Wow, that week just whizzed on by. How come the older I get, the shorter periods of time seem subjectively when I look back from the present, yet they seem as long as ever while I’m experiencing them?

Beats me, but I bet the answer has something to do with compression. As we get older and add more and more stuff to our mental hard drive, we are forced to compress our memories, and so the “space” between them becomes smaller, and that produces the illusion that times grow shorter all the time.

But then again, what do I know? On with the science!

Where To Get Your Greens

This is one of those ideas that blows your mind, because it is brilliant and totally obvious in retrospect and just makes so much sense.

Why not put hydroponic farms atop supermarkets?

I mean, d’oh! Why not grow the food on the roof? Talk about fresh, local produce! It’s so local, it only moved a hundred feet!

Heck, grab a ladder, you can “pick” it yourself.

I really like this Paul Lightfood guy. He is a man after my own heart, because he has a deep and abiding passion for efficiency, and so do I. I loathe waste. I hate it on a nearly cellular level. To me, efficiency is like a god. It’s how we get the most out of what we have. How we get the most human happiness from the limited amount of source material that we have.

And what could be more important than that?

I also think that people in efficient systems are happier. People in efficient systems can relax and concentrate on their job and not worry about the system, because efficient systems are trustworthy. You never feel like your effort or your contribution is wasted. It all fits into the overall purpose and it does so in a way that makes you feel like everything you do counts.

And you know what, Paul is right. Food is not grown primarily for flavour. It’s grown to stand up to shipping first, and to look good second, and to be cheap third. Flavour is maybe fourth, or in a tie for fourth with nutrition maybe.

Think of what you could do if you were growing the food right where it was being sold. We could all have the European Old World model, where the food you buy is so fresh, it was alive the morning you ate it.

It’s just so damned brilliant.

A Warm Little Robot

This little project really caught my eye, mostly because I see it as having enormous potential that maybe the inventors don’t see themselves.

It’s all about a little black box on wheels.

Inside this black box, at the heart of its operation, is a phase-change heat storage system that lets the little black box store heat and then radiate later.

Pretty cool, huh? But wait, there is so much more.

Because also inside this little black box is an infrared sensor and some smart programming to allow this little black box to use its wheels and go around looking for heat to absorb.

So imagine this little black box scooting about looking for heat to absorb, maybe soaking up some warmth from the back of your refrigerator, or that one lamp that still has the old fashioned hot light bulbs in it, or even curling up in the sunshine like a cat.

And it does this all day…. then when you get home, it finds you, and shares all the warmth it has gathered for you!

I tell ya, if you can take that and make it look cute, preferably with some kind of cute fuzzy animal motif, it would make the emotional connections people make with their Roombas look like a passing infatuation. Imagine an adorable robot animal that wants to make you warm, and spends all day looking for warmth to share with you!

I want one right now, honestly.

The Craziest F**ing Thing….

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about the craziest fucking thing I have seen lately.

This mad genius, Garnet Hertz, took an original Outrun full cabinet (if you played the game in the standup version, you were robbed) and modified it by mating it with a golf cart and turned it into a driving game you can drive.

What’s more, he also caught some major augmented reality vibes and made it so, via two cameras and some pretty nifty code, the road ahead of you is turned into Outrun graphics right there on the video game’s screen. You can truly drive the world as if you were playing Outrun!

Now, I have never liked driving games. They bore me and I am not that good at them. I really don’t feel motivated to win races. I want to save the world, not win some stupid rally.

But I tried the full Outrun back in the day, and it impressed even me with how visceral the experience was and how much that drew me into the game. I actually played the game more than a few times, which for me is very unusual, especially for a racing game without missile launchers.

(What can I say, I am better at combat that speed. )

So Outrun was already cool in my books…. but to take the gamer’s dream of taking the thing on the road and make it real is just beyond amazing.

I am sincere when I say I find this sort of thing beautiful. To me, making this thing is the epitome of art, because it’s a crazy idea turned into magnificent reality, a dream come true of epic proportions.

Now I am trying to think of what old arcade game I would like to see realized like this. A lot of the games I loved involved martial arts, and those are already more or less real.

I mean, nobody can really throw a hadoken, but still.

I sure as hell wouldn’t want to see real world Gauntlet. Too disturbing. And a lot of those old games, in the pre-genre days, were really messed up. Burger Time? Make Traxx? No thank you!

I give up. My games are all too disturbing to realize.

Although if someone figures out the hadoken thing, tell me, I want one.

I have a bunch of things clogging up my browser lately, awaiting inclusion in this blog, and I figured, what the hell, today’s the day for a big inventory busting blowout sale.

Everything must go!

First, there is this fascinating article about a challenge to the collegiate status quo at MIT.

And we are not talking about some minor fiddling with the SAT system (boy, I wish we had that here… ) or some novel new way for engineering profs to be even bigger dicks to their students.

We are talking a challenge (albeit a cautious and tentative one) to the very business model of higher education itself. How’s that for a firecracker?

Here’s the deal : MIT already has 2,100 courses available online for absolutely free. You can go to their website right now and audit any of those courses online for entirely free. The program is called MIT 2.0 and they have been doing this for ten years (hence the corny name) and it’s pretty frigging amazing, when you think about it.

For ten years, if all you wanted from MIT was the knowledge and not the piece of paper, you have been able to get it for free at MIT. How’s that for truly serving what a university is supposed to be all about, namely sharing knowledge?

Well, now, you just might be able to get the piece of paper, or at least, some kind of paper from MIT as well. They are planning to launch MITx, which will be an enhanced version of MIT 2.0, one where you can take online laboratories, chat with other online students taking the same free online courses, and for a small fee, actually obtain official certification from MIT that you took and passed the course.

That is one small step and one giant leap right there. Sure, it’s not the same as an actual degree from MIT, but it’s still something from MIT that says how smart you are, and it’s going to be way, way cheaper than the real thing.

Sounds like a bargain to me, and the sort of thing that could very well upset the whole “you have to take out massive student loans and give us four years of your life just to get a piece of paper” business model of modern colleges and universities.

I mean, what you really want is the knowledge, and proof that you have it. So why be saddled with debt for life and give up four vital years of your youth when you could just take the course from any computer (with Internet, natch) and only pay for the testing?

Tech certifications have been doing this for decades now, and I think it’s the model for the future for a certain stream of academia. There will always be people for whom the whole lecture based model is needed or desired, and you do get a lot more than knowledge from college.

STDs, for example, and the opportunity to be exposed to them.

But I think in the future, a lot of people will self-educate from home.

While you are thinking about that bright and shiny future, here’s five North Koreans playing Take On Me by a-ha! for you to look at, and wonder.

Feel free to sing along, especially if you can do it in Korean. (I love you, Internet. Don’t ever change. You bright me such wonders!)

And if that wasn’t stimulating enough for you, have some Hong Dong.

Quit looking there, that's just my name!

It may be hard to believe, but that there is a picture of the world’s most expensive dog.

His name is Hong Dong, which translates to “Big Splash” in English, and makes him sound like a water park. You just need to add “Mountain” or “Valley” to the end.

He is a Red Tibetan Mastiff, and a Chinese coal baron just bought him for $1.6 million bucks.

Obviously, said coal baron is highly impressed by the Red Tibetan Mastiff’s legendary and unparalelled prowess in looking like a shitty rug from the Seventies.

It’s not your fault, doggy. But you look positively macrame. And where the heck does that coloration blend in? Oh well, I am sure you’re a sweet and snugglesome pup anyhow.

Finally, the star attraction of today’s article : a little story about a man, nudity, breaking and entering, and the only wrong way to eat a Reese’s.

Cops answered a call to a Kentucky supermarket and found themselves facing the daunting task of having to arrest a naked dude covered in peanut butter and chocolate.

It gets better. The double coated chocolately goodness turns out to be a 22 year old dude named Andrew Toothman and he was arrested in a tiny town of 770 people called Neon.

Yes, there is a Neon, Kentucky. And it’s just as exciting as it sounds!

Oh, but he wasn’t completely naked. He had a pair of black boots on.

For some reason, to me, that makes it like a million times better. Naked, covered in chocolate and peanut butter…. but with his boots still on. What a cowboy.

And here’s the crowning glory of this tale of bizarre crime :

But the most bizarre bit of vandalism, investigators reported, involved NyQuil, the popular cold and flu remedy. “There was nyquil on the floor that spelled out sorry,” according to the February 2 citation.

See? He feels bad about it! The judge has got to take that into account, right?

The most obvious question is, of course, what the FUCK was he thinking? breaking into a supermarket, sure. You might do that for any relatively sensible reason. A bad case of the munchies comes to mind.

But how do you get from that to “naked and covered in two great things which taste great together”? I am guessing some seriously volatile mixture of brain altering chemicals were at work in whatever Mister Toothman (soon to star in a line of children’s horror books) has for a brain.

Or maybe he can plead really low blood sugar. I might have to cop to that some time, so I am personally interested in said defense.

I bet it will be a really interesting story anyhow.

That’s all for today. I have tons more, honestly, but that will do for now.

Later, all you wonderful people!

Ho there science fans, and welcome to another addition of this semi-regular science thing we do here on a fairly large number of potential Fridays.

In it, I attempt to illuminate the week’s most interesting science stories, and provide you with my own pithy, trenchant, and even coherent commentary on the story in hopes of seeming smart.

We have a fairly bumptious crop of interesting science tidbits for you today, so I am looking forward to telling you all about them once I remember where I put them.

You will have to forgive me, I unwisely took a melatonin at 4pm and I am feeling a little sandbagged at the moment. I apologize for any increase in incoherence, but duck phalange disco at the booty bar.

First story : it is my usual practice in these silly little missives to save the most cortex-popping or sensational stories for the end of the article, but this one has been burning a hole in my browser since I came across it today, so I am going to take care of it right away.

I can’t seem to lay a hand on the entry right now, but I am pretty sure I have told you fine folks about the quest to pierce Lake Vostok before.

Lake Vostok is a sub-glacial lake in Antarctica. That means it is an actual fresh-water lake, but it is located under 2 miles of Antarctic ice.

The idea of getting to examine such a large yet isolated ecosystem has been taunting scientists for decades, and recently, a Russian team decided they were going to use the deep drilling techniques that Russia has perfected to get down there and find out just what is going on down there.

I have been following the story avidly, as I am fascinated by the utterly marvelous mystery of it all. An enormous lake, the size of Lake Ontario but with three times the volume, trapped under the Antarctic ice sheet for millennia, left to develop all on its own, cut off from the rest of the biosphere… who knows what strange turns life might have taken in all that time alone?

In many ways, it is like landing on an alien planet.

But it also kind of sounds like the start of an X-Files episode, doesn’t it? Or my favorite horror movie of all time, John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Hey Vostok guys… if a guy in a helicopter is chasing a dog, SHOOT THAT FUCKING DOG!

Anyhow, the newsbit I just had to share is this : we have lost all contact with the Vostok team.

And now the X-Files portion of my brain is going absolutely apeshit. This is exactly how an episode of X-Files where Mulder and Scully have to go investigate something in the Antarctic (why them? Why not. ) would start.

And of course, it would then turn out that the drilling unleashed some horrible scary evil life form from the Jurassic era that killed all the crew in horrible and mysterious ways and Mulder and Scully will find the bodies one by one and Scully will do a couple of autopsies and they will figure out that if this thing made it back to the mainland, it could destroy all life on Earth, and just barely be able to stop it before the end credits, but not before it’s revealed that the person backing the mission to Lake Vostok from the shadows was…. CIGARETTE SMOKING MAN!

Um, let’s move on before I freak myself out.

I know, we will cover the wacky and weird world of completely insane scientific papers.

There is currently this completely insane (and I mean that literally, as in shows signs of schizophrenia) scientific paper floating about called the Theory of Everything that is causing quite a stir not because it is clearly batshit insane, but because it got published in the fairly sober and prestigious and peer-reviewed scientific journal Life.

So somehow, this wackadoodle paper about how all things are alive and how everything is something called a “gyre” (never defined) and stuffed with over 800 citations… somehow THAT got past an editorial baord of 23 fellow scientists to gain the imprimatur of respectability that being published in a peer reviewed journal means in the world of science.

What a scandal! People have already fallen on their swords and resigned over this. More heads may well roll before it’s all over. And of course, people are wondering… is the author of paper, a previously sane and sober scientist named Erik Andrulis, genuinely this crazy, or is this all part of a marvelously effective hoax to reveal just how flawed the peer review system of science is?

I hope it’s the latter. It’s amusing as a scandal, but it’s more fun as an elaborate sting. That would make it the scientific equivalent of an artist painting a really terrible but very trendy painting and then convincing professional art critics it is brilliant.

Finally, here’s a fun story about zapping animals in the balls for science.

Now relax. They are just being zapped with ultrasound. It sounds painless to me. In fact, it is possible that some of the animals, specifically the monkeys, were rather enjoying it.

“The monkeys didn’t seem to mind the treatment a bit, but we were having a rough time of it. Thirty minutes of treatment three times a week is a lot of monkey testicular massage. We felt pretty silly, and it didn’t help when the techs would come around and wonder what kind of research we were doing. We were relieved when we finally saw an effect.”

I bet there was a lot of scientists thinking “I went to graduate school for this?” while rubbing monkey balls on this one.

The idea is that in the future, it might be possible for male contraception to be nothing more than a zap to the balls now and then.

Of course, they will have to market such a thing very, very carefully in order to keep from inducing the “male testicular trauma response” universal to all men.

I suggest using the word PAINLESS an awful lot.

Seeya next week, science fans!

OK, OK, I admit it… whatever strange impulse compelled me to start up the whole Friday Science Roundup thing before seems to be reasserting itself. Dammit, just when I think I have gotten out, it keeps pulling me back in, with its siren song of there being one day a week on which I do not have to think up something to write about for that day.

But it’s not a roundup, dammit! It’s something else. Something less cowboy.

A Friday Science… salon? Kaffeklatch? Update? Bacchanal? I will work out the details later.

But I can’t guarantee that I won’t start resenting it and give it all up again.

Being a writer means never saying you’re sure. At least, for me, it does.

Anyhow, on with the science.

Here’s a story that combines two interesting things : theoretical data processing questions, and large birds of prey. It’s about just how fast a flying object (be it an unmanned drone or a Northern Goshawk) go and still be able to dodge around obstacles in an environment of a given density.

The Northern Goshawk enters into the equation because it hunts on the wing, and must pursue its flying prey through the tops of trees at heart pounding speeds in order to get a meal.

At the speeds it hunts at, the Northern Goshawk can’t possibly actually see all the tree tops around it. Instead, it moves at a certain speed at which it will be sure to always be able to find an opening in the green tunnels around it in order to continue its pursuit.

Researchers are studying how it does this in order to be able to build drones that can go faster. Right now, drones tend to be slow, especially when there’s stuff they might crash into.

It’s hoped that the Northern Goshawk might just teach them a thing or two about flying faster than you can see.

This really is the dawn of the Age of the Drone, isn’t it? From the United States using armed drones to take out hundreds of terrorist leaders in Afghanistan to something as absurdly mundane as Los Angeles real estate developers using drones to scout houses .

This strikes me as yet another example of something that was theoretically possible for years but nobody was able to get it to work (and hence it remain strictly science fiction) that finally emerges into reality in this modern era. Like nanotech, and cybernetics.

Of course, science fiction has also conditioned me to think of drones as evil spybots sent by oppressive governments to make sure you are not committing thought crime and/or assassinating people, so I can’t help but be a little freaked out by it all, as well.

Moving on, we have people trying to turn an old meat packing plant into a vertical farm.

Well, they call it a vertical farm, anyhow. It’s nowhere near the sci-fi ideal of a zero-G aeroponics farm with enormous clouds of wheat, rice, and corn floating in the air, roots, stalks, and all, and little robots coming along to mist the vegetation with nutrients now and then.

It’s not even, from the sound of the story, a properly planned out and executed vertically integrated farm, but they are moving in the right direction, anyhow : building a closed ecosystem, where the waste from one process is used as fuel for another process.

Of course, to be a farm and not just a highly sustainable garden, it can’t be a closed loop because some part of the process has to end up inside people in the form of food we eat. So there will therefore need to be some kind of constant input to balance out the output, no matter how finely balanced and efficient the ecosystems inside the process might be.

But then again, if you integrated the human beings themselves into the process, using their waste products as fertilizer in order to compensate for their consumption…. after all, urine is sterile and feces might be the most disgusting thing in the universe to us, but it’s just a lot of yummy fixed nitrogen to our plant friends…. hmmmm…

Of course, then nobody could leave the system once they entered it, but that would hardly be a problem compared to the efficiency benefits alone…

Of course, those Monicans would probably try to ruin everything...

Finally, a bit of random news from the world of big league psychiatry : they are thinking of deleting half the personality disorders from the DSM-IV when they (finally!) make the DSM-V.

For your information : the DSM is the standard for making diagnoses of psychiatric conditions in the world of psychology. It’s quite extensive and rigorous, which is especially important in the vague and misty world of the science of the human mind.

I had just been wondering lately whether they were even close to issuing a DSM-V yet when the article popped up before my eyes, almost as if StumbleUpon can read my mind.

Or the Universe conforms to my wishes, but only in ways I don’t expect. Take your pick.

Anyhow, what bugs me in the article is that they never actually give a decent explanation for why they would want to reduce the number of personality disorders.

It says it would be to “reduce comorbidity”, which I take to mean that it would reduce the number of people with multiple and overlapping diagnoses. And I suppose that would make the paperwork easier.

But that doesn’t mean those five personality disorders do not exist or are not therapeutically useful. You can’t make those problems go away just by taking them out of the DSM.

And what happens to single-diagnosis mental health patients who suddenly find their illness no longer exists and is therefore not covered by their health system? Do they just wander back into society, unmedicated and untreated and unhappy, and end up showing up in a less favorable part of the system, like the hospital, or jail?

It just strikes me as wrong.

Well, that’s it for now. Seeya next week folks!

Seeing as tomorrow is a Therapy Tuesday and we all know what kind of entry I will write after that, I figured that today, I had better cough up something more like content and less like the deep psychological sputum of the soul.

First up : oh crap, the Sun is gonna blow chunks!

Scientists in solar observatories all over the world today witnessed the telltale ultraviolet burst that heralds a coronal mass ejection, meaning that a huge mass of slower than light solar particles are heading our way.

Because the ultraviolet light reaches us at light speed, whereas the solar mass travels at a comparatively pokey 1,400 miles per second, we get some warning before it’s going to happen.

Still, the idea that the sun basically just hurled and the results are coming at us at something like five billion miles an hour, is an awesome prospect indeed.

Luckily, we little monkeys living on planet Earth will be fine. For one thing, these sorts of things are not all that rare. And for another, this one in particular is going to just graze us, and thus we will be spared the full brunt of its fury.

So there might be a few glitches here and there, but we don’t have to worry that all our electronics will fry and we will be cast into a Thundarr the Barbarian future.

Like your new spouse? She's the one on the right.

Still, a massive solar storm would be a great time for any latent mutant superpowers I might happen to possess to activate.

I’m just sayin’.

Another bit of science awesomeness : people at MIT have come up with an even faster Fourier transform.

And I am terribly excited about it despite only just barely understanding what it’s all about.

All you (or I, thank gosh) need to know about the Fast Fourier Transform is that it’s an Al Gore Rhythm, er, algorithm for taking the input from something that creates an irregular, noisy signal and turns it into a clean, pure signal with very little loss of information.

In that capacity, the Fast Fourier Transform is built into tons of different electronic devices, from massive radar arrays to your trusty little mp3 player.

Well, now it’s gotten even faster. Those meganerds of superpower at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with an even faster version of it, and this could have long-range implications for the speeds of nearly everything electronic.

Not only that, the Fast Fourier Transform is at the heart of all file compression. With a brand new shiny Even Faster Fourier Transform to play with, we might see forms of file compression that make the current standards seem like something from the era of punch cards.

At least, I think so. Like I said, I am barely keeping up here.

Still, this seems like quite the development. It seems, in fact, like one of those little-heralded innovations that ends up changing everything in the long time, like something out of an episode of Connections with James Burke.

So as you can see, without the invention of rubber nipples, we would never have gotten SPAM.

In other good news, Washtington State seems poised to legalize gay marriage.

Way to go, Washington! As the dominoes fall and society in the gay marriage states continues to completely shatter into a million pieces due to this vicious attack on the traditional marriage, as the streets quite insensitively refuse to run red with the blood of the innocent (stupid Anti-Christian streets!), the case against gay marriage being legal is shown for the pathetic social conservative spook show it has always been.

There is something downright pathological about how easily social conservatives accept enormous amounts of completely baseless information that happens to accord with the ridiculously childlike fears that seem to dominate their tortured and woebegone psyches.

The very idea that society will tumble if gay people are allowed to get married is laughable on the face of it, and yet millions all over the world believe it because they just naturally assume that their fears are justified. That things are always as bad as they are scary, and therefore if something scares them as much as gay marriage does, gay marriage must be bad enough to ruin civilization.

Otherwise, they would have to admit to themselves that they can be incredibly frightened of something which actually won’t affect much at all, and they would have to face what tiny minded children they are.

That’s not gonna happen.

This was inevitable as soon as men stopped wearing spats!

Finally for today, we have this well polished little gem of reductionist office comedy :

I like that they set up that our lame presenter earned all the bad things that happen to him because he decided to pick on That Guy.

Now, never having worked in an office (or really, much of anywhere) I can only assume that those observations about what presentations are like ring true. They seem true to me, or at least, to my understanding of human behaviour.

Honestly, I think our presenter got off lucky. If I had been That Guy, I would not have just made bored noises. I would have asked a lot of innocuous seeming questions that totally threw the presenter off his game and made him look like a complete idiot who had no idea what he was talking about and who was just wasted everybody’s time by being up there.

Next time, don’t pick on people. Some of us people fight back, and fight back hard.

Some of us, in fact, save it all for defense.

Well, I guess that’s it for this vaguely content-oriented entry. Tune in tomorrow, when I will no doubt revert to long form navel gazing and primitive divination via the examination of my entrails after my trip to the therapist tomorrow morning.

Maybe I should be blogging more publicly.

Got some more awesome science to share with all you lovely people today, and the fact that it happens to be Friday is a completely and total coincidence, and should not be in any way, shape, or form construed as a resumption of the Friday Science Roundup.

Because homey don’t play that “regular feature” commitment bullshit no more. That becomes, like, work after a while, and as we all know, we writers are a shiftless and lazy bunch, disinclined to toil to the point of an almost childlike lassitude.

We try to compensate for that with our enormous vocabularies, however.

Starting off, let’s talk about ancient Peruvian burial grounds.

Archaeologists have found one, and yup, they are poking around in it, as they are wont to do. And I am glad, of course, because this one is a biggie and they are going to learn so much from it.

But the sci fi slash horror part of my mind can’t help but think about how many bad, bad things I have seen happen in horror movies and X-files episodes that all started with curious archaeologists finding some kind of ancient burial ground and saying “Neato, let’s defile the fuck out of it!”

The truth, in this case, seems to be even more horrible, however. The burial ground contains the remains of 73 children and llamas, and not a single adult. And all the remains are located in a single sedimentary layer, which strongly suggests that this is no family graveyard or hallowed resting place for the bones of the ancestors… but the site of a massive human (and llama) sacrifice, possibly made in an attempt to control the weather.

Of all the things about more primitive cultures that we, as modern human beings raised in a culture where human life is the most precious thing of all, cannot understand or accept, it is the practice of human sacrifice. It is nearly impossible to put ourselves in the mindset of an advanced stone age culture, where advances in agriculture have created a massive urban population surplus, with all the problems of unrest, disease, and disorder that causes.

In such a climate, where people are dying from what, to you, are mysterious causes all the time, the idea that the gods are hungry and a deliberate sacrifice might appease them. On the other end of the motivational spectrum, everyone is miserable and, at least subconsciously, everybody knows that the cause is that there are too many damned people. The idea that the solution involves reducing that overpopulation might have a certain very dark appeal.

But even if we can accept that…. killing children? That just plain cannot be accepted by any modern human being. We presume children to be innocent of all things, and value them above all other things. The idea of someone deliberately killing any child just on the chance it will appease some invisible, imaginary deity seems the height of barbarism to us.

It is this sort of thing which makes history so very difficult to truly understand. Even the most sophisticated historian, well versed in cultural relativism, might well find themselves blinded by their own moral instincts when trying to analyze something so abhorrent.

Damn, that is depressing. We need a refresher from all that petty inhumanity and Stone Age squalor. Here, have an awesome video of a lightning storm over Africa, as seen from the International Space Station, with the Milky Way as backdrop.

The little flashes are the lightning, of course, and the sort of glowing mist you see flowing like clouds in the background is, in face, the entire Milky Way galaxy.

There, that’s better. Cleanses the palate with a little cosmic perspective so that we are ready for the star story of today’s article : ROCKS FROM MARS!

Yes, unbelievably, some meteorites that hit Morocco last year turn out to be ROCKS FROM MARS. We have actual Mars rocks to study without even having to figure out how the hell to make a vehicle that can get to Mars and back with a payload!

Now, first question : how the heck did rocks from Mars get to Earth in the first place? It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? But the answer you came up with is the one the scientists came up with, too : something hit Mars very, very, very hard, so hard that bits of Mars were thrown into space.

That means the impact was so fierce, so utterly massive, that it threw these particular igneous rocks (because Mars doesn’t do sedimentary) all the way out of Mars’ gravity well. Imagine that. WHAM! Space.

But to me, the coolest part of the discovery that bits of other planets can end up on Earth is that it adds weight to a favorite bit of high theory of the exobiological world, panspermia.

Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with satyr jizz.

Instead, it is the theory that the ingredients of life might arrive on a planet from an outside source, for example, a meteorite that gets ejected from a life-bearing planet somehow, and hence bootstrap the processes of life on the planet upon which said meteorite falls.

Obviously, no kind of complex life is going to survive whatever kind of event is cataclysmic enough to eject life bearing rocks into space. But simple life forms are remarkably hearty, and can survive some fairly harsh conditions by going dormant.

Hence the high degree of interest in space circles in extremophile organisms.

So it’s not hard to imagine that some meteorite of planetary origin might arrive on another planet with a payload of hungry micro-organisms who will awaken to a world full of their choicest nutrients, and absolutely no competition.

And just like that, the cycle of life begins anew on another planet.

Heck, for all we know, that might be the very thing that happened here. Admittedly, currently theories of the origin of life on Earth do not require an outside stimulus. But they don’t preclude one, either.

And that would be that really, we are all aliens.

And that’s something I have suspected about myself for a long, long time.

Don’t let the crazy title fool you. I am only calling this “Unncessary Thoughts” because I am going to blog about the rise and fall of the evil SOPA/PIPA bills in the USA, and I am fairly unlikely to say anything that a million other bloggers will not also say on this historic day.

In other words, I am doing that compulsively self-effacing thing.

Public auto-flagellation aside, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that today, Wednesday the 18th of January, 2012, will be a day that goes down in history as a pivotal day in the growing populist strength of the Internet, and the rise of the global citizen.

Because today is the day that the Internet rose as one, and said “NO. “

It said no to the virtually identical piece of evil legislation known as SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act).

Both of them would have granted the United States government broad, wide-reaching powers to block or take down any website that their corporate masters deem to be supporting online piracy or intellectual property theft.

And this was not just a problem for the USA. Either of those bills would have applied to many Canadian websites too, because the legislation treated all addresses registered with ANIC, the American web registrar, as the same, and that means all .com addresses would be considered to be American for the purposes of the law.

Websites like, say, this one for example.

Clearly, this legislation was a complete corporate fantasy concocted by the same sort of minds who think that if you fast-forward through the commercials, you are stealing television. The kind of people who wish your DVDs only worked once and then you had to pay another fee.

The kind of people who, if you let them, would erase every mp3 in your collection.

Hell, they would erase songs from your memory if they could.

But the Internet community was having none of that. Momentum has been building against these evil twins of legislation born straight out of corporate Hell (the politicians have all admitted that they didn’t even read the bill before saying they supported it, which kind of makes you wonder who wrote it for them, doesn’t it? Or does it?) for at least a month, and today it came to a glorious head when dozens of websites “went dark”, installing scripts that let you see their content for just a split second before the screen blacked out and a message told you why they went dark, and why you should support them.

And as protests go, it will go down in history as one of the most profound of this era. Nothing says “pay attention to this” like depriving millions of people of their Reddit, Wikipedia, and Wired. Even the apolitical and apathetic had to take notice.

And what makes this a great day in history, and not just an historic one, is that it’s working.

Support for the evil twins is folding. Legislators who, before today, were on record as supporting these two corporate nightmares are withdrawing their support, and they are doing it in droves.

Finally, there has come a moment when a major country’s legislators are hearing the voices of the people they purport to represent over the voices of the corporations who pay their rent.

Finally, the politicians are reminded that this is still a democratic world, and that if pushed far enough, their constituents will push back, and push hard.

This is what the Internet looks like when it is angry.

And this is the result.

And it is truly a beautiful thing.

It restores just a small but vital bit of my faith that democracy can work, the people do still have a voice, and evil can be stopped if the people band together as one to fight it.

When last year’s Occupy Movement began to abate, I asked myself “What’s next?”

All the anger and outrage does not simply go away just because the forces that be stomped out the first embers of the growing fire.

It simply goes underground, growing in strength and conviction, and nobody can predict where it will spring up again.

In the heavily saturated liquid that is the Internet, no science can predict exactly which memetic fragment will form the nucleus of the next vast crystallization.

Occupy came out of seemingly nowhere. Just someone with a good idea that, due to the speed and efficiency of the Internet, caught on so fast and spread so far that it dominated the news cycle for months in a row.

That’s a huge achievement in this short attention span, twenty-four hour news cycle world.

And now, we have this, the noblest and most inspiring Black Day in all of history.

Because today is the day that by going black, the Internet shed a great deal of light about the power of the people versus the power of the people in charge.

It took a hell of a lot of us shouting as one united voice in order to be heard over the influence of money, lobbyists, lifestyle, and the Capital City effect. But it can still be done.

I sincerely hope that all the corporate sharks who were so sure they could slip this money grubbing, rights abusing, corporatist legislation into the law books without anyone noticing (after all, they have done it before) are now scrambling like mad, trying to figure out how they lost this one while their billionaire bosses demand heads on plates for their failure to subvert democracy as ordered.

Hopefully, these sharks will find the people harder and harder to fool as citizen rage increases and the means to express that rage remain in the hands of people and proves impossible for the powers that be to control at all.

The Internet might not always be pretty, but it’s the last best hope for democracy in the world.

And today, it raised its mighty voice, and said “NO.”

(This probably could go without saying, but it won’t : This article is all about my thoughts about the movie Black Swan. If you haven’t seen it, this it not going to be of much interest to you. Sorry about that. Watch it if you get the chance, even if you don’t give a damn about ballet. I don’t. )

Finally got around to seeing last year’s critical darling Black Swan yesterday, and so I thought I would capture some of my thoughts about it on my handy little blog here and save them for all posterity.

It’s the least I can do. You know, for the future.

First off, I should note that I did not go into this viewing aflutter with anticipation or giddy with joy. Sure, I had sampled the amazing rush of great press for the movie, so I know it was both a box office success and a critic’s best friend, but that is no guarantee of a movie’s suitability for my own particular (and sometimes downright peculiar) tastes. I have disliked critical darlings before, and of course, being a science fiction fan, a lot of my favorites have been pooh-pooh by the literary and cinemiste elitists who have the strange idea in their heads that science fiction is all zippy pow ray guns and heavily mammalian aliens babes.

Personally, I think it’s because the word “science” is in there, and people who like science like science fiction. Hence, the arts majors who make up film and literary instinctively fear and hate it, figuring that if they go anywhere near science fiction, someone might ask them to do long division.

And of course, despite being no more alpha specimens than we are, the literary and film snobs are still as determined as everyone else to look down on us nerds. And if nerds like science fiction, then liking science fiction makes you a nerd. And there’s nothing worse than that. Right? Right.

But meanwhile, back at my point… I was not highly anticipating this movie. I have no interest in ballet, and the whole thing seemed, from afar, like a rather self-congratulatory and pretentious exercise in artistic excess. The premise certainly does not appeal to me.

But the psychology of it does, and that is what drew me into the movie and why I now consider myself quite a fan of the flick. If you have been avoiding this movie because, like myself, you don’t care about ballet, rest assured that this is a great movie regardless of the subject matter or milieu.

It was poor Nina’s descent into madness which sucked me deep into the depths of this film, and Natalie Portman deserves a lot of the credit, because this was an incredibly complex role for any actress and she played it with exquisite detail. You could really see her transition from the prim, quiet, submissive Nina who was completely her mother’s appendage, there to fulfill the dreams her mother had to give up to take care of baby Nina, to the out of control, out of her depth, and clearly out of her mind Nina at the end of the film.

I feel for girls like Nina, the quiet overachievers who are docile and placid on the surface, but just below the surface are a roiling, seething mass of anxiety, depression, suppression, and lack of self-expression.

It really touched my heart when she said “I just want to be perfect.” That is exactly the trap that such overachievers face, ever striving to be The Perfect Child when that is simply not possible. No matter how hard to try, you are still human. You will never be perfect. You have to make peace with that, or it will eat you up inside, and sooner or later, you are going to crash, and crash hard.

And that is what I think happens over the course of the movie. I am sure there are many other theories as to “what is really going on” in a movie like Black Swan, but to me, the movie is clearly about what happens when one of these pent-up timebombs who seem so “perfect” on the outside finally reach the limits of their sanity and break down.

In her case, she went so long staying under her mother’s oppressive wing, living in the incredibly competitive world of ballet that demands so much sacrifice and self-control from girls from a very young age, with absolutely no outlet for her tensions and stresses, that when she broke, it was with such monumental force that it shattered her mind all the way into psychosis.

So in many ways, the Black Swan of the title is her long-suppressed id finally fighting free of the smothering influence of her mother/superego.

Her encounter with the self-puncturing Beth, who walked into traffic rather than face the fact that she was not the bright young star any more, was a particularly poignant (and extremely horrifying) illustration of the kind of self-destructive passion that drives these high achievers.

Stabbing herself in the face and screaming that she is nothing… this comes from a person whom the entire ballet world thinks is a goddess. Anyone would think she should be happy. But none of that matters. To her, she is nothing, nothing, nothing.

And it is this very dangerous cocktail of ambition and self-loathing that I think drives Nina over the edge. When she is chosen by Tamal (who bears some of the responsibility for her tragic end, I think), and then Tamal carelessly pokes about in her mind with his half-seducing her and telling her to “live a little” so she can be a better Black Swan for him, that is more than enough to trigger a breakdown. The combination of an extreme increase in pressure to be “perfect” and the stirring up of tightly suppress id-related adult emotions was simply too much for her brittle mind to take.

And so the movie, like the ballet, is ultimately a beautiful tragedy.

I think I like the movie a lot more, though.