Here we are again in Foobtown, population the square root of negative one raised to the power of KABLAMMO, so it must be Sunday. Wow, these all inclusive package tours really get you turned around, huh? when I woke up earlier, I thought it was Sunday!

But, you know, a different one.

In France. During the Revolution. Or possible the Resistance. I don’t know, people were very French, very angry, and there was a lot of pastry.

Got plenty of low-calorie high-fibre fun stuff to share with you this week, so with exactly three words more of ado, let’s get started!

Let’s start with something that’s always reliable for happy foobtacular vibes : gunplay!

I love these guys. Not only did they do a completely insane and awesome thing in order to demonstrate their bulletproof (er, I mean bullet-resistant) glass, they did it with style and fun and a hell of a lot of cameras.

Because face it, if you are going to get your employee to shoot at you three times with a gen you wine AK-47, Kalishnakov’s pride and joy, you do not want to have to do more than one take to get your angles.

Very nicely done, too, mister I got to shoot at my boss. Boom, boom, boom. Neat as you please. I’d invite you to my old fashioned country drive-by any day.

After all that excitement, we need something a little more relaxing to take the edge off.

And what could be more relaxing than a nap with an adorable puppy who know how to get the most out of air conditioning at his place.

Awww. Just look at them floppy ears floating delicately in the breeze! Amazing that he can sleep with his ear flapping around like that, but I know just what it is like when you finally find a cool spot on a hot day, and the relief alone can make you melt into a puddle of utter bliss.

And from there to a nap is really no distance at all.

In fact, there’s only one thing cuter than a cute animal asleep.

Great, now I need a nap

That’s when the whole touring cast of The Incredible Journey does it.

I think the hardest part of getting that photo must have been resisting the urge to go “Awwwwwwwww!” really loud until after you snap the picture.

Of course, one can take the whole pet photography thing just a little too far.

Great, another bitch who thinks she's a princess

I am not normally a person to cast aspersions on anyone’s chosen lifestyle. I figure if everyone is happy and feels good about themselves, then god(s) bless you, go at whatever it is you need to do with a will and a whip.

But I think it is safe to say that if you have gotten to the point where you are dressing up like you are a Southern belle from some bizarre alternative universe where dogs rule the Earth, what you are doing can no longer be considered a “hobby”.

It’s a lifestyle, and you had better face up to the fact before the investigation.

Back to video, with this magnificent example of the Day Job Orchestra’s brilliantly random and completely irreverent redubbing of famous movies, in this case, Star Wars.

(Which one? The one called Star Wars, dammit!)

Major LOLs on the home front here. It’s the combination of the extremely silly attitude and the precision of the lip-syncing that really makes it work… a great example of how truly brilliant comedy is a combination of lunacy and engineering.

I am not sure why, but it was the Jawa that really made me lose it. Maybe it was just the straw that broke the comedy dam’s back, I don’t know.

I know that as a kid, I was terribly disappointed when I found out the Jawas were just some sort of rat-creature under those hoods. I am not sure what I thought was under there before then, but it was definitely something more bizarre and exotic than rats.

Something with glowy eyes on stalks, or something.

Finally, I share with you, my beloved people, one of my favorite bits of irony in image form I have ever seen.

Quick, honey, I just had the most hilarious idea!

I would explain the joke, but I prefer to leave that as an exercise for the student. Consider it to be an irony test. If you laugh, you pass.

That’s all for this week, folks! Hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed doing it to you, and I mean that sincerely.

This is an idea I have been pondering and refining for a long time now, and I think it is finally, finally to a point where I can share it.

It’s a theory related to depression, and in order to explain it, I will need to relate the rather depressing fact that got me on this train of thought in the first place.

Scientists did a study comparing people’s attitudes towards life and their mental health in general to how accurately the participants were able to answer simple factual questions about themselves like how tall they were, how much they weighed, and so on.

Now one would think that the optimist/healthy group would have an entirely accurate idea of themselves and the pessimist/depressive group would imagine themselves to be shorter, fatter, less good looking, and so on than the real facts would show.

But the truly enervating fact is that the optimist/healthy people consistently thought they were, to put it bluntly, better than they actually were, and it was the pessimist/depressive group who had the most accurate idea of themselves.

As it turns out, reality is depressing.

Now, how to interpret this stark little factoid? My first thought, besides, of course, “my God, that’s depressing”, was that depressives have a habit of using the truth to torture themselves over their perceived inadequacies, and have often memorized their vital statistics in order to better excoriate themselves at their leisure.

But that explanation is wildly inadequate. Clearly, something more was going on here, and it somehow conneced with the way depression operated.

Perhaps the problem was that somehow, a certain amount of positive self-delusion was actually absolutely necessary for the human psyche to operate in a healthy, positive, self-sustaining way, and a lack of that cushion against the bumps and blows of reality for our self-esteem was actually quite unnatural and dangerously maladaptive and unhealthy.

Maybe the lack of this buffer against the perfectly natural shocks and calamities is highly symptomatic of depression and low self-esteem, and perhaps even one of its root causes.

Without the shock-absorber of self-delusion, the ego soon shakes itself to pieces.

This would also be concordant with another factoid I picked up from somewhere, namely that healthy people have a relatively fixed, positive self-image which can only be changed by large and emotionally important events, whereas unhealthy, low self-esteem depressives have a wildly fluctuating and constantly re-evaluating self-image which nearly anything, no matter how minor, can influence.

And just like the more often you check your watch, the slower time seems to be going, the more often you re-check your self-worth, the lower it seems to be, setting up a pattern of continually lowering self-worth quite often found in depressives.

What leads to this disparity in ego inertia? Why can one person’s self-worth withstand any number of things that would make a depressive person’s sense of self-worth plummet like bird shot from the sky?

I am not sure. Certainly, the most basic answer is that normal, healthy people must have some sort of mechanism like an immune system which protects their self-worth from outside influences, blocking and defusing things that might upset it, and correcting the damage fast enough when it does happen so that the net effect is one of near-constant high self worth.

In depressive, said system is severely compromised or possibly even nonexistent, and it is therefore no surprise that the patient rapidly becomes very ill.

What causes this mental immune deficiency? From the depressive’s point of view, the answer might seem to be “life itself” or “the fact I suck”, but that does not really answer the question. Another person in the same circumstances might well have a wonderful opinion of themselves and a clean bill of mental health. What makes the difference?

To continue the immune system metaphor, perhaps the problem is that events in the depressive’s childhood damaged their mental immune system badly enough that it opened the door to more damage to their self-worth and thus began a terrible cycle of increasingly compromised psychological function which leads, finally, to depression, low self-esteem, impair cognition, and all the rest.

If that is the case, then it at least in part validates the traditional therapeutic approach of searching for these original traumas and attempting to repair them in order to bring the whole psyche back into health.

The problem is that the broken mental immune system has let in countless other trauma since then, and addressing them all would take several more lifetimes than any of us get.

Modern SSRI-based antidepressants, on the other hand, by suppressing some of the symptoms, might just artificially restore the mind to the state of health where the mind can begin to heal that long term damage, without the stress of the ongoing depression.

But that would be treating the symptoms more than treating the disease.

The answer, obviously, is exactly what everyone recommends these days : treatment plus medication. Not a groundbreaking result, but still interesting.

Perhaps a system of practical training in ego defense could be added to the cognitive portion of more traditional therapies in order to help repair this vital psychological defense mechanism and stop the damage from getting worse.

There must be a way to sure the undefended ego.

At least, I sincerely hope there is.

Holy cats, it’s Friday again already! We need to start putting these things further apart or something. I mean holy crapola, it’s September already! I am so not ready for it to be September yet. I am not even halfway done with August yet and I still have loads of leftover July taking up space and Tupperware in the fridge.

But oh well, time marches on, and so does the relentless forward rush of science. I have the usual jumbo pack of science related stories to share with you this week, so let’s skip the rest of the formalities and dig right in with both hands!

First up, let’s check in with one of my very favorite science type subjects, tissue engineering. No, not how to build a better Kleenex, but how to grow human tissue like muscles, skin, and hopefully one day entire organs in a lab.

A little creepy, I know, but the potential good for humanity of a future with no need for organ banks more than outweighs the ick factor.

The latest news is that some scientists at Holland’s Eindhoven University of Technology have figured out how to overcome the problem of lab-grown muscle tissue being flabby.

Turns out, it’s not rocket science. You just stick some Velcro tabs on either end of the muscle to stretch it while it grows, and voila, you get all the growing cells to align in the same direction and ergo become toned and firm and ready for the beach.

As a bonus, the muscles also grow their own intracellular blood vessels, which had been a problem as well. Thus, the path is now open for lab-grown muscles, which will mean a lot for medicine as well as tissue engineering’s even weirder offshoot, vat grown meat.

After all, the meat we eat is pretty much just animal muscle tissue. If we can grow animal muscle and fat in the lab, then we could see not just a future without organ banks, but a future without the slaughterhouse as well.

And speaking of glorious futures free of terrible things, how about long waits at the airport? We sure as heck could do without those, right?

Well an astrophysicist from Fermilabs, in his spare time away from pondering the very origins of things and stuff, has come up with a method that would cut the board times for airplanes in half.

His method is a little complicated, but this more or less explains it.

