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And now, on with the show!

Our lovely assistant Janice is pointing to the first item in our science showcase, an article that starts with an amazing question : Can you smell obesity?

OK, let me get this out at the beginning : as an obese person, I find this question extraordinarily offensive. We fat people have enough problems with people assuming we are all disgusting slobs without you substandard science writers putting ideas in their heads.

And here’s the kicker : the answer is “no”. The article is about the sort of differences in gut bacteria that I talked about last week, and the differences in breath constituents would only be comprised of methane, which is odorless.

But the thing that really gets me is what possibly need is there for a breath test for obesity? Obesity is the easiest diagnosis in history. You can diagnose obesity from across the street during heavy traffic. You need no special equipment to diagnose obesity. You only need eyes.

So from all possible angles, it is a stupid and offensive question. Screw you, CNN!

OK, what silly metaphor am I using this week? Oh right, game shows.

Next up, behind that curtain you will find a fabulous… story about a computer program that is using a Kinect to diagnose depression!

And so much more. The program understands facial expressions and body language to a degree I would not thought possible. Check out this video :

The amount of sophisticated understanding of human behaviour this program shows is very impressive. It understands gaze aversion, facial expressions, leaning forward and backward, and tons of other stuff.

It is, in essence, using a lot of the same cues that we use when we are trying to understand what another person is feeling. Human beings have extremely sophisticated hardware in our brains that let us understand what other people are feeling, and to a certain extent, feel the same things ourselves.

The degree to which the program is going to put people at ease is highly questionable. Don’t get me wrong, it does amazingly well and is leagues ahead of any similar program I have ever seen.

But it is still creepy and unnatural. Because human beings’ hardware for doing the same job is so powerful, it takes a lot more than what they have done here to ‘fool’ it.

So as research and development, this is an extraordinary achievement. But practical? I don’t think so.

Coming up on our turntable, you will find this rare and exotic story about recent progress towards solving the mystery of dark matter.

(Warning : as that link goes to a CERN press release, it’s an uphill read for us amateurs. )

From what I can gather from the article, a rather neato device called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (or AMS to its homies) was installed in the International Space Station (ISS, formally speaking) in order to figure out just how much excess (as in, more than predicted by current theory… we don’t have too many) positrons it can detect in the background cosmic radiation of space (BCROS to nobody).

This had to be a space station kind of thing because trying to get precise readings on Earth would be like trying to see the stars through heavy clouds. That pesky atmosphere of ours would distort the effect we are looking for. So to space the AMS had to go.

The reason positrons are so important is that one theory of how we can detect dark matter and figure out what the heck is going on is that when two particles of dark matter collide, a positron is emitted.

If this is true, then we might be able to use these excess positrons as a clue towards solving the mystery of just what most of the universe is MADE OF.

Because honestly, we have no freaking clue. Isn’t that marvelous?

And speaking of things we don’t know, our last prize in this incredible showcase is a wonderful three day and ten night vacation to this story about near death experiences.

The headline is “Near Death Experiences More Vivid Than Real Life”, and when I read it, I immediately said “Well of course they are!”.

Being a fairly committed materialist who does not believe in life after death, the explanation that I endorse for the nature of Near Death Experiences (NDEs to their Moms) is that when some people are dying, the lack of oxygen to the brain triggers a frontal lobe seizure much like those experienced by various holy folk in the various religiouns of the world.

And one of the most reliable and indelible effects of a frontal lobe seizure is the feeling that what you are experiencing is incredibly real, realer than anything you have ever experienced before.

That is because one of the most important functions of our frontal lobes is to tell us what is real and what is not, specifically, what is internally generated and what is happening outside our skulls.

When you have a frontal lobe seizure, the intense electrical activity in the frontal lobe causes the “real” switch to go to max and stay there, generating this feeling of super vivid reality that seems realer than real.

A similar (but less intense) effect sometimes happens when we dream.

No wonder so many faiths believe in a more-real world beyond this one. Without a modern scientific perspective, how else could you interpret experiences that seem far more real than everyday experiences?

It is truly frightening to think that your sense of what is real could fail you like that.

Thank goodness these experiences are rare!

See you next week, folks!

Hidey ho, neighbors! We here at the Scienceville Welcome Wagon are pleased as particularly pleased punch to welcome you to out picturesque little town and I will be glad to give you the grand tour of the neighborhood and introduce you to your new neighbors!

First off, over there in that charming little neodymium Quonset hut, is our youngest resident, a 19 year old boy who recently designed a ocean array that could clean up millions of tons of plastic waste.

The existence of vast patches of conglomerated plastic waste just floating in the oceans of the world like vast drift of immortal yet toxic seaweed is an international disgrace and a stinging rebuke to humanity in general. It reminds us of just how often we human beings shit where we sleep.

So it would be a great service to both the ecology of the world and that of our ethical beings if we could clean that stuff the heck up. But the problem is so massive that attempts to come up with a solution have foundered in the early planning stages.

Enter Boyan Slat, who has designed a vast ocean-going array of booms and nets that would encircle the garbage patch and funnel the plastic waste towards a series of processing platforms, where workers would then sort and process it for recycling.

Obviously, this would not be cheap. And the money earned by selling the plastic to recyclers would probably not even come close to paying for such a massive operation.

But young Boyan Slat’s idea at least makes it seem possible.

Next door to Slat, in that gorgeous magnetically levitated Buckyball, lives Dean Burnett, whose main claim to fame is a recent article he did for The Guardian summarizing the criticisms of the widely used Mybers Briggs Personality Index, or MBTI.

Full disclosure : I like the MBTI. I like it for fairly personal and anecdotal reasons, granted, but I still like it. See, it worked great for me.

Before I took the MBTI in college, I had little faith in personality tests. All the ones I had taken up to that point (I had to take quite a few when I was a child for reasons I will not go into here) gave results which were either blindingly obvious, or wildly inaccurate, or some combination of the two.

Then I took the MBTI, found out I was an INTJ, and read the official description… and was powerfully illuminated. It not only described me extremely well, it described in detail aspects of my personality and thinking that I thought, up until that point, were unique to me and me alone.

So it was quite the extraordinary experience to find out that there were other people out there with the kind of independent and relentlessly pragmatic minds as me, and made me an instant convert.

Ergo, I am biased towards it. And nothing in the article seems like a legitimate and cogent criticism of the test itself. In fact, they strike me as criticisms cooked up by someone who did not like their result.

Instead, the main criticism is of how the test is overused in situations where it is not even applicable in corporate environments, and honestly, there is no tool which is safe to use by those who use it blindly and by rote, without knowledge or understanding of the nature of the tool and how it works.

Across the street from Dean Burnett, in that adorable little neolithic igloo in between the Laser Testing Range and our award-winning Holographic Community Center, lives the team of scientists who recently found a surprising link between intestinal bacteria and obesity.

When someone gets a gastric bypass surgery (ugh), the bacteria in their intestines changes. This discovery began when someone had the bright (and gross) idea to take some of those changed bacteria and put them into the intestines of some mice that had not had the bypass, and see what happened.

And lo and behold, the mice lost weight!

This means that it is possible that the weight loss associated with gastric bypass (meaning, taking a big chunk of your gut and just throwing it away) was caused merely by the gut bacteria change it spurred.

Roll THAT one around your brain for a bit.

It also means that the futuristic high tech treatment for obesity might simply be one of those yogurt drinks with the helpful biota in it.

According to those wacky scientists, that would cause the right kind of microbes to multiply, increasing our basal metabolism rates and improving insulin response and blood glucose levels.

The rats lost 30 percent of their body weight. For me, that would be like 110 pounds. Boffo.,

My theory for why this works : these helpful microbes pre-digest the food for us (ick), making the nutrition more available, and our body perks up and says “Time to party!”.

But possibly our most promising residents live over there, in that enormous replica of the human genome with every human base-pair sequence carved into it.

There lives the scientists who recently managed to convince patients’ immune systems to attack and eliminate their cancer, and that has truly breathtaking implications for the future of oncology.

It is, of course, a small study, with only five patients. Obviously, you start small when testing a new therapy on very sick people. But the results are so strong that it is worth noting anyhow.

Three of the five patients have been cancer free for at least five months and up to two years.

How sick were these people?

The patients all had B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and had relapsed following chemotherapy. The outlook for patients in this category is typically bleak.

Amazing. They took people with very bleak prospects and made them cancer free.

Who knows? This might be the first solid blow of our eventual victory over cancer!

Well, neighbor, that concludes our tour of your new home. Feel free to pick a drawer in the hyperspatial portmanteau we use as guest housing, and settle in. Don’t worry, they are quite spacious and well-appointed on the inside!

See you at the next Vat Gown Barbecue!

And with a mighty screeching of well-worn tires and a gigantic whispery hiss of escaping hydraulic fluid like a Leviathan of a whale blowing offshore, the Science Bus pulls up to take us lucky science loving tourists on another tour of that big wonderful world called Science.

On today’s route, we have such diverse stops as how to get an extra octave with a sex toy, the truth about doctors and placebos, the official medical opinion on gay adoptions, how rude comments on Web stories change your opinions, and the latest news in the exciting new world of 3D television.

So climb on board! Feel free to take all the pictures you want, but please, no flashes.

Our first stop is that sex toy thing. Sure, I could have teased you with the sex toy story and then saved it till the end like some cheap Action News broadcast, but I want you all relaxed and paying attention.

And relaxation is the name of the game. A voice coach from the University of Alberta (go Canada!) named David Ley has been using a sex toy to get extra octaves from his voice students.

We have reserved this portion of the tour for you all to giggle, whisper amongst yourselves, and speculate about just how one uses a sex toy to get better vocal performance.

Sadly, the truth is a lot more boring than any of our more colorful and anatomically intriguing notions. He just uses a small egg-shaped vibrator on the outside of his student’s throats in order to help relax their throat muscles and hence help them hit those high notes.

Reportedly, the device works like a charm for this purpose:

Toronto Actor Sara Farb, who is currently in three productions at Stratford, swears by the device and says she bought one online moments after being shown how it worked by Ley. “It was almost immediate,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

I like this story not (just) because it is titillating, but because it represents the sort of novel thinking that I admire.

And who knows? A little vibro-massage now and then might save the voices of future actors and singers from the ravages of time!

Continuing our tour, if you look out the windows on your left, you will see a story about what percentage of doctors have prescribed placebos.

The percentage? Ninety seven percent. 97 out of every 100 doctors in the UK has sent a patient away with a placebo instead of a genuine pharmaceutical.

Shocking, isn’t it?

Well, no. Not really. Doctors have long careers and so most will end up in the situation where a placebo is the proper procedure at least once.

And the truth becomes even less shocking when you realize that the study cited includes prescribing an antibiotic for a viral infection in the category of “placebo” treatments.

And I am fine with that. After all, the antibiotic might not be the classic sugar pill, but it is definitely not going to do a damn thing for your viral infection. And a modern GP can be forgiven for doing this now and then when faced with the occasional very insistent and/or overwrought and upset patient with a viral infection.

After all, if the useless antibiotic helps the patient calm down and let nature take its course, then it has genuinely improved the patient’s life, and that is what medicine is all about.

And of course, none of us want to think our doctor has slipped us a placebo, and the odds are, they haven’t. The situations where they are called for are quite rare.

Next, on your right, soars the majestic towers of this story about how the American Academy of Pediatricians says same sex couples should be allowed to marry and raise children.

And the science is firmly on their side. They say there is absolutely no evidence that being raised by a same sex couple is any different than being raised by a traditional mixed gender couple.

Furthermore, the Academy has always had the opinion that stable, committed two parent families are better for raising kids, and letting gays marry can only increase the odds of this.

Way to go, AAP!

After that brief stop, we forge onward to gaze upon the exotic splendor of this story about how nasty comments on a Web article change your opinions on issues.

Basically, researches cooked up a fair and balanced story about nanotechnology, and then posted two versions of it, one with polite comments, and one with rude and nasty comments.

They found that people who read the story with the nice comments had no change of opinion, whereas the rude comments version made people’s opinions more extreme than before.

This is a known psychological effect. It comes from the tension between two parts of our psyches, the top level truth-seeking thoughtful part, and our more primitive and emotional oppositional instincts.

In the realm of pure logic, absolutely no opinion could change our opinion merely by being exposed to it. Only sound logic and reliable information could change your opinions.

But down here in the real world, rude and aggressive opinions make us feel like we have to dig in and fight them, and we do that by, in effect, pulling just as hard but from the other side.

To put it mildly, this is not the best way to get to the truth. But when we argue, we are defending our own intellectual integrity and world-view far more than we are seeking the truth or even trying to win the argument. Unopposed, human beings merge their senses of reality into one picture.

Which was fine when we were talking to each other about where the best food could be found. But once we got a serious sentience upgrade and became truly human, that got… complicated.

And for our final stop before I let you all off at the gift shop, we can all feast our eyes on this surprisingly realistic story about a form of 3D television that does not require glasses.

Yup. This story again. Like flying cars, fusion, and a dishwasher that really works, this is the something that has been promised many times before.

The basic problem is this : we seen in 3D because we have two eyes. Each eye sees a slightly different view of the world, and our brain combines these into a single 3D image.

So if you have ever wondered why everything has two eyes and not just one… that’s it. 3D!

This presents a rather sticky problem for would-be 3D pioneers, though. How on earth do you get a different image to each of the viewer’s eyeballs with a 2D screen?

The classic method is to put both images onscreen at the same time and get the viewer to wear something that separates the two images and gets them to their proper eyeballs.

But that is somewhat cumbersome and nobody really enjoys wearing dorky looking glasses. I would do it if the effect was impressive enough, but then again, I am already a dork.

The dork effect also rules out another method, the “goggles” method, which would involve wearing some form of goggles where each eyepiece is a tiny computer monitor and beams the image directly into your eye.

Such systems have been developed, but are expensive, heavy, uncomfortable, and a host of tricky issues pop up when you put the image that close to people’s eyes.

Then there are the famous holograms, currently making a big comeback on our credit cards. Those work great for still images, but moving images just do not work. Our eyes are very clever when it comes to tracking motion in 3D.

So the world has been looking for a way around the glasses or goggles problem for some time, and according to the story (remember it?), the big brains at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California have come up with a new contender for that long sought after prize.

They claim that their technology allows for the true “fishtank” experience, where one could have one’s 3D TV on and walk around your living room and it would still look fully 3D.

Color me skeptical. Also, honestly, people sit when they watch TV. As long as it works for being sprawled on their couches, it works fine, honestly.

Still, if they can pull it off, it would be the biggest improvement of the TV since color.

For me, though, I am not all that interested until I can put on a VR helmet and watch TV from the inside.

That’s it for this week’s tour, folks! See you next week for more science goodies!

9:00 AM : Another sleepless night. I am awake but unsteady. I get it, Life. I should have remembered to bring my damned sleeping pills. Lesson learned. Now can you stop punishing me with headaches and nausea and the feeling that my eyeballs are backed with sandpaper? Because this is definitely not going to help me have fun. Thanks a whole big bunch.

10:00 AM : We bid a fond final farewell to our charming and unpretentious little room at the Accent Inn in Burnaby. It was far from luxurious, but it was comfortable, and I value that far above snob appeal any day. Bye bye, Room 278! You were not our home for very long, but you were still home, and I will always remember you fondly.

10:15 AM : I hit the Story Editing panel late. (Woops, sorry Carthage!)Unsurprisingly, Carthage brought his father, the professional journalist, to this one too. I must say, I really admire the guy’s willingness to enter our weird little world and parley with us. Shows he has the true courage of a journalist, willing to go where the story is, to reserve judgment till he has enough information, and to try to understand things on their own terms.

The story editing panel, in which we (but mostly Carthage’s dad) scrutinized some examples of prose and did some basic editing of it, was both fruitful and humbling. I feel like I learned a lot about what is necessary and what is not in prose, but at the same time, of course, I could not help feeling that my prose sucks and I need to work way harder on my writing.

I knew that was the likely fallout of attending the panel, though, and I somewhat assuaged my ego bruises with the knowledge that it is the other half of writing where I excel. That does not let me off the hook for getting better at the first half of it, what one might call the technical half, but it does mean that technical flaws in my writing do not doom it completely.

Also, I want to hand out massive props for the furry writer (sorry, but I forgot your name) who offered up one of his own short stories for scrutiny by the panel. That took a lot of courage. I am not sure I would have been brave enough to do it myself, if asked.

12:00 PM : I hook up with Joe, Julian, Carthage, and my dear friend Marzipan (not the one from Homestar Runner!) for the brunch buffet at the convention hotel restaurant. One of the best things about any convention is seeing the people you only see once a year at said convention, and I am very happy to see Marzipan. Isn’t it sad how people drift apart over the years?

Also worth noting : I am very pleased with myself at my self-control at the brunch buffet. I eat mostly salad, fresh fruit, and of course, BACON. Unlimited bacon is half the reason I go to a brunch buffet. I completely avoid all the tempting carb-laden options like hash browns and I limit myself to only one croissant. (Croissants are eighty percent of the other of half of why I go to brunch buffets. I have been known to go to a brunch buffet and end up eating nothing but fruit, bacon, and croissants.)

Even when I go to the dessert table, I come back with mostly fruit, plus some sort of nougat/fondant square that was surprisingly terrible. Tasted like the inside of one of those ultra cheap candy Easter eggs you find at dollar stores. Gack.

And that is all I had. (Well, plus two Nanaimo bars. I’m not made of stone! And they are just so damned good. And probably doubled my blood sugar all by themselves.)

2:oo PM : I attend a Multimedia Industry panel run by a fellow who goes by the name of Rocko, like Rocko from the show Undergrads, of which he is a big fan. He works in the animation industry as a sort of virtual puppetmaker. He gets the rough sketches of characters from the artists and turns them into models in Flash that the animators will in turn animate.

His job sounds fascinating and I learned a lot about how modern animated shows are made as opposed to the classical method with which I am passingly familiar.

However, his command of English is somewhat poor and his accent is very thick, and so the panel is easily as frustrating as it is informative. I am highly sensitive to language and so dealing with someone like that is very tiring and stressful for me.

I am not knocking the guy. The fact that he speaks any English at all in addition to his native tongue puts him ahead of me in language skill.

But us writer types are more intimately connected with language than most, and dealing with someone with poor command of it on multiple levels stresses us out.

4:00 PM : Laden with the exotic wares of this strange and intoxicating new realm, Joe, Julian and I once more brave the long and dusty trail back to the familiar streets and byways of Richmond, where we will tell our tales of mysterious far off lands and bold adventures.

5:00 PM : At long last, we are back home in Richmond, and with plenty of time to meet up with Felicity, have a quick supper, and relax for the evening.

As always, the end of a convention is bittersweet. You value all the fun you had, but you are sad that it is over now. It’s rather like the day after Christmas in that respect.

Luckily, soon the rhythms and routines of daily life sweep you back into their soothingly familiar tempo, and your sadness about the convention ending is replaced by fond memories, and the feeling of looking forward to the next one even more than you did this one.

And to be honest, I am really looking forward to finally getting some sleep.

9 AM : Officially awake after a sleepless night of watching TV and cursing myself for having forgotten my sleeping pills back in Richmond. See, my sleeping pills work great. They do not force you to sleep, they just make it a lot easier to get there and (the most important thing for me) they help you stay asleep even if you are a restless type like myself. But they have one little drawback : no pills, no sleep. This should make the rest of the convention fun.

10 AM : Allowed into the Dealer’s Room after a brief detention by officials. Apparently when they say it opens at 10 AM, they really mean it. Not one minute earlier. Lots of fun things that I can’t afford in there, including caffeinated soap. I kid you not. Soap with caffeine in it. I express doubts as to the efficacy of supercutaneous caffeine application to the vendor. He concurs, but notes that their soaps also smell very nice. And they do!

11:00 AM : I check out the Hangout Room. To my surprise and delight, it is full of video games. IRL Events are there, and they have a ton of video game consoles, old school and new, set up to play. I get to try out the Wii U, and enjoy playing New Super Mario Brothers. The level of detail and the vividness of the colors make for a gorgeous and very rich visual experience. Plus, of course, it’s quite fun.

But even better than that, I end up participating in a card game called Cards Against Humanity. It’s like someone combined Apples To Apples, Match Game, Madlibs, and Satan’s thesaurus to make a game designed to produce and reward the most depraved and hilarious answers possible.

It’s perfect for me, and I laugh like hell the whole time. What fun!

1:00 PM : Hanging out with my friend William Graham in the lobby, chatting about science and watching the fursuiters go by in the fursuit parade. (A fursuit is like an animal-themed mascot costume. ) There must have been at least fifty of them. Vancouver has a very active and thriving fursuit community. I loved seeing them all.

3 PM : I eagerly participate in a Harlem Shake video shoot. Despite misgivings about the final product due to a cluster of snafus, it does turn out fairly well. You can find it here if you would like to check it out yourself : http://youtu.be/oBk0F1QK0YI. I am the very fat fellow in the suspenders and glasses with long hair, a beard, and absolutely no shame.

3:30 PM : I attend a Furry Media Relations panel hosted by my friend Carthage with (surprise!) his father as a guest commentator. Being a professional journalist, he ends up being our official representative of “the media”. This is a somewhat perilous role, as we of the Furry ilk tend to be pretty touchy about how the media portrays us. It always hurts to be misunderstood, and our little world is far too strange and outre for the mainstream media to possibly “get”, and so on those rare occasions when we are noticed, we tend to be portrayed as nothing but a bunch of hilariously deviant perverts with a thing for Bugs Bunny. And we are so much more than that.

Despite this tension, the panel generates a lot of really interesting discussion about how The World Outside portrays our World Within, and a lot of fruitful insights as to the causes of our poor image are gleaned. We discuss articles done about us in the popular press, mentions in popular culture, and a Certain Episode Of CSI That Shall Remain Nameless. We talk about how much of our bad rep comes from the mainstream world’s inability and unwillingness to understand us, how much of it we bring upon ourselves with indiscreet behaviour and poor media relations, and how much any of it really matters. After all, it’s not like they are rounding us up and putting us into camps.

All in all, an excellent discussion.

5:10 PM : With nothing in particular to grab our attention, Joe, Julian and I go back to our room, Room 278, at the Accent Inn to chill a while before going out to hunt up some dinner. The room continues to be comfortable and cozy. We chat, relax, and ponder our next move.

6:30 PM : Having been thwarted by extremely long lines at both the Sushi Garden and White Spot, we are forced to retreat all the way back to our hotel again and end up eating at ABC Country Kitchen for the second night in a row. There’s nothing wrong with ABC, in fact, we often eat at the one here in Richmond. But part of the fun of being away from home is eating someplace new, and so I am kind of disappointed to be back at ABC yet again. But oh well, that is what happens when you and an entire convention of hungry furries are all looking for supper at the same time. Next time I will either just plan on eating later, after the rush, or pack a lunch.

8:30 PM : Back to Chez Nous (alias our hotel room) for a little rest and relaxation before we head back to the convention for Bad Movie Night.

10:00 PM : Oops! We fell asleep. All that good ABC Country Kitchen food must have done it to us. Joe and Julian head off to the convention anyhow. I decide to stay in the room and try to catch up on the sleep that has eluded me so far.

10:45 PM : Bad idea. I am unable to get back to sleep, so instead of having fun at Bad Movie Night, I end up just listlessly watching television in our hotel room with only the rubber duck for company. (He’s cute but he’s no conversationalist.) I end up feeling lonely and depressed. Not one of my better calls, trying to stay back to sleep. Conventions are the opposite of sleep!

Oh well, there is always tomorrow. We all make bad decisions sometimes.

(After two weeks of forgetting to do this, then remembering, then forgetting again, I am finally getting around to writing the convention report that I was totally going to write the day after we got back. )

2:00 PM : My roommates and good friends Joe Devoy, Julian Castle, and I, our meager worldly possessions stowed in the trunk of Joe’s car, embark upon the long and dangerous journey to far-flung and exotic Burnaby with our hearts filled with optimism and hope for our new (three day) lives in this strange new land.

3:36 PM : Hardened but heartened by our journey, our hardy troupe arrives at the Accent Inn at Burnaby, and does all the little unpacking and sorting things necessary to settle in to our temporary domicile. The room is distinctly “motel” and seems like the sort of place a vacationer in the great travel boom of the 50’s might have stayed, microwave aside. I feel quite comfortable there. We are quite amused by the little touches of personality, though, such as a “do not disturb” sign that reads “Don’t even think about coming in here!” and a rather well dressed rubber ducky in the bathroom. He made bath time oh so fun!

4:20 PM : We arrive at the convention hotel, which is not the Accent Inn but the Executive Inn. (Next year, we will know to book our room earlier). After negotiating strange Burnaby roads and even stranger Burnaby parking, the free shuttle bus from the Accent Inn to the Executive is starting to look more attractive.

4:50 PM : The pre-convention hurdles have finally all been cleared. Made the road trip, got settled into our motel style hotel, drove the fix strange blocks to the Executive Inn, got registered as an official convention going creature, and now I can catch my breath, browse the convention swag, and say hi to some of my furry friends as they go by. We’re off to a great start!

6:35 PM : My first panel – Introduction to 3D Printing, as hosted by Loial of OtterSoft.ca . A very interesting introduction to 3D printing (formerly known as “rapid prototyping”) in general, and Loial’s own 3D printer, designed and built himself, in particular. The real show-stopping moment was when he showed us all how his printer was so fast and accurate that it could even print while sitting on its side. Amazing!

7:45 PM : Our beloved editrix Felicity Walker, while not a convention attendee, has graciously decided to drive all the way from Richmond to Burnaby to have dinner with Joe, Julian, and I at the ABC Country Kitchen restaurant next to the Accent Inn. Good food and great conversation with friends. Life is truly good.

10:00 PM : I attend my second ever “Eye of Argon” reading. For those unfamiliar with this crime against prose, “Eye of Argon” is a Conan-style fantasy novella published way back in 1970 which is considered by many to be one of the worst written anythings ever. It is a juggernaut of literary horror, an absolute monolith of malapropisms, terrible imagery, bizarre word choices, appalling sentence structure, scatter-shot spelling, and logic that would melt an android’s brain into twitching, sparking slag. It is not just bad, it’s legendarily bad, the sort of bad that cannot come from mere incompetence alone but which can only rise from a kind of perverse anti-talent that drives people to continue when all sense and reasons would tell them that they have no idea what they are doing and should really stop and have a bit of a nap.

The readings, therefore, are freaking hilarious events. The rule is simple. People are seated in a circle and take turns reading the story aloud. You turn ends when you laugh, or when you have read for five minutes. Not many people make it to the five minute mark. I made it within fifteen seconds but the darn thing wrung a derisive “heh” out of me at the last moment.

Obviously, what with all the laughing and the inevitable digressions into existential crisis caused by wondering just what the hell is going on and what on God’s green Earth the author was thinking, it takes a long time to get through all of it, and when you do, you really feel like you have had the same sort of shared terrible experience that turns men into soldiers in times of war.

1:00 AM: I do something entirely out of character and go to the ballroom while the dance music is blaring. I do this to support my friend Graham Mitchell, who is doing his very first ever DJ gig as his alias DJ Silvermink. Normally, I shun anything even remotely resembling a dance club like the Amish shun buttons. Dance clubs are not good environments for those of us who do not like loud noises and crowding and whose charms are largely based around personality and verbal skills.

But I figured, what the heck, it is good to do things outside of your comfort zone sometimes just to stretch yourself a little bit. And I wanted to show support for my friend Silvermink.

And you know, it was not that bad. I didn’t dance (when I dance, people are reminded of the hippos from Fantasia, so no thanks), but I relaxed and enjoyed the groove for a while.

But then, at about 35 minutes in, I suddenly just got up and left. I don’t even recall making the decision. I just left, as though I had reached some saturation point and left entirely by reflex, like a lemming obeying a sudden urge to migrate.

This does not reflect on Silvermink’s DJ skills in any way, though. I just do not like dance music. The priorities of people who want to dance are not those of people who want to just listen to the music, and I find all that oontz oontz and repetition just too damn boring to keep my interest.

2:00 AM : Joe, Julian and I regroup and head back to our cozy room at the Accent Inn for a well earned good night’s sleep.

Hey there science fans! It is the Ides of March, and while it would be far outside the proper use of a science column to tell you to beware some arbitrary date invented by Shakespeare, it still could not hurt anything to avoid all rotundas today, especially if you have been kind of a dick to your friends recently.

Might want to avoid Caesar salads too. It would be terrible for your death to make the news as “Persons Dies Choking On A Crouton On The Ides of March!”

Got plenty of scientastic stuff to share with you wonderful people this week, so let’s dig in!

First off, let’s start small with this rather clever little device.

Being someone who really hates the heat (and vice versa… to be honest, the heat started it), I find evaporative cooling very interesting. It seems like it turns humidity into a good thing for fighting heat, instead of something that makes heat a million times worse.

Trust me, I have had plenty of both dry heat and the humid kind. Dry is way better.

But what really impressed me about this fellow’s gadget was that he looked at one of those plastic room deodorant cases and realized that would be ideal for holding the wet sponge.

Something designed to let air go through it that is cheap and easy to work with. Genius. Then all you need is a computer fan and a sponge you have cut down to the right size, and a little water.

I bet you could make a mint mass-producing a slicker, more consumer-friendly model.

Let’s go one size up, and talk teeth. Specifically, growing brand new ones as an adult.

The method is crude and frankly a little horrifying so far (poor mice 🙁 ) but the science is there for it to be a possibility in the future, and I find that very interesting.

We might see a future where a lot of the complicated dental work that we do today is replaced by a simple procedure where they take out the bad tooth and then stimulate your mouth to grow a new tooth instead.

This might mean that in the future, dentists have a lot less work, or at least that their work is simpler and requires less specialized training.

Imagine a future without dentures! Old people with perfectly healthy, new, fresh, straight teeth, able to eat whatever they like and to heck with Fixodent and all its ilk.

Sounds great. A little creepy, but still, pretty great!

Next up in scale we have that always relevant subject, exercise.

Some researchers in Australia claim to have found the world’s most efficient fat-burning exercise regimen.

Now by “efficient”, they mean “the most fat burned for the least amount of pain”, which just shows that these are fitness researchers who have their priorities straight.

Here is how it works : you do three 20 minute sessions on the exercise bike a week. During these sessions, you pedal like crazy for eight seconds, then pedal at a slower rate for twelve, then repeat fifty nine more times or so.

This makes your body release loads of fat-burning chemicals while keeping your muscles from building up lactic acids, which are the main thing that make you feel tired.

This supposedly means that for an hour’s worth of exercise a week, you will get the same results as if you jogged for five or six hours a week.

Sounds sort of annoying to do, but I imagine it’s fine once you get used to it.

Moving up another notch on our scales of ten, let’s talk about a worldwide internet for robots.

First off, let’s get this out of the way : HELLO SKYNET!

Are we done now? Good.

It’s called Rapyuta, and idea is that robots worldwide would use wireless Internet access to plus in to a database of existing solutions for the sorts of problems robots might face, or if they have just solved a problem themselves, upload that database to the system.

That way, instead of every robot starting from scratch and having to reinvent the wheel every time it comes across a problem that is not in its own local database, robots all over the world can share solutions and the state of robot intelligence can advance far, far more rapidly.

In essence, it gives robots culture. And given that robots have computers for brains, that is a culture that can advance incredibly fast.

Finally for today, we have this large scale simulation of just what it is like in the local neighborhood of our little old Solar System.

And just look at all those stars with planets around them. All those marvelous possibilities!

As we have learned in this column before, evidence is piling up that having planets is the normal thing for suns and having none is the distinct outlier, which means that you can pick any star in the night sky and say “Yup. There’s planets there. ”

The video illustrates that point in a marvelously perspective enriching way by starting with Earth and then zooming out while keeping our friendly yellow sun centered at all time.

It has that Powers of Ten feeling of majesty and scope, and really makes a little naked beach ape sitting at a computer on this little clod of dirt feel both inspired and humbled.

FYI, the video was made using the Hayden Platentarium’s Digital Universe, which is the world’s most comprehensive and accurate simulation of the universe.

I would really love to play around with that for a little while.

“Plot a course to Omicron Beta, Ensign Ro. Maximum warp. ”

Then play the TNG theme while you watch the universe go by.

Well that is it for this week, loyal science fans! Meet me back here next week and I swear I will once more have my pockets full of marvelous things for us to gape and wonder about.

Until then, true believers thinkers, keep your minds open, your standards high, and your hearts ready to be filled with the wonder of the true magic of this wonderful and amazing Universe!

Contradiction in terms, right? Maybe not.

I recently came across this article about the rise of atheist churches, and it really got me thinking.

First, full disclosure time, I am secretly a hyper-intelligent octopus. (Well, no, but could you imagine?)

The disclosure is that I have had the idea of nontheistic churches for quite a long time. It just grew naturally out of my curiosity about just what a church is, what people do there, and what exactly it is they are getting out of it.

Because you see, as many of you already know, I am a complete outsider when it comes to religion. I was raised without it, and have never had a religion in my life. One might call me a natural atheist, although I prefer the term nontheist as it is less confrontational and carries less baggage.

So when I first read the article, my feelings were mixed.

Most of me was happy that people were doing what I felt needed to be done in order to truly begin the process of overcoming religion. Namely, offering an alternative, something that fulfills all the functions of a religion without demanding faith in a bunch of fairy tales and an angry yet benevolent sky monarch.

But a little part of me was disappointed. Another of my brilliant ideas being executed by someone else! I swear, I was totally going to do that…. some day. Eventually. Maybe. At the very least, I was going to write about it and hope someone else picked up the slack!

OK, confessional closed, on to the subject at hand.

A lot of people are going to ask “Without God, what is the point of a church?” In fact, some people have such a negative association with the word “church” that they will reject the notion of a nontheistic church out of hand.

And that is, of course, their right. Much cruelty and madness has be foisted upon innocent children in the name of religion, and those scars run deep.

But my contention is that what people get out of going to church every holy day has very little to do with religion and a great deal more to do with community, and that, in fact, religion has hijacked community and claimed its positive effects as its own.

That warm feeling you get from singing psalms and doing rituals together? That’s God, and we own Him, so you had better do what we say or we will cut you off.

Oh, and we will also be the social hub of your community, so that all the good feelings you get from other social activities like picnics and meetings will also bear our seal. The happiness you get from spending an afternoon in the company of your little community? That’s God, and we own Him.

Troubled? Why, just come to one of our representatives and talk it out. That good feeling you get from someone listening to your troubles and offering kindly advice? That’s God. And we own Him.

But it isn’t God at all, it’s just the human need for community and empathy. You could remove the Bible, God, and all the rest from the weekly service and it would be just as effective at making people happy without asking them to break their brains and obey.

So I am glad that people are out there doing this. Their efforts are small now, but I feel that this movement or something quite like it is the wave of the future and that the churches of the new millennium will be born from such simple roots.

Right now, traditional religion is largely the domain of the old. Obviously, this cannot continue, and their children and their children’s children will have to find or create something new.

They will also have to go get the baby we all have thrown out with the bathwater when we threw away the good parts of religion along with all the badness.

One point of contention : I would not define my new church as atheist or agnostic. That is not inclusive enough. You want people to come there and feel safe, accepted, unjudged. I would simple make it so that God is not included in the church but those who believe in God are not excluded from the religion.

That way, you can accept people who have a lot of doubts about their religion and their relationship with God, but who are nowhere near ready to just chuck the whole thing yet.

And maybe through your nontheistic church, they will someday find the courage to make that final break with their faith. And maybe not. You might, in fact, help them find their way back to God. So be it.

But people are desperate for solace, and you do not create solace for them by putting up walls. You do it by letting people in, and giving a place to call home.

So why call it a church at all? Why not call it a social club, or a fellowship, or a regular meeting of the Grumpy God Hater’s Society?

Because only by calling it a church can we emphasize that church and religion are not the same thing, and make sure that we are replicating everything that a church gives people without the necessity of enforcing obedience through some silly old book written by cranky patriarchs.

There are functions that a social club simply cannot replicate. I want people to have a church to go to, I just want to to be a church that does not ask for faith or in any way put itself in opposition to reason, science, and humanitarianism.

So bring on the soup kitchens, the group singing of songs, talks about shared values, counseling services, and all the rest. People need all of these.

And if we can do this, we can truly pry the fingers of religion off the throats (and minds) of the people and replace it with something safer, saner, and better suited to the realities of the world.

Only with nontheistic churches can we create a post-religious world.

I, for one, am eager to start that process ASAP.

Wow, hard to believe that it’s already been a week since I took off for VancouFur. Where does the time go?

Anyhow, now I’m back, and it feels good. Got a freaking ton of awesome scienceness to share with you eager beavers out there, and I just can’t wait to get down to it.

To start off, let’s talk about the discovery of a lost continent under the Indian ocean.

Now we have not actually found this continent yet, but we are hot on its trail. We have the smoking gun, which in this case takes the form of sand.

They have found grains of sand on the beaches of Mauritius, an island east of Madagascar, that contain zircons that are way older than expected, to the tune of between 660 million and about 2 billion years old.

We are learning a lot from zircons, aren’t we? Kickass. And to think most of us have only ever heard of the cubic kind.

Anyhow, based on the age of these zircons, geologists have deduced that there must have been a whole microcontinent somewhere in the neighborhood of Mauritius that vanished under the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago.

So, you know. No big deal. Just a whole continent we had no idea existed until now.

I am really hoping this leads to the discovery of a whole mess of exciting geological and biological finds from the days when the continent, dubbed Mauritania, was above the waves.

Staying with underwater life for the moment, we have the latest news from Lake Vostok, where after drilling down four whole kilometers into the Antarctic ice, we have finally found something : a kind of bacteria currently unknown to science.

And yes, for those of you wondering, there definitely was an X-Files that started like this, as well as being the setting for the best horror movie ever.

So, if you see a lone husky running towards you, scientists, shoot that fucking dog.

To refresh your memory, Lake Vostok is a lake that has lain beneath the ice of Antarctica for at least a million years. That means the waters of this lake have been locked away from the rest of the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, and thus can hopefully give us a picture of what life was like back then.

It is a rare and wondrous opportunity, and I am glad it is yielding useful results. Realistically, the odds are that this bacteria will not be all that different than ones we already know.

But until the full search of all known micro-organic genomes is complete, we won’t know for sure.

Next up, we have this week’s entry into FSW’s favorite topic, brain science, and it’s a doozy, because it’s all about how some scientists have figured out how to connect rat’s brains together.

Yes folks, they created the world’s first brain to brain interface. One rat brain definitely could talk to another rat brain and vice versa, and nobody is disputing that.

Whether or not it was a meaningful conversation or not is somewhat open to question, and for some reason, the researchers are going on about linking multiple animal brains together to form some sort of organic computer, which seems entirely beside the point to me and makes me wonder if these people are doing this research for the right reasons or whether this whole thing just got funded on mad scientist appeals.

We already have really good computers. It is pointless to try to recreate in wetware what we already do perfectly well with hardware.

What I want to know is, how is the rat perceiving this strange new stimulus? Are the rats communicating via this interface, or is basically just annoying them?

And of course the obvious, could people do this? Could we all be instant messaging with our brains one day? And would that be a good thing?

Next up, we have a very cool story about how Chinese scientists have managed to measure the speed of quantum teleportation, and as you can imagine, it’s really freaking fast.

How fast? At least ten thousand times the speed of light. We have to say “at least” because there does not currently exist in this universe equipment precise or fast enough to measure something going faster than that. So we have to guess.

But when 10,000C is your minimum speed, we are talking really freaking fast here. It might well be instantaneous. We don’t know.

Quantum entanglement is, of course, the strange effect created by “entangling” two quantum particles and then moving them apart.

Somehow, when you do that, no matter how far apart said particles get, when you do X to one of them, the opposite happens to the other.

And as far as we can tell, this happens instantaneously. And that’s not just instantaneous from the point of view of human perception.

That is literally, scientifically, instantaneous, as in a duration of 0.0 with however many more zeros you want to add.

