ABOUT ME
I am many things to many people: son, brother, friend, lover, electrical/nuclear engineer, part-time superhero, avid reader, music snob, beer and dark chocolate connoisseur, lousy photographer, collector of too much stuff, naysayer, inventor of the glass jar, heir to the throne of Tonga, and finally, if this email I received this morning is to be believed, the only surviving relative of a Dr. Imbutu Mongawa of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company and inheritor of A SUM OF THIRTY ONE MILLION (31,000,000) US DOLLARS.

"Sandstorms inflict damage of about $540 million per year, and losses of crops and forests due to acid rain amount to about $730 million per year. More serious are the $6 billion costs of the "green wall" of trees being built to shield Beijing against sand and dust, and the $7 billion per year of losses created by pest species. We enter the zone of impressive numbers when we consider the onetime cost of the 1996 floods ($27 billion, but still cheaper than the 1998 floods), the annual direct losses due to desertification ($42 billion), and the annual losses due to water and air pollution ($54 billion). The combination of the latter two items alone costs China the equivalent of 14% of its GDP each year." - Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed