Global contrapment, Rube Goldberg style
I had a crazy game called Mouse Trap when I was a kid. It involved an elaborate chain of mechanisms meant to trap a plastic mouse in a cage. When I read Chris Wood’s new Natural Security column I remembered that game — and shivered to imagine earth’s mechanisms as a game contraption, on a vast scale and speeding up. An excerpt of Wood’s column: Rube Goldberg is long dead, but the figurative machine to which he gave his name lives on. It’s that whimsical confection where a rolling marble tips a lever that sends a toy plane whizzing down