First, passengers sitting in the window seats on one side of the plane all board at once, in alternating rows (row 1, 3, 5, etc.). Then the same is done on the other side of the plane. Then the middle seats, still in alternating rows, boards on the first side of the plane. That continues with the other side’s middle seats, then (first one and then the other) aisle seats. Then, do it all again for the even-numbered rows.

So basically, the principles are : alternating-row seating, so that there’s always empty rows between the ones boarding, and boarding people from the outside of the plane inwards, window seats then middle seats (which are evil) then aisle seats.

As you can see from this video, it’s incredibly efficient without requiring the passenger to know or do anything new, just board when they are told to board, which we all already do.

Not only does this make the process faster, smoother, and most importantly less stressful for us, the poor cattle trying to get somewhere, but faster boarding times would mean more flights per day for the airlines, and hence, more dough ray me.

And all because its inventor, Doctor Jason Steffen, looked at the problem logically and with an open mind determined to find a superior solution.

Words cannot describe how much I admire that.

Finally, GPS. Is there anything it can’t do? From tracking lost pets to letting people become Mayor of their local hangout via Foursquare to, now, letting clever scientists track the underground nuclear tests of rogue nations.

Not the GPS units in everyone’s cell phone, but the satellites themselves. Some clever scientists figured out that underground tests still shoot a lot of radioactive stuff up into the air, and by monitoring the GPS distortions caused by said radioactive stuff (stop me if this gets too technical) they can totally pinpoint the location and intensity of these nasty little surprises when they happen.

Which is great, but beside the point. The important thing for these rogue nations is to convince the world they might have nuclear weapons, and thus, force the world to treat them like they are a big deal, and offer them all kinds of perks for discontinuing a potential nuclear program, and so all these rogue nations need to do is create the illusion of a nuclear weapons program and suddenly, from the point of view of a tin pot dictator who is total master of his nation, but it’s a tiny stupid shitty nation and so his megalomania is driven wild by the thought of all the world he does NOT control and how they might be looking down on him, that is pure fucking gold.

I think we should demand a higher level of proof before we give them the attention, importance, and respect they crave so much.

Anyhow, that’s all from me for this week, weekend shoppers! Remember to look boldly toward the future, embrace the new, and always remember, science is AWESOME!

And the answer, of course, is…. FOOB!

I mean honestly, why not?

Here we are again in wacky crazy Foobsville, population F00B, and it’s time to get down, get funky, and share some of the bounty of the Internet with you fine folks as you browse the shops, boutiques, and bidets of our quaint little town.

First off, hey, remember this guy?

That’s Jim Carrey, confessing his undying love and urinary issues to Emma Stone.

I can’t believe there are people complaining about how “creepy” Carrey seems in this video. Um, this is Jim Carrey, he was born creepy and has been working on it ever since. He’s a very talented guy, and I loved Ace Venture when I saw it in the theaters (not sure I still would, mind you… ) and I consider myself somewhat of a fan.

But if you can’t tell that he is not being serious at all in this video, and obviously made this for Emma Stone in order to make her laugh and have something fun to share around, then like Ebert said, you have Irony Blindness and there should be a telethon for people like you so you can get the help you need.

Next up, we have a story so full of “Awwwwww!!” cuteness that it will make your heart happy and your inside giggle! It’s the story of two highly unusual friends.

Skip to 0:30 to see what I am talking about.

Isn’t that lovely? That dog swims out into the harbour every single day just to play with his dolphin friend. It’s such a marvelous testament to the gregarious and loving nature of our fuzzy best friends that it does my heart good just seeing it.

And of course, it also shows how friendly and playful dolphins are as well. One can only speculate about what Doogie the Dolphin thinks of his odd fluffy (and soggy) playmate. Does he think of him as just a very weirdly shaped dolphin? Or do dolphins even care about such things, or do they just want to be friends with the world?

If he’s lucky, maybe his dolphin friend will teach him to go conching. It is totally the latest thing amongst the dolphin “smart set” and would be tres. tres chic.

As for the dog’s owners at the inn, I am sure they really appreciate having this unique little feature to draw in tourists.

But I bet they could live without the daily salty wet dog smell. Eww.

Next door to that last story we find one of my favorite things in the world : geek love.

This guy, Gary Hudston, commissioned two very talented Portal 2 level designers and, get this, featuring the original GladOS voice actress, Ellen McClain, to make a three part Portal 2 level that would end with a marriage proposal to his gal, Stephanie.

For those of us who do not inherently find watching someone completely a Portal 2 level fascinating, I highly suggest watching the opening text sequence, then skipping ahead to around 6:30 in the video for the marriage proposal bit.

Oh, and if you want the full story, click this here link.

I absolutely adore this kind of thing. I am a big soft sentimental marshmallow at heart, and big romantic gestures like this melt my gooey heart every time. If I am ever lucky enough to have a fellow in my life who goes to this kind of trouble to propose to me, I will love him forever and ever and ever and then some. I would fall for this like a ton of besotted bricks. And if I was ever the one doing the proposing, you can bet I would want to make it something spectacular, because only something big and sweet like this could possibly express the depth, breadth, and power of my love.

Plus, you know, I’m a ham.

Finally, we offer this chilling vision into what happens when your mama finally gets tired enough of your pestering her while she does the laundry to snap.

He's well hung for his age

“And you will stay up there, young man, until you either learn to behave like a civilized human being, or the sheets are dry. ”

Well, that’s it for this week, foob fans! Time to roll up the streets, tuck the kids into bed, share a nightcap with someone you love in front of a roaring fire, preferably in a fireplace, and then slip in to bed for a long night’s sleep.

You’ve earned it!

…. Anonymous.

What and Who is Anonymous? And WHAT are we Capable of? Take a fucking LOOK! from Helmut on Vimeo.

The language is a little hyperbolic, the music is a little obvious, and the abuse of proper capitalization and puncuation is a tad much, but still, not a bad video and it is a subject in which I am quite interested.

First, a little clarification, as the media, for all its efforts, does not quite seem able to grasp exactly what Anonymous is.

There is a hugely important website called 4chan.org, and originally it was just a place where people post pictures and links and such to the Internet, like dozens of others. Smut, funny videos, weird links from the past, the usual grist for the Internet mill.

On it, there is a section where anyone can post anything with complete anonymity. There’s no usernames, no signup, no tracking of any kind. It is the “anonymous” section, and it is from this the “group” Anonymous takes its name.

This section, over the last decade or so, became a unique environment, fast-paced, wild, anarchic, and freethinking. The complete anonymity meant that people were only represented by what they said and did, prompting people to wild and creative action. It became a place to express yourself and win the applause and praise of others, or their mocking scorn, all without personal risk. You did not even risk a reputation, because you have none. No identity means complete freedom.

It rapidly became a hotbed of Internet culture, generating popular memes, serving as a raucous mob forum for unfettered communication and hence becoming a powerful reactor core for the slowly forming world consciousness.

As such, it’s often quite ugly. Consciousness in the raw is not a pretty sight, and a lot of nasty behaviour, deliberate foulness, and goonish behaviour can be found there. But the fascinating thing is that as this molten consciousness cooled a little and began to find its voice and its power, it began becoming a place for action.

Participants would call attention to something they thought was wrong, and suddenly, there would be thousands of people attacking the target over the Internet. The one I remember hearing about is the Internet hell unleashed on someone who posted a video of them abusing a kitten to the Internet. This person had their personal information stolen and posted all over the Net, had their email flooded, had their credit cards hacked, and so on.

And all with no central authority, and no personal gain. People do this simply for the pleasure of purposeful action, and the approval of their peers.

You know, basic human motivation, no cash required.

More recently, as you can see by the video, this group has developed a social consciousness and an agenda of sorts. With the attack on Wikileaks, and obviously with heavy influence from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, they have become freedom fighters determined to strike back at the great wrongness of the world of today.

Being anonymous, they are accountable to nobody but each other and their own consciences. This is quite obviously scary. There’s a reason we rarely have torch wielding mobs play the hero in our popular movies. Individuals in a free society fear the mob mentality.

But I (cautiously) applaud them. They are the only sort of force that can overcome all the corrupt gatekeepers and senile dementors running the world right now. They are the youth, strength, passion, and idealism required to forge a new world.

They might be an unruly mob, but they represent enough power and idealism that they can actually threaten the powers that be. And that is something desperately needed in today’s rotten old world.

This is the Millennials searching for a way to strike back at the ills of the world and finding it. The hippies had sit-ins, rallies, and protests. The hipsters have the Internet, and that is a lot more powerful in a much shorter period of time.

I am intrigued by their threat to take on international banking. That would be the ultimate hack. The money Internet that is international banking is amazingly secure. It’s also the conduit of a lot of evil, of billionaires playing shell games with numbered corporations, ill gotten gains, and money laundering.

If they could crack that, and actually steal some of these bastards’ money and redirect it to, say, pro-democracy organizations or famine relief, then it would really get these fucker’s attention. Then they would have to listen.

Because nothing can stop Anonymous except shutting down the Internet.

And when they do that, you shut down your government.

As usual, the amazing science stories are raining down on my brain and my browser like artillery shells, and all I can do is fire back and pray!

For example, scope this : bottlenosed dolphins in Australia are teaching one another a new way to fish called “conching”.

