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!