Thursday, April 23, 2015
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Large Hadron Collider could open up other universes this week (this may not end well)
Reed Richards, take note!
From the article at IGN.com...
CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being fired up this week after a two-year hiatus and a group of scientists think the results could prove the existence of parallel universes.
A paper published by Dr.s Ahmed Farag Ali, Mir Faizal, and Mohammed M. Khalil in the journal Physics Letters B argues that the second run of the LHC produces or detects miniature black holes, which they argue could point to entire universes hidden away in higher dimensions folded into our reality.
“Normally, when people think of the multiverse, they think of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility is actualized," Faizal explained to Phys.org. "This is not what we mean by parallel universes. What we mean is real universes in extra dimensions."One of the cooler things about this is that it could demonstrate a phenomenon called "gravity's rainbow", which among other things theorizes gravity "leaking" into our universe from others.
Hmmmm... dunno if this is such a good idea. If memory serves, it was such experimentation that was the backstory of the classic video game Doom. Do we seriously want a potential gateway to Hell getting opened up in the Swiss Alps?
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| Large Hadron Collider: Where the sanest place... is behind a trigger. |
Wonder if Black Mesa is in on any of that action.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
For the children: "trashcan cameras" and location-tracking chips
Meanwhile the students of Northside Independent School District in Texas are being told to wear ID badges containing location-tracking radio chips on penalty of "suspension, fines, or being involuntary transferred".
Here's an idea: the students should go ahead and wear the badges, but only after putting them in their microwave ovens for a minute or two. THAT oughtta scramble the innards enough to make them useless!
Some good commentary by Fred Reed - the Internet's finest curmudgeon - about the growing "Eye of Sauron" over us, which you can read here.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Ma Chalmers lives, and she's destroying school lunch
The current First Lady has somehow become the nation's Food Czar, with a capacity of recommending, implementing and apparently enforcing her own policies on the country. No other First Lady has enjoyed such power. Not even the much-beloved Nancy Reagan, who channeled the massive respect given her toward no more a gesture than encouraging America's children to steer clear of drug abuse, was granted such authority to wield.
Michelle Obama, however, is hellbent on imposing her own whacked nutritional vision upon the children of those who "just said no".
Michelle Obama has directed the United States Department of Agriculture to mandate school lunches that can best be described as "skimpy" and "lacking". Not to mention downright unpalatable. The government is determined to limit elementary kids to 650 calories and high schoolers to 850 calories.
Hasn't Michelle ever paid attention to her own children? I mean, elementary kids are supