I hope you are all enjoying a pleasant and chocolatey Bunny Day. Do not mind me, the sullen diabetic in the corner, eating his no candy and resenting all you happy people who live in Candy Paradise and have absolutely no idea how god damned good you have it.

I mean seriously. Easter is a big “Fuck You!” to diabetics. Christmas has all kinds of other awesome things, like gifts, turkey, an awesome warm togetherness vibe, Christmas trees, and so forth and so on. Halloween, the other candy-oriented holiday, at least has costumes and bobbling for apples and the fun of being scary.

But without candy, all that remains of Easter is a reason to eat ham.

Not that I am bitter or anything.

Anyhow, it is time to clear the unused uncategorized stuff out of my browser once more, and that means it is time for a Bunny Day Special Clearance Sale!

All these wonderful items, and only for the price of one blog entry! Why, with prices like this, we must be insane! As insane as the idea of a egg laying bunny Jesus!

Let’s see here. OK, let’s deal with Frane Selak first.

Meet Mister Lucky

Warning, big ol image ahead. Click to enlarge.

If you are in any form of transport with this man, GET OFF NOW!

Let us start with the obvious, boring, sensible, and most likely explanation first.

That would be just sheer probability. With billions of people in the world, and instance of someone with this many near death experiences in his life was bound to occur sooner or later.

Or the whole thing could be an urban legend, or just plain fabrication.

That taken care of, the far more entertaining theory is that at some point, Frane Selak made an incredibly powerful and vindictive enemy who has been trying to kill him for decades, but Frane is just too wily and resourceful and quick to respond to die.

I mean, doesn’t the whole thing kind of remind you of Unbreakable? Maybe Frane Selak is actual an ancient immortal being who only poses as a simple music teacher in order to conceal his dark agenda!

But then he got tired of the Big Evil business and decided to just cast a spell so that he would win the lottery and live in style for a while.

Or maybe all the crashes and such were just his way of collecting the souls he needed for that Win The Lottery spell. If so, you would think there would be an easier way.

Isn’t rampant speculation fun?

Print Your House

And speaking of rampant speculation, here is a link to a very interesting bit of it about the future of object printing on a grand scale, written by futurists, who speculate rampantly for a living.

The lucky bastards.

Basically, my take on the article is that the future will see, hopefully, a wholesale, sea change kind of increase in the efficiency of the manufacture of certain things, like houses and highways, and this will create a ripple effect of spreading efficiencies that will in general make the future way better.

I am particularly interested in efficiencies in home building. The burden of a massive mortgage and the barriers this creates towards home ownership are a serious problem in modern society. The ladder of success is increasingly missing many rungs. Anything which makes housing cheaper is a godsend as far as I am concerned.

That said, I am not sure we will be printing entire houses in the future. I am not ruling it out, but I think that it is a far more complicated proposition than the futurists think.

Sure, you can print the parts of a home. But we already do that in places called “factories”, and I am pretty sure the savings in transport costs you get from printing on-site would not begin to compensate for the loss of economies of scale.

“Printing” future highways is actually a more reasonable idea. A highway is far simpler than a house, involving a lot of the same thing with the same basic ingredients following a set pattern. I can imagine a single machine that can do all the tasks with humans only supervising.

Still, the future is looking bright shiny and efficient!

He’s Not Chevy He’s An Asshole

Believe it or not, that is the exact title of a Gawker article about what a complete, total, lifelong, reprehensible, utter asshole douchebag cocksucker of a horrible human being Chevy Chase is.

(For those of you who did not get the reference in the article’s title, relax, neither did I at first, it is really clumsy and terrible. But for what it is worth (not much), it is a reference to the Neil Diamond song “He’s Not Heavy, He’s My Brother”. I know, I know… ouch. Very ouch. )

I was slightly disappointed, but not surprised, that he is has been an asshole to the cast and crew of Community, a show I love, as well. His presence on the cast was the main reason I avoided the show for a long time, and I suppose I had to convince myself he might not be so bad a guy now in order to justify watching the show (which is very good and extremely funny, by the way).

But now I have to face facts : if I want to continue to love the show, I have to overlook the fact that Chevy is still a massive pussy fart of a man and the only difference between him and his character Pierce from the show is that Pierce means well, and Chevy is just mean.

Oh well. The damage is done. I have already watched the first two seasons via Netflix streaming, and I love the show, and I can’t just suddenly un-love it because I know the truth about Chevy now.

Just… nobody tell me anything bad about any of the stars of Better Off Ted, okay?

I don’t tink I could take it right now.

It makes for darkly entertaining reading. I have hated the prick for years and even I did not know even half the shit they dug up.

Yes! Actual science on an actual Friday! After two or three weeks of various life randomizing events, mostly pretty bad, I am actually back to doing the weekly science roundup on the right day of the week for a change! Rejoice, o science lovers, for the Fairly Decent Times are here again!

Feels good to be back in the saddle and back to normal (so-called) once again. Granted, my finger is still in a dressing (which has begun to ITCH dammit) and will be until Sunday, and still feels kind of weird, and I wonder what is going on under the Band-aid (not looking forward to taking THAT off), but what the heck, I am clearly on the mend.

So let’s find some science and get it on!

Your Robot Army Awaits

Robots are awesome. I think we can all agree on that. Being able to make stuff that does stuff is an incredible kick, and as proof, I offer the fact that we have wholeheartedly embraced robots as a world culture despite the fact that technically, apart from dubious utility as a slow and awkward vacuum cleaner, robots are not really useful to us unless we happen to be car factories.

But designing and building a new robot takes a lot of time, money, and expertise, and most of us simply do not have enough of all three of those to be robot designers.

But that might be about to change, thanks to the Printable Programmable Machines initiative, which plans to make it so that anyone with access to a 3D printer can design, program, and print their own brilliant ideas for robots.

Granted, you would still need some basic design and programming skills, but nevertheless, this could in theory democratize the robot design and build process down one very important level, increasing the number of potential active roboticists in the world by a thousandfold or more.

And that is a very good thing. If we are ever to realize the dream of, for instance, the household servant robot, it will be because we finally have enough bright and ambitious minds working away at all the little problems inherent in something that complex.

Or who knows, maybe they will come up with something entirely new that nobody has even dreamed of before, something so simple and cheap and useful that we all get one and it ends up completely changing the very fabric of society.

Either way, cool beans!

Not An Oxymoron

Meanwhile, over in the always wild world of particle physics, where the folks at the Thomas Jefferson Accelerator Project are looking for (this is not a typo) dark photons.

Dark photons are a theoretical particle that unlike a regular photon, would have a mass. And it would still carry the four forces with which we are familiar with, plus a mysterious fifth force that we know nothing at all about.

Spooky sounding, isn’t it? Dark photons carrying a mysterious unknown force… sounds like some great techno babble for how your science fiction villain’s powers work.

“Puny Earthlings, your feeble human weapons are no match for the mysterious force of my Dark Photons!”

That kind of thing.

It is all beyond my mental reach let alone grasp, but it all sounds very intriguing. It even might hold the answer to where the heck all that dark matter/dark energy stuff is out there. Dark matter and dark energy from dark photos… makes some kind of sense to me.

If they have mass, I can only assume they do not travel at the speed of light, as otherwise you get into that pesky divide by zero problem which would mean said particle had infinite energy.

Physicists hate that kind of thing.

Where Is Everybody?

A Friday Science Thing would not be complete without some creepy science, and this one will be no exception. A pair of artists has figured out how to use a process normally used by NASA to study stars in order to produce pictures of famous, busy places without all those people getting in the way.

Here is what that looks like :

Chilling, is it not? Like a science fiction tale where something terrible has taken all of humanity except for our poor hapless hero, who is left to run through the empty streets in increasingly desperate need for the sight of a single other human face.

The idea of the technique is deceptively simple. You take a really long exposure of the subject, and then this NASA process subtracts out anything that is moving, like people and cars.

Sounds simple, but the math alone involved in being able to discern what is a blurry streak and what is a solid bit of scenery must be simply staggering.

Hard to imagine a practical use for this technique, but it certainly makes for a very interesting artistic effect. If I were them, I would go from town to town, selling various town governments pictures of their highest traffic areas, areas usually quite busy during the day, as they would look without anybody in them.

I am sure they would find enough takers to make a go of it. Could look very nice blown up to mural size on the wall of a Town Hall or Chamber of Commerce.

Lest We Forget

Lastly, I will sneak in some content which is not at all science, but it is science fiction, so it is half science, and that counts, right?

Check out this bit of subversive Star Wars art :

Lest we forget. Click for full size.

I love this piece. I especially love the inclusion of the “toaster droid” (actually a messenger droid, according to Star Wars lore) from the original Star Wars movie. I laughed so hard when Chewbacca growled at it and it ran away when I was a kid.

Well, that is all for this week in science and science fiction, kids.

Tune in this time next week. It just might happen again!

It’s Bucket O’ Content time again, all you fine and fulsome folks, where I share with you, my loyal an exclusive audience, some of the choice morsels that I have painstakingly gathered from the far corners of the Net for your nourishment and entertainment.

Nourishment and entertainment at the same time? Sounds like dinner theatre. You know, I bet dinner theatre was invented by a bunch of actor/waiters who really wanted to perform before an audience so they just started putting on little playlets in between courses.

Now, of course, it’s the stage acting equivalent of working at a McDonald’s.

Hooray German Resourcefulness

First up, am amusingly disturbing and downright horrifying image from the past.

That there is a “Gasaanvalbestendige kinderwagen”, or “gas war resistant pram”, here shown off attractively by lovely gas mask model Alptraum Kraftstoff.

As you might have guessed, this was a device for the up and coming mother in World War 1 who wanted to go for a comfortable stroll with her precious bundle from heaven but was worried about the constant threat of Allied mustard gas attacks.

Well worry no more, Frau Durchschnittlich! With this stylish and affordable new product from Why Don’t You Just Stay Home Industries, you and the fruit of your loins can see and be seen by all the other people who are for some reason also roaming the streets!

Just think of what the neighbours cowering in their basements will say if they should happen to glimpse you strolling by with the baby they will just have to assume is in there out of the one window they forgot to black out!

So orders yours now, and for only an additional shipping and handling charge, you will also get our Flak Resistant Bassinet and our Flamethrower Resistant Onesy.

Seriously lady… if it’s that bad, just stay the hell home, OK?

Catch As Catch Can

Next up, this rather fun video of a guy showing off his l33t remote control glider skills.

Quite the visual, is it not? What makes it so breathtaking is the moment you go from the context of the aerial view, which is very nice but we have all seen aerial shots like that a million times in television and movies, to the suddenly much smaller and more human level of Crazy Horst’s hand.

I can only imagine that if you are a remote controlled glider enthusiast, being able to RC pilot so well that you can catch it must be worth major badass points. And he clearly is not making it easy for himself. Some of those look like he was deliberately making it really hard for himself, in fact, and I have mad respect for that. The hot air balloon one really takes my breath away.

And I totally want to hang out with some guy called Crazy Horst some day. That sounds like my kind of guy. I bet he would have awesome toys.

Oh, and I love the cartoon sound effects with the bloopers. Classic.

The Old Watering Hole

And now, a cute little ad, very furry, for Mio.

I like the art style in that ad. They managed to balance animal and human characteristics quite well. It looks good, it’s expressive, and it’s charming. Not bad, people.

As for the script, I like the “crock” joke, but then, I have a known weakness for puns, especially silly animal puns. Otherwise, the script is cute but not that funny. But what the heck, it’s just an ad for this Mio stuff.

I have to admit, I am curious about it. It’s little drops of highly concentrated flavouring that you add to whatever water you have on hand. I am guessing that it is primarily for the bottled water crowd, whether the bottle was bought at the store or filled up at home. But it would work just as well with the free glass of water you get with your meal at a restaurant, I would imagine. You just have to endure the glare of the manager who knows you are dodging paying for a high margin drink with the stuff.

Speaking of which, who the hell orders water at a bar anyhow? Bitchy animal ladies, apparently.

Anyhow, I hope we get it up here soon. It works out to something like 17 cents per serving, which seems reasonable, although the website does not define serving, so… who knows? And it’s sugar free, which makes me happy.

And who says you can only add it water? It would be awesome to experiment with it in other beverages.

So bring Mio to Canada already, Kraft! Wannit.

The Real Beauty Secret Of The Stars

Finally, I saved the best for last. Finally, you too can know the real beauty secret that all the supermodels and actresses use in order to look so damned good!

Voila, it is revealed!

Totally Laughing Out Loud. Awesome work, ladies. Now that is satire. It pulls no punches and just lays it out big broad and beautiful. And I can think of few more deserving targets than the supermodel myth factory that makes billions of women hate themselves and their bodies and their faces because they do not look like people who do not exist.

I am serious. There is no point in wishing you looked like the women in the ads of your women’s magazine because those women don’t look like that either. Nobody does. Those people are as artificial and unreal as cartoon characters, and if you could be a fly on the wall when one of these models is at home and relaxed, you would see that she looks a heck of a lot more like you than you ever thought possible.

This kind of thing makes me so damned angry that I don’t know what to do with myself. So bravo to all the ladies who made that clip, and especially to the one who wrote and directed it, Jesse Rosten.

Jesse can totally be a girl’s name, right?

Still typing with a gimpy finger and that is still not a heck of a lot of fun, but it does not seem to have gotten any worse over the last 24 hours, and so I will skip the trip to the Emergency Room and stick with doing what I do, namely writing, even though doing it is a trifle harder than usual right now.

So here it is, finally : some cool science type stuff! I have a lot of it I want to share with you nice people, and I better share it right now, before any more of it shows up and I have nowhere to put it.

Connect It All

This is not strictly speaking science, but it is too cool not to share with you fine folks.

Lots of nerdy kids loved their LEGO, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob connecting block toys, but always wondered : what could I build if I could use all of my connecting toys together?

Well wonder no more, nerd kids and kiddish nerds (which is, face it, all of us)! Thanks to the wonderful world of 3D printing, you can connect everything with everything!

I was never much for toys as a kid. Give me a bucket of LEGO and I would make some random abstract structure while I explore just how the things stick together, but once I had figured that out, I would lose interest, and go back to reading,

As for the rest…. why would I want to build a helicopter out of LEGO? It will just be a lame LEGO helicopter. Even if it made a really realistic looking one, I still would not care.

Never much for the toys. What a weird kid.

But even I can see how cool being able to connect ALL your stuff might be.

The Sky Pirates

Not quite in the ultra cool Nausicaä sense, but this might just be the first step towards that kind of piracy.

Those bastions of Internet anarchism The Pirate Bay, known mostly for being the number one place to go to find a bittorrent of that software you want but do not want to pay for plus their highly public and successful (for them) tangles with the forces of corporate information control, want to take this game into the future by establishing a network of autonomous flying network nodes.

As attractive as this idea is, with visions of quadcopter WiFi nodes giving Internet access to people in oppressed regions, odds are this idea is at least somewhat ahead of its time. We have the technology, just barely, to pull this off on a rotating rechargeable basis… drones working on rechargeable batteries and working in rotation.

But then there needs to be a base, and bases can be found and seized. The real prize is a fully autonomous drone that uses solar energy and ergo never needs to land. And we are not quite there yet.

But give it a few years, and we will see.

It Kills Potholes

This has me terribly excited, because if it delivers as promised, it could change things for all of us, especially us urban jungle dwellers.

It is called The Python, and its makers say it can fix a pothole in two minutes flat.

And that is just with a single operator! Imagine how quickly and cheaply your community could fix those axle shattering tire grabbers on your street if they had one of these babies. Instead of having to force six surly city workers to actually do their job for a change and ten have them for some reason take a full week of blocking your street (no doubt to punish you for making them work) in order to fix one lousy pothole, they could have a Python that simply patrols the streets looking for potholes and fixes them on the spot, right then and there.

And once they caught up with the backlog, it would not even need to patrol that often. Once a week would be plenty, and it could catch small potholes before they become big ones that cause big cracks in the pavement, thus saving money on repaving as well.

Coming from Prince Edward Island as I do, where the only smooth pavement is on the Trans-Canada and where the potholes have their own postal codes, this sounds awesome to me.

Soothing the Savage Beast

And finally, a story that has me written all over it, scientists are finally figuring out what kind of music appeals to animals.

Despite some people’s claims that their dog loves Debussy and detests Andrew Lloyd Webber, under controlled scientific conditions, animals show a profound indifference to human music.

That is because, for one thing, their hearing operates on a different set of frequencies than ours. So for a lot of our music, they are just plain not hearing most of it.

That much is fairly obvious. But tempo and tone matter just as much as tune. It turns out that heartbeat is the universal metronome, and so animals prefer music which is as fast (or slow) as their heart rate.

And what is more, they prefer music that incorporates the tone of their natural, happy noises. In social animals, this would be the noises they make to indicate to their group that everything is A OK.

To me, the amazing thing about all this is that they took such a goofy and whimsical idea as “music for animals” and actually made it work. They are getting real results here.

How real? You can, no word a lie, now buy music for cats.

I totally hear that in a Bill Murray from Scrooged voice when I read it.

I really wish I had a cat to test said music upon. It would be totally worth $1.99 to me to be able to be part of such a marvelous bit of pet science.

Well that it is for this week, science lovers! Next week, it might even be on time.

First, the standard disclaimer : I don’t usually comment on The Big Thing Happening Right Now because I figure there are millions of blog entries and Tumblr posts and so on being written about it as you are reading this, so why bother adding my own voice to the cacophony?

But every once in a while, something comes along that creates such a cultural gravity well that I feel like I have to add my two scents’ worth in order to prove I have at least a little pop culture mass without getting completely sucked into the stories’ orbit.

So it is with this Kony phenomenon.

It all started with an extremely powerful and effective bit of heartfelt viral propaganda that came out of nowhere to seemingly instantly be everywhere on the Internet all at once.

It’s a call for arms against a very evil man named Joseph Kony who leads a rebel army guilty of a great many horrible crimes, including abducting children and turning the girls into forced prostitution and the boys into becoming brutal child soldiers.

Here is the video :

As you can see, the video is the singular effort of a passionately committed person who is trying as hard as he possibly can and using every trick in the book to convince you to share his ideals and work in common cause with him towards the same goal.

So yes. It’s propaganda. I don’t think anyone would seriously dispute that. It is not an unbiased examination of the subject. It quite clearly wears its intent to convince and convert on its sleeve. That, to me, makes it propaganda. It uses the propagandist’s tools with verve and passion, if not with subtlety or sophistication.

But propaganda is not a dirty word. Everyone wants to convince others to share their views. Trying to do so with a rather overblown but still fairly stirring and quite well made video is no crime. People only call it propaganda when they either do not share the view being put forward, or are frightened by the power of the message. I am sure that if the message of the video had been something benignly banal like “we should all work together” or “love is important”, nobody would be calling it propaganda. But because it has been so successful in capturing the idealism of today’s youth, and because it so clearly calls for actual and not merely token or symbolic effort and real positive action, suddenly the mainstream media and the pundit dome is abuzz with confusion, derision, and cynicism.

Take this piece by David Rieff, unsubtly entitled The Road To Hell Is Paved With Viral Videos.

Yes, Mister Rieff, the video is propaganda. So is your column. So is this one. In a free society, especially this modern era where we all can publish our thoughts for the world to see effortlessly, we are all propagandists for our own point of view. We are all free to uses whatever tools we have on hand to make the strongest possible case for our opinions, and in turn, we are all free to either be persuaded by the propaganda of others, or disregard it.

And because the Kony 2012 video is propaganda and not a documentary, it is not filled with a high density of facts and a balanced point of view. It does not go into the complexities of global politics, the deep history of Uganda, or even openly admit that what it is amounts to a call for war.

It is rhetoric, not logical, that fuels that video. And I am not claiming the video to be perfect. The parts with the director’s child are particularly cringe-inducing and frankly ill-advised. Naked earnestness is often somewhat unpleasant and embarrassing for us older, more sophisticated folks. But that does not mean we have the right to attack it and try to kill it. The growing concrete idealism of the younger generations is a wonderful thing, and should be encouraged as much as possible, unless you happen to think the world is perfect as it is.

Because honestly, if things are to get better, it will fall, as it always has, to the young and idealistic to provide the energy and drive to make it happen, and it will be us older folks who can either help them (and gently encourage them towards the most effective channels for their energies), or simply be swept aside by the tide of history.

Remember, these young people will be in charge some day. Do we really want them to be bitter, apathetic, and cynical like us when that happens? Or do we want them ready to make the world a better place?

And from a practical point of view, I do not think the video’s call to arms is entirely impractical.

Sure, war is nothing to contemplate lightly. But Joseph Kony is a man without a nation. From what Rieff’s article itself says, his army is not very strong, militarily speaking. A sufficient international UN force could probably take him out in a short period of time, without any burden to perform a regime change or rebuild a nation.

It could be, in fact, the perfect “global police” action, fast and effective and very clean, and pay extraordinary dividends in propaganda value and diplomatic rallying points by showing the world that there is something you can do about terrible people doing terrible things to your fellow human beings who merely had the bad luck to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It would be the sort of thing the whole world could rally around and feel good about. No complicated issues regarding soveignty. No “winning the war and losing the peace”. Go in with overwhelming force, take his army out, free all the child soldiers, and leave, dragging Kony off with you to stand trial at The Hague, and then rot in jail in public view for the rest of his misbegotten life.

And think of how happy it would make all these young people who are swept up in the movement!

Sounds like something worth doing to me.

Welcome back to that cozy little spot in your week, the Friday Science Thing, where in a friendly, intimate atmosphere, our attractive and supple serving staff serve a top chef quality tasting menu of the latest scientific dishes, appetizingly plated with only the choicest cutlets of semi-informed commentary and a light dusting of sarcasm, all at the low low price of absolutely free. No refund.

It’s been a bit of a slow week for really hot science stories, but there’s still plenty of meat on the bones of science for us to devour.

I had better make with the science before this metaphor kills me.

Say It With Neutrinos

Scientists at CERN have recently managed to use those highly elusive particles known as neutrinos to send a message through 780 feet of solid bedrock.

I am not sure what to think of the message they sent, which consisted of a single word : NEUTRINO.

That is either the most pathetically unimaginative message imaginable to send via billions of dollars of the highest tech in the world, or a brilliantly minimalist and ironic commentary on the reductive nature of science. I really can’t decide.

I would have gone with “HELLO WORLD” but that’s just me.

But it’s not like the content of the message was important. Nor is this a particularly practical way to text someone yet. It took a massive particle accelerator harnessing enormous amounts of energy to send the message, and the rather extraordinary MINERvA neutrino detector to receive it, so don’t expect it to replace your trusty SMS text messaging any time real soon.

But that was not the point. The point was proof of concept, proving that it could, indeed, be done, and that it did marvelously well. And neutrinos pass through almost everything without effect, so who knows? Maybe we will use it for interplanetary communication some day.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagara

Microsoft is talking about making something from Star Trek come to life : the Universal Translator.

Well, sort of. It would really just be an integration of three existing technologies : speech to text (like Apple’s SIRI can do, translating spoken word to text via computer), “mechanical” translation software (like Google Translate), and text to speech so that the computer speaks the translated words.

All that Microsoft would be doing is integrating that into one piece of software, plus they are saying their text to speech software would preserve your timbre, intonation, and even sort of sound like you when it spoke in the new language.

That seems like some serious lily gilding to me. To me, it would be perfectly fine if the computer’s voice did not sound perfectly like me, as long as the person I am “talking” with understands me. And I am positive a lot of that does not translate into other languages anyhow.

And like with all speech to text these days, you will have to spend an hour of your time “training” the software to your voice. And trust me, an hour might not sound like a lot, but that’s an hour of some seriously tedious activity.

Plus, remember, this is Microsoft talking, and they talk a lot of crap. Oh, they mean it when they say it, they are just not very realistic about what they actually can pull off, and so you learn to take their grand pronouncements of future technologies with a hefty grain of salt.

That’s not to say what they are promising is impossible. It is all quite possible, and I am sure someone will do it in the near future.

It just probably won’t be Microsoft. Although they will likely come out with a sad clone of the product that actually works, a year after the good one comes out.

One Click Crime Reporting

And the best part is, that click is the click of your cell phone camera.

West Virginia is going to try out a crime reporting app that lets people take a picture of something they think is a crime, have it automatically tagged via GPS with the location and time, and uploaded to the authorities, all with one click.

I know, I know. It’s sort of creepy. I imagine it makes a lot of people instantly think of the whole atmosphere of mistrust and betrayal that marked the height of the Cold War on all sides.

And the article raises the specter of this being used by vindictive neighbours and police departments being swamped with minor concerns.

But my point of view is this : if you don’t want to get caught doing something illegal, don’t do anything illegal. Nobody has the right to get away with crime, even on the small stuff. I totally believe in the panopticon within the context of a modern society.

Every crime should be punished. The fact that we can’t currently do that is a matter of imperfect efficiency in law enforcement. Anything that improves that efficiency is welcomed by me.

And wouldn’t you just love to be able to instantly report someone’s illegally parking in front of your house, or catching someone in the act of littering or letting their dog crap anywhere they please? One well lined up photo, and the cops have all the evidence they need.

I do not have a problem with that. Sure, people will complain about being “spied on” and bring up Big Brother a lot, but the truth is, they are just angry they got caught.

And I have no sympathy for that. Don’t want to get caught? Don’t do it!

End of File

Well, that’s it for the science news for this week. Nothing really super exciting or game changing, but lots of interesting items nevertheless.

Come back this time next week, when we will be serving a heaping helping of brand new and super savoury science dishes sure to brighten your day as they dazzle your palate.

I hope you enjoyed your meal here, and please note that a fifteen percent gratuity has, for your convenience, already been added to your bill.

Bone a petite.

I am in one of my sleepy phases right now, and yet, my browser is stuffed once more with fascinating links to all kinds of cool things. So obviously, I have no choice but to do invoke the nuclear option, and…

RELEASE THE LINKSTORM!

Long Live Chaos Monkey

First up, there is this absolutely fascinating little article about an unusual Netflix app.

The app in question is a script called Chaos Monkey, and as the name implies, its sole purpose is to disrupt the Netlix Instant Service by shutting down servers and instances. They have essentially programmed their own saboteur and told him “Go. Destroy. Make us miserable!”

Sounds kind of insane, right? But it’s actually brilliant, and a marvelous example of exactly the sort of “next level” thinking that I adore.

The idea is that by loosing the Chaos Monkey on their systems, they can continually test just how well their system reacts to compensate for problems, and thus, Chaos Monkey teaches them to make absolutely everything as independent of other systems as possible, with redundancies on every axis and the dependencies down to an absolute minimum.

For too long, people have tried to get away with reaction based emergency planning in system design, where you make the simplest system, then wait for something to go wrong, then slap something kludgey together in a blind panic to fix that one thing, and then go back to not thinking about it till the next failure. And so forth, and so on, with plenty of people slapping corks into leaks but nobody thinking about how to build a better dyke.

By willingly and knowingly increasing the chaos and entropy in the system, the Chaos Monkey idea forces people to build systems that can handle anything and that prevents the dangerous “complacency and emergency” mindset from setting in.

Sure, work hard to prevent failure. But do not fall into the hubris of design which lures people into thinking their design is “foolproof” and therefore they can safely ignore the “What do we do if something goes wrong?” question.

Know that you are not perfect and therefore neither is your design. Like the article says, “assume failure”. And plan accordingly.

It’s just so sensible and intelligent, it makes me want to weep tears of joys.

Hey This Place Sucks Too!

Then there’s this little article about a concern for the far future, namely, would faster than light travel totally destroy the planet you’re traveling to?

You have to admit, that would suck.

And in at least one form of faster than light travel, the Alcubierre Drive, that is a distinct possibility.

When traveling via Alcubierre Drive, the spaceship would end up accumulating a huge buildup of high energy particles moving at the speed of light as it pushed through space and ran into random interstellar hydrogen and so forth.

Then the ship arrives and stops, and all those high energy particles are released from the warp field, and annihilate the very place you were traveling to in the first place. And the longer you have spent in warp, the more particles and the greater the damage. Yowch.

I can easily imagine a very tragic science fiction story where a group of space colonists keep traveling to planets that their research says should be teeming with life, but when they arrive, it’s just a lifeless rock of no value whatsoever. Then, they learn their Terrible Secret… it’s their very warp drive that is destroyed their potential colony sites! Oh, the guilt!

Of course, there is a perfectly obvious workaround. Just don’t come out of warp directly aimed at your destination. Aim yourself in some harmless direction, then turn your ship towards your destination. Problem solved.

A more intriguing idea would be the idea of doing this deliberately as a weapon. It would make a great “secret Kirk strategy” type plot-solving climax to a space opera type science fiction story.

“But what you don’t know, Professor Oblivion, is that I have had one of my ships cirling in warp for the last two weeks in anticipation of just this situation!”

Robot pathos strikes again

Finally, we have this little nugget of animation, entitled NO ROBOTS.

No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.

First, disclosure : my first impression of this short was a bad one, because the description Ebert gave it said something about “a future without robots”, which made me think it would be a high concept science fiction story about a society which gets rid of the robots on which they had become dependent, and what happens after.

And the first part of the animation totally supports this idea, so that when it devolved into a smaller story about a milk stealing robot, I was quite disappointed.

But on second viewing, I decided I quite liked it. I love the art style. It reminds me of some of my favorite pieces from Heavy Metal Magazine, from the always much better but little ballyhooed “non tits and gore” stories. A very European style, in a good way.

And I can’t stay mad at a story that ended in kittens. Happy kittens that now have a human protector to keep them and care for them and try to keep their robot saviour upright.

Granted, it’s a fairly obvious and totally schmaltzy ending. I expected the robot to be caring for a baby with all that milk, but kittens is an even better choice, because a human baby would have raised the specter of a human being raised by robots and would have made things kind of squicky.

So kittens it was, and that makes for a happy warm ending, and I have no problem with that. I am quite sentimental in my own way, and a sucker for legitimate warm happy feelings, and so I do not mind being manipulated a tiny bit to get there.

The world needs all the warm loving happiness that it can get. Anything that helps people connect to the wellspring of deep human compassion is fine by me.

Even if it takes a robot with some kittens.

I am just going to be winging it in terms of content today (unlike my usual finely crafted and micrometer machined prose) and more of less making things up as I go.

Like the word “fandangle”. I just made it up. The title “the usual fandangle” popped into my mind, and I went with it because it sounded right. I have just decided that “fandangle” means a complicated and seemingly chaotic mess that is actually the result of a very high and subtle level of order.

See? Being a writer is fun. I just made up a word. Coining a neologism is just that easy. Sure, odds are nobody will ever use it. In fact, odds are, I won’t even use it again.

But it’s still a word, as real and legitimate as any others.

Lo, I am the Master of Words!

Are you surprised? Well then, look at this :

Sure it's a dumb pun, But you laughed anyway, didn't you?

You just emitted three thousand moles of that element!

Writing is not only fun, it can teach you new, exciting, and completely bogus things!

I am not ashamed to say that when I first saw the above image, I laughed out loud in amusement and delight. In retrospect, it seems like an obvious joke, but it still fancies my tickle. What can I say, I have a lifelong susceptability to puns, and it not something I expect to, or desire to, overcome any time soon. It brings such joy.

While we are doing images, here is one to melt the heart (and possibly the mind) of all us cat lovers. Imagine if one of your kitties did this :

Pls miss, I can haz pets nao?

I only found that image early today, and already I have seen it pop up in two other places. In the world of the Internet, where cute cat pictures rule with an iron paw, this one is a clear winner. That has to the most adorably polite cat ever. I mean really, who could resist petting a cat who asked so very nicely? Nobody with a heart, that’s who.

Then again, I can’t resist petting kitties anyhow. I do not get these people who think cats are aloof and are not affectionate. Those people must have all the wrong vibes or something, because all the cats I have known are super affectionate. They get so happy to see you they rub up against objects around them and start trying to arch up into your hand before your hand is even there yet. They purr and lean up against your hand and sometimes even fall over in their enthusiasm to show their affection for you.

And how can you not love that? Cats are just plain awesome.

Next up, we have a young lady with a tattoo you might find hard to believe :

What the hell is a regert?

Assuming that was supposed to read “no regrets”, I am thinking she has at least one.

Something along the lines of “I regret going to an illiterate tattoo artist” or possibly “I regret not spell checking my sketch before handing it to the guy”, or maybe even that old classic, “I regret drinking that entire pitcher of strawberry margaritas and thus rendering everything else I did that evening a warm blur punctuated by penises”.

You have to admit, penises make for pretty good punctuation. I know I do a hard stop when I see one.

What else have I got lying around to share with you people… oh, I already posted this one to my Twitter, but I think I will share it here too.

Warning, this is explicitly about pooping, although no poop is actually shown.

And when you are done, don't forget to wash your brain! Click to enlarge.

As disgusting a metaphor as it is, I think it is fundamentally true. Meditation, or psychotherapy for that matter, is basically a process of elimination. You gather together the waste products of the mind, all the archaic emotions, unfinished thoughts, suppressed impulses, and other mental detritus, and then flush them out of the mind so that they are no longer draining your energies just to hold them back, or worse, having them come out at a time and in a manner not of your choosing.

Basically, thinking you can go forever without dealing with your suppressed emotions is like thinking you can go your entire life without going to the bathroom, and usually with the same result.

Sooner or later, it all comes out.

Finally, a subject that is literally near and dear to half of humanity’s hearts : boobs!

I find it hilarious, but completely unsurprising, that someone went to the trouble of creating such a video. The Internet creates its own inevitabilities, due to the One Nerd Effect.

Now I am a fag, and boobs do not mean a thing to me sexually, although I think they look very nice, and I sure do appreciate their baby nourishing function. But they are not erotic to me, so I feel I can be very object in my assessment.

And to my mind, it is clear as a bell that the PS3 titties are far more realistic than the 360 ones. The PS3 boobs look pretty realistic. Clearly, someone understands how a boob is put together. The 360 ones, on the other hand, are sadly of the “beachballs and rubber bands” school of boob physics.

Tits are not spheres, people. Sure, there is the central mass, but it is held in by skin and muscle, not elastics and double sided tape.

Well, that’s all for today. Oh, one last note : the entry I wrote on Saturday will be up shortly, I am just having unexpected and tiresome technical issues getting it off the laptop and onto this computer so I can post it.

Why is nothing ever easy?