It’s a simple game : grab a conch shell, swim through a school of small wish with it in your beak, surface, shake the water out, and dump a whole whack of little fish directly into your smiling mouth for a tasty maritime treat.

Repeat until full.

And the very cool thing is that not only are some dolphins in Australia’s Shark Bay (home of Shark Week, no doubt) doing this neat new trick, but that the trick is spreading amongst the dolphins like wildfire. Soon, that whole population will be doing it!

And you know what that means? Dolphins got culture!

Think about it. If two teams of alien scientists checked out the bottlenosed dolphins in question at two different times, one before this innovation and one after, the ones before would have no idea the dolphins were capable of this trick, and the ones afterwards might well conclude that it was both “natural” and “instinctive” to the dolphins, and point out how well evolved they are to do it!

No, you alien ninnies, it’s culture and innovation!

And hey, check out the latest bionic hand!

Pretty kickass, right? Hell of a price tag, but did you see her picking up those little blocks? That’s downright amazing.

But to me, the most important thing is that not only does it work well, but it looks cool. It’s not some Uncanny Valley fake-real thing that just creeps people out, or some horrible thing with hooks on the end that look like they will rip your eyeballs out.

It’s a very sleek and cyborg-like prosthetic and, in not even trying to make it look human, they have actually made it much better for a fifteen year old girl at school.

Everyone will want to look at it and watch her use it, and some of them will honestly be kind of jealous of her awesome robot arm. Then the novelty will wear off, and people will get used to it, and it’ll just be another normal part of life. Perfect.

And this piece is now (gloriously) dated, but I still love it :

Remember Junkyard Wars? This is the real fucking thing, people. Libyan rebels taking whatever they can get their hands on and turning it into weapons against oppression.

That’s the sort of thing that does my rabble rousing rebel heart good. Anything that makes sure the few have a harder time oppressing the many is fine by me. You can take your stupid “citizen militias” full of survivalist gun nuts any day. They are few and far between and not much good when the shit really goes down.

But you give me a population willing and able to turn anything and everything into a weapon, and you have a population that can and will resist tyranny.

And they will do it with SCIENCE!

Let’s see…. oh, there’s the blooming controversy surrounding the new generation of so-called “memory erasing drugs”.

As usual, the bullshit is way ahead of the facts here. So let’s be clear : nobody has invented some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (great flick, BTW) type wonder drug yet.

We are just talking about drugs that might be able to keep the brain from making those excessively strong and deep memories that impair the entire functional of the brain afterwards and lead to the whole range of post-traumatic mental illnesses.

So honestly, what’s the controversy? Sounds fine to me. Who needs that kind of memory? Sure, it might change the person’s personality, but that is equally true of absolutely every form of recovery from mental illness. Oddly enough, going from “mentally ill” to “sane” tends to change people’s personality. Since when is that a bad thing?

Oh, and one last nugget o’ science fun : researchers have spotted a supernova mere hours after it started, and now all eyes are on it, making it the most studied supernova in the history of astronomy.

Now, let’s be clear : they spotted it within hours of it happening from our point of view. The thing is 21 million light years away, so presumably, this supernova actually took place 21 million years ago.

Still, to us, it’s brand new, and now scientists are rushing to point every single telescope on Earth and in space towards it so we can capture the richest data set ever about a supernova. In other words :

We are going to study the fuck out of that thing.

Damn, I love science.

See you next week, folks!

… although us mortals suspect.

Heya foobketeers! I hope you all have your Secret Dakota Rings (because we special people know there’s a third Dakota, and it sure ain’t Fanning, am I right kids?), your Official Foobketeer Spy Glasses(for looking into Mom and Dad’s SOULS!), and of course, your very own custom personalized ultra secret and cool jar of industrial-strength artisnal Mustardayonaise. Otherwise, you’re not a true Foobketeer, and all your friends and family will mock you mercilessly for the shameful and scurrilous faker than you are!

And you’ll deserve it too, dammit.

Sorry, kids, that was a tad harsh. You’ll have to forgive your poor old lovable Uncle MJB for not being his usual halt and chipper self today, and being even, perhaps, a wee bit snarly round the edges, but one of his key medications for his diabetes has gone off the market here in Canada^[1] and he is three days without it and beginning to feel the effects. He feels tired and stressed and cranky and ill and like all his joints need severe lubrication (Oilcan! Oilcan!), and it’s put a hamper on his usual Sunday fooblefied ebullience. So as he vowed, as a child, never to take out his foul moods on others (unlike certain fathers he has), he has withdrawn from social congress, holed up in his roam, and suffers in seclusion. Thus, he saves everyone from the barbs of his infirm state.

Well, except for you people, but you love me, so you understand.

Seriously, though, I feel like hell. And I am pissed off at my doctor, because I found out about Avandia, the drug that put my diabetes in check, being discontinued on last Wednesday, and the pharmacist assured me that she would call my doctor’s office immediately and they would arrange some kind of alternative, and so far… no word from either party. I am totally going to call my doctor tomorrow and get me some explanations, because here I am getting sicker while someone does not do their god damned job.

I will try to remain calm on the phone, though. More flies with honey, and all that. But I am feeling cruddy enough so that my usual deference and timidity will most likely be entirely superceded by my burgeoning grumpiness.

I mean, this is my freaking life on the line here, people. Hop to it!

Must remain calm. Clear blue oceans, deep cleansing breaths, daydreams of bloody and painful vengeance on all who have ever wronged me or caused me pain…. ah, that’s better.

So um…. foobs and stuff. Right. Uh…. well there’s uh….. no, no, that wouldn’t do. I guess I could show you…. nope, never mind that, too dark… um….. fuck.

Sorry kids. I got nothin’.

Here’s a random cute animal pic from my collection.

Yup. That's what cute looks like.

Aww. That makes me feel better. I still feel ill, but there is nothing quite like a picture of an adorable animal peacefully asleep to soothe the rattled nerves of a sickie, especially if the sickie is me.

For those of you unfamiliar with this charming and adorable species, the sleeping cutie you are looking at is a red panda, sometimes known by its Chinese name as a wah, and while I know it looks like the creation of a mad genius stuffed animal designer, it’s a real honest to goodness animal that lives and breathes and scampers through the tress in southwest China and the Himalayan Mountains.

As much as we love our adorable everyday cats and dogs and other critters, it’s amazing to think there’s whole continents full of adorable animals we’ve never even seen, isn’t it?

A globetrotter’s perspective on the cute and cuddly critters of the world, I suppose.

One more darn cute pic :

Big kitties are cute too!

Awwwww. They’re just big kittens after all! Really big kittens, with the bodies of nature’s perfect athletes, reflexes faster than lightning, a mouthful of teeth that could rip the face right off your skull, and claws like razors that crave meat.

But look at that fuzzy tummy! Don’t you just want to fuzzle it?

Yup, no way I would survive that encounter.

That’s it for me, all my dear sweet gentle and above all sexy readers. Time for your Uncle MJB to go lie down and feel miserable for a while.

Seeya next weekm, kids!

Another week in the world’s weary transit round our round old sun, and another week of science news goodness to sift through, choose from, and proffer to you, my good and gentle readers, as a hapless and penniless moonstruck beau offers his lady a bouquet of carefully chosen wildflowers from a shy and trembling hand.

How’s that for a little impromptu poetry? I amaze myself sometimes.

First up, a story that I absolutely love because it contains many of my favorite elements^[1] : a 13 year old boy has designed a new kind of solar panel based on the Fibonacci sequence that might just make solar panels far more efficient in the future.

Efficiency, of course, is the magic word when it comes to solar power. The Sun gives us so much free (to us) energy that we could solve all our energy problems ten times ’round if we could but capture enough of it for our needs.

But current solar panels captures woefully little of it. But that might change thanks to New York seventh grade student Aidan Dwyer, and his brilliant new design based on the Fibonacci sequence^[2] and, of all things, the mighty oak tree.

He was walking in the woods, and noted (as many before) that the branches of the oak trees followed a Fibonacci pattern. He then decided to get out his protractor and measure just how an oak tree is put together, then went home and made a computer model of it, then built a PVC “tree” based on that model.

The result : solar collectors on his “tree” took in far more energy than the usual flat rooftop panel arrangement, and all without any parts having to move to catch the sun.

Makes sense, right? Trees don’t lean over to catch the sun! Nature has already designed extremely efficient solar collectors. They’re called trees, and they are all around us. This kid just figured out how they do it.

Like all genius, it is elegantly simple and obvious once someone explains it to you.

He figures the Fibonacci angle keeps the various parts of the tree (and his “tree”) from casting shadows on one another, thus maximizing solar intake.

Amazing stuff, Aidan. That’s true genius!

Next up : the secret language of pronouns.

Not that pronouns are secret. Feel free to continue using them.

Like these smart people!

No, the secret is how the way a person uses pronouns, and which ones they use and how often, reveals about the psychology of said person. According to the research of psychologist James Pennebaker of the Univerity of Texas in Austin, an amazing wealth of information can be derived about a person’s mental state simply from which pronouns they use most often, whether in writing or in everyday speech.

Myself, I am dubious about the predictive power of his results. Sure, you can find all kinds of patterns in known data sets. When you are analyzing the past, as with looking into someone’s writing, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you can correlate Observation A with Known Event A. That doesn’t mean there’s an actual meaningful connection.

Still, if he wants to pretend he can predict the actiosn of him or her, I won’t object.

Lastly, we have this extremely awesome little video of the closest thing we have to Voltron existing in the world today.

Heck, better than Voltron. No five stereotypical anime character human pilots needed!

Seriously, though, my mouth hung open in amazement during most of that video. The Eye-bots alone are pretty snazzy. But watching all the colorful shiny robots work together to solve a problem is truly fascinating.

Not sure if the clunkily-named “Swarmanoid” (why not just “Swarmoid”?) will make it as a real world problem solver, despite the usual boilerplate stuff at the end there about it being used in space exploration or hazardous environment work.

I get the distinct feeling that a lot of steps were glossed over in the presentation in order to make the ‘bots seem more independent than they are.

But still, this sort of thing, making individual units that can cooperate, coordinate, and operate in parallel, as well as integrating video into the process, strikes me as a very interesting line of exploration that could well lead to something potent and practical in the not too distant future.

Well, that’s it for science for this week. Tune in next week, when I will reveal the name of the secret master mole who controls earthquakes. Ciao!

Today’s foobtastic article title is the work of the winner of a super secret contest held over the last three million years in a layer of reality where time means nothing, the speed of light is the same as that of a stiff walk into a light breeze, and parking tickets are given out by fat bottomed cherubs with kidney issues.

After millions of subjective years, billions of entries, trillions of rounds of judging, and hoompta-tri-quggi-dillions of thought molecules, the winner was a last-minute entry from a Doctor William Cosby, who describes his creative process as one of “inspiration, meditation, and flatulence” and declares his entry to be not only an episode title, but also a dinner mint, a floor topping, and an aggressive tone-poem attack on nonliteral transubstantiation without proper documentation.

Thanks, Doctor Cosby! Hope you enjoy your prizes of a thousand-week vacation to Ejaculation Island and a boot straight to the junk.

Onward with the foobs! Bit of a thin herd this week, but what the heck, the spirit of the fooble freedom fighters will carry on!

First up, I recently learned of the existence of a hilariously brazen and horrible scoundrel of the comic book industry named Rob Granito.

I first heard the name when going through the archives of a webcomic called Gutters and found this strip immortalizing Granito’s gall and bastardry by lampooning it.

This intrigued me. It sounded like this Granito guy might just be the kind of shameless shitbag that is fun to read about when you are not personally involved. And I haven’t been involved in the comics scene since 1990 or so, so he’s not peeing in my pool, so to speak.

So I looked him up, which was less than effortless because the guy doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia page, or even an Encyclopedia Dramatica page, so there’s no one definitive place to go to get all the poop on this fecal accident of a fellow.

But this article here seems to have a fair bit of it.

This sack of low grade fertilizer’s modus operandi is to just plain claim other people’s artwork as his own. It’s the perfect crime for someone who is both lazy and shameless. And stupid, of course, because come on, dude, like you can get away with that shit in this day and age. There are millions of nerds who collectively (and sometimes individually) know absolutely every piece of comic art ever, along with who drew it, when they drew it, what kind of pencils they used, and what their cholesterol count was at the time. You will get busted so fast it will violate causality.

But hey, judging by the fact that the asshole in question wanted people to pay him $150 an interview based on how “everyone was talking about him”, apparently, he just wanted the attention and didn’t care how negative it was.

I have a small amount of respect for that, and for brazen hucksters in general.

Still, man, what a turdburger!

Our other major foob for the day is…. well, this thing.

As always, click to enlarge

You already want one just from the picture, don’t you? I did.

It’s possibly the most outrageously ambitious and imaginative concept car ever, and just to rub it in, it’s called…. get this… The Flake.

It’s like it’s daring you to take it seriously.

And listen to some of the details of this thing : for one, it’s covered in fur.

I am serious. Fur. The car… is furry. Fake fur, of course, thank goodness, but seriously, according to the designer, this special fur will make it more aerodynamic.

And, presumably, easier to heat in the winter, and nicer to cuddle up with.

All those flat surfaces can raise or lower automatically in order to change the actual shape of the vehicle to the best one for different circumstances, for example, lifting up the opposite side as you go into a turn.

Imagine being in a car that ripples and heaves around like that. It would take some bloody getting used to, to put it mildly.

Oh, and the wheels…. aren’t wheels. Well, not exactly. They are instead a ring of pads connected to a small central hub by more hydraulic tubes, so that the “wheel” can also shift shape to the optimal one for different driving conditions.

For example, at high speed, the bottom part of the “wheel” can flatten, exactly like those expensive Daytona racing tires, and hence the name of this wheel technology, the “D-Wheel”.

Shows they know that in order for your concept car to sound cool to people, it has to have parts that sound like something out of Speed Racer.

The article does not quite make it clear whether there is a working prototype of this car or whether it’s all just design ideas now, but I have to admit, I want to see one of these things in action. And I don’t normally care much about cars.

But come on. It’s a shape changing furry car! How can that not be cool?

This crazy old mossy mudball upon which we stubbornly cling and insist on calling “Earth” (because calling it “Dirt” would be declasse’)has spun on its axis seven times since the last time I emptied my bucket of science news jewels into your lap, milady, and so it must be time to do the whole thing all over again.

So here I am, your classically competent collator of cromulent contributions to the Knowledge of Humanity, once more sifting the sands of science for your very own personal benefit.

And what the hell, I will even share my thoughts on each item too. You lucky stiffs!

First up : scientists have discovered the blackest planet ever.

No racial message here, it is just plain literally the blackest planet ever observed, absorbing nearly all of the light that falls on it. It’s blacker than coal. It’s blacker than flat matte black paint. It’s just plain really, really, really black.

And at the center of this Jupiter-sized exoplanet of ultimate blackness, in the shadow of the blackest heart of the blackest planet around the darkest star ever, you find this guy.

And if you find him…. and if your skin is lighter than burned toast, you won’t…. but if you find him there, you will find him…. angry.

Admittedly, it’s debatable how important finding the blackest planet ever seen will turn out to be to science in general or astrophysics in particular. It will be interesting to speculate on what the heck it’s made of to make it so damn black, but really, the main interest is poetic, or aesthetic.

The idea of “the blackest planet ever” just seems made for rampant science fiction fiddling. Maybe it’s a giant energy collector for some energy-hungry aliens who live at the center and who need every single bit of energy that strikes the surface of the planet just to survive.

Maybe it’s the central temple of some void-worshiping energy beings who use it both for all their important religious ceremonies and for the execution of their worst criminals, who are tossed into That Which Eats All.

Or maybe it’s just the Locknar. Or that evil planet thingy from Fifth Element.

And the science fiction fodder just keeps coming, because the big news from NASA’s family of researchers is that we seem to have found some DNA from space in a sample from a meteoroid.

Caution is the watchword with a story like this, both because of the potential colossal hugeness of the find and the potential for a false positive due to external contamination.

I mean, this is Earth, we got DNA all over the damn place, from the microbes in the air to the whales in the sea and everything in between. You can’t get away from the stuff!

And, you know, you’re full of it too. DNA, I mean.

And we are not, alas, talking about a full double helix from some alien creature, only awaiting the right combination of genetic science and complete ignorance of science fiction B-movie plots to be brought to life before us.

Instead, it’s more like bits of chemicals that could become DNA. There’s two of the four DNA “letters” plus some other DNA-ish junk. But the important thing is that it proves that pre-life type chemistry in floating space rocks.

This would bolster the panspermia hypothesis, which posits that life on Earth might have actually gotten its start from materials that fell to Earth from space. A comet, a meteor, the glowing substance from a Happy Fun Ball, something like that.

One more item to round out the troika…. hmmm, I had it somewhere here…… there was one more, I am sure of it…. oh right, here it is. Rich people are evil.

Or at least, significantly more evil than the average person. Less empathetic, less altruistic, less compassionate, less caring. All the attributes traditionally associated with morality the world over are things they lack, or actively reject.

I have been saying for a while that wealth infantalizes. The richer someone becomes, especially when they reach the point of decadence where interpersonal relationships are replacing with dictatorial relationship and the ability to identify with your fellow humans becomes less and less necessary. The ability to have whatever you want, whenever you want it, spoils adults just as surely as it does children. In fact, it does it faster, because the person is basically spoiling themselves. And just like with children, it makes them selfish, impatient, quick to anger, rude, dismissive, and just plain unpleasant.

It makes them, in fact, infants. They get everything they want via crying in anger, they are cranky and fussy, they refuse to take care of themselves and make others do it, they are demanding and impossible to please because they basically want a return to the womb, where everything is provided for them without them even having to ask.

And infants, of course, lack empathy. They are sociopaths, because they do not even have a sense of people as valid beings, just as means to satisfying their desires.

And because they are so firmly stuck in the decadence trap, they are often deeply unhappy people who lash out against the world, blaming their inability to be happy with their wealth on others. And they see the world entirely in a self-based morality. Anything they don’t like is evil and bad and mean and done just to hurt them. There can never be any possible moral justification for doing the slightest thing that displeases them. That, in their infantile moral language, is a program that just does not compute.

And in our broken world, they have more political power than everyone else, and want the world turned into their personal playpen, ground down into a never-ending bottle of pablum for their greedy guts, and anything else is just plain wrong.

So…. um…. science.

Science is still cool. Right?