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North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due To Core Flux
National Geographic is reporting that the migration of Earth's magnetic pole has accelerated again and is now racing in Russia's direction at a blazing 40 miles per year. This movement began in earnest around 1904 at about 9 miles per year and has been accelerating since. "Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid rock. This creates a 'dynamo' that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Although the new research seems to back up this idea, Chulliat is not ready to say whether magnetic north will eventually cross into Russia. 'It's too difficult to forecast,' Chulliat said. Also, nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction."
Do magnetic fields get bent?
Yes actually they do.
The face of the magnetic 'sphere' that is facing the sun (and thus the solar wind and all the magnetically charged particles that come with) push against the magnetic field, so that part of the planet surface sees it much closer inward.
On the other side of the planet, it gets stretched further from the earths surface, and tapers off towards the end due to the charged particles flowing around it (Think an airplane wing, but in all three dimensions instead of two)
In fac, it is the flow of these charged particles, starting at the side of our magnetic field facing the sun, that are pushed faster, and end up following the magnetic field and in to the earths pole. This causes the auroras in the sky at the poles.
If the magnetic field ends up weakening, the field lines could even split and earth would have multiple poles wandering around the surface until two other fields met up and merged later on.
If that was to happen, the multiple poles would redirect charged particles from space down on more heavily populated areas of the planet and possibly have some health affects on us fragile humans.
The up side is you will have many auroras at night over many spots on earth.
An operating system may be too large and complicated for any one person to understand. A code of laws might also be that complicated.
A single bill, however, is most closely analogous to a patch -- or at most a patch series -- and no open source OS would accept a patch that no one claims to understand. Are you willing to run code on your computer by maintainers who accept that kind of patch? If not, why are you willing to live your entire life according to laws that are equally poorly understood and maintained?
Even beyond that, computer programs tend to be inherently less ambiguous and more deterministic than laws. These traits allow useful decomposition of programs into a hierarchy that allows a person to focus on single parts of the whole. Because laws lack those traits (and especially in the US where courts look at history and precedent), it is much harder to decompose laws into elements that one can analyze separately. This is compounded by legislatures being loath to revise even obviously outdated or buggy laws, which makes it hard to correct bugs in the law. (The Internet has many examples of dumb or silly laws; an obviously buggy one is the US federal law prohibiting compensation for bone marrow donations by classifying bone marrow as an organ.) On the whole, it is much more important for legislators to understand the whole of the law than it is for software developers to understand the whole of a program.
Voters are well-known to be rationally ignorant of their choices at the ballot box. Your argument is essentially that legislators should be rationally ignorant regarding the laws they vote on. Is that really what you want to encourage in law-makers?
The largest body of evidence for this is found in the striping of the ocean's floor. In the areas where rock material moves up from the mantle and solidifies, the molten rock aligns with the current magnetic field before it cools, and this alignment cannot be changed once the rock becomes solid. The entire ocean floor is banded with a north/south/north/south alignment pattern, implying the reversal is very consistent from a cosmological timescale perspective.
This reversal of the field occurs approximately every 800000 years, with a period of 1000-2000 years around the switch where the magnetic field is disorganized and significantly weaker than normal. This period has very big implications for lifeforms on Earth... obviously not enough to totally end life, but enough to kill lots of animals from various causes (extra solar radiation, messed up internal compass, disrupted migration patterns,etc.).
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law