurking around the factories of London, it still took several decades for the most disruptive technologies in millennia just to cross the the English Channel and North Sea!

In other words, to praise the speed of the iPhone’s adoption is really to praise other disruptive technologies – the telegraph, the airplane, the intermodal container – that make the immediate worldwide adoption of new products possible. To call the iPhone the fastest most-disruptive technology in history is really just another way of calling it the most recent most-disruptive technology in history. No shame there, but let’s share the love with the other disruptors.

Person of Interest: in scenes showing the world from The Machine’s point of view, there are lines of text and graphic boxes Color-Coded for Your Convenience. A real system wouldn’t need visual displays like these, but they help the viewer understand what The Machine is “thinking.”