And that just blows my freaking mind.

Finally, we have our big story, and you might be asking yourself : wow, what can top all that?

And the answer is : fusion. Actual nuclear fucking fusion. And according to the guys at Lockheed Skunkworks, we are only four years away from it.

You read that right, four years. Not forty, like the old joke says (fusion is always forty years away), but four. As in 2017. As in real soon now.

To call this a bold claim is a Planck scale understatement. Nobody, not even the fusion enthusiasts working on tokamaks and toroidal plasma containment units worldwide, has been talking about real live fusion happening that soon.

Technical details are sketchy at the moment, but apparently this method relies on beaming radio waves into tightly controlled magnetic fields and creating safe and stable plasmas out of the most abundant material in the universe, hydrogen.

Charles Chase, the head of the team making these gobsmacking claims, says that he is confident that they will have proof of concept by 2017 and begin producing trailer-sized units capable of powering entire small cities shortly thereafter.

And it is hard to know how to react to claims that extraordinary. Obviously we all want it to be true. Something like that could change the world and forever solve all our energy problems.

But it’s so unexpected and so frankly outrageous a claim that it is hard to believe it. It just seems too good to be true, and while that is not technically a logical or scientific measurement of likelihood (the history of scientific and technological progress is filled with implausible truths), it still makes fr a fairly reliable rule of them.

Still, on behalf of Mother Earth, and we, her most precocious and bothersome of children, I sincerely hope that Charles Chase knows exactly what he is talking about, and that by the end of this decade, all the electricity in the world is fusion based or the equivalent.

Keeping working on those electric cars, people!

I have been pondering a potentially useful distinction lately, and today is the day I have decided that I should probably put some of it down somewhere.

And seeing as it’s Writing O’Clock, that place would be here, and that time would be now.

First off, let’s define some terms.

Intelligence, we will define as the raw processing power of your brain. Mental horsepower. Some people have very strong minds, capable of pulling great loads of information. Others have extremely fast minds, which deal with small amounts of information but do so with blazing speed.

Most of us smart types have some of both, but for the purposes of this article, we will consider them equal and just think of it as horsepower. Processing speed. Hardware.

Sophistication, we will define as “understanding of the world”. This too has two dimensions, breadth and depth, but for the purposes of this essay, we will treat it as a single quantity.

Now for the relationship between the two. Arguably, sophistication requires intelligence. There is a limit to how well you can understand the world and how it works, and that limit is at least partly governed by intelligence. A highly intelligent person will be capable of a richer, deeper understanding of the world than someone of low intelligence.

This assumes sophistication derived via intellect, and I am well aware that this may not always be the case. Human intuition works in mysterious ways, and it is possible that a person of limited intelligence might well acquire a level of sophistication above and beyond what would appear to be their limit via collating and correlating information on a subconscious level.

But I think that would be the rare exception, the outliers, and we are best off setting them aside when we examine this issue of intelligence and sophistication.

Thus, sophistication requires intelligence. But intelligence does not guarantee sophistication. Sophistication is software, after all. It is the view of the world a person build up out of their life experiences, the formal knowledge they learn via their education, the observations they have made based on the patterns they have noticed in the world, and countless other factors that all contribute to a person’s understanding of how the world works.

A person might well have the excellent hardware of a truly powerful brain, yet still limit themselves to a very workaday and functional understanding of the world that is strictly limited to that which will get them through their everyday lives, and everything else is of value only as possible entertainment.

Likewise, a person of average intelligence might, through diligent self-education and determined effort at expanding their consciousness, approach a much higher level of sophistication than an incurious genius.

Still, as a guiding principle, intelligence limits sophistication, and that is a problem for democracy.

Democracy, broadly speaking, requires of every citizen that they have an opinion about the issues of their times and the proper course for the government of their community.

There is no option, on paper at least, to simply abdicate that authority to someone who understands these things better than you do.

And if we were all of similar intelligence, that might not be a problem, but societies inevitably produce an intelligentsia, formal or informal, and these people are always pushing for progress and making things more complex in the process.

This is a very good thing as a whole. Were it not for the intellectuals, we would all be living in caves. But in a modern democratic society, with every citizen an equal participant, it creates a great deal of stress and confusion as the denizens of the top tier of intelligence, in the true spirit of egalitarianism, attempt to translate the language of their own level of sophistication to people of a lesser level of understanding.

This ends up creating an undeclared elite as the people of low or average intelligence, sensing that they are unable to truly understand what is going on as well as the top tier does, are left with no choice but to instead pick the smart person who they like most and who seems to understand what is going on the best, and do what that person (or group, or political party, or whatever) tells them to do.

This violates the very spirit of democracy and its foundation values of equality and fairness, but it is nevertheless the inevitable result of the asymmetry of the distribution of intelligence in a population.

What further complicates the issue is that while, technically, every citizen should be interested in politics, realistically speaking, it is still entirely optional. You don’t even have to vote.

So instead of the democratic ideal of an educated and involved public functioning, via public debate, as one great and wise intelligence, a more realistic view would show a population loosely stratified into layers of sophistication, involvement, and intellect.

As far as I can tell, there is no acceptable solution to this problem. We are certainly not going to quizzing people on the issues before they can vote. Not only would the very questions on the quiz then become hot button political issues, but what does one say to a citizen who is turned away because they are simply not smart enough to vote?

“Sorry, but you will just have to let other citizens decide for you. Turns out, this country is not yours. You are a second class citizen. Be glad we still let you have opinions. Now go away. ”

No, that is not acceptable in any way.

But what I think we must reluctantly accept is that we of that top tier of intelligence have a responsibility not just for how we form our own opinions and make our own choices, but for what we may lead others to think and choose as well.

We might not want this extra responsibility, and our individualist culture would suggest that we therefore do not have to accept it.

But I think we have it whether we want it or not. That is often how responsibility works.

The challenge, then, is whether we use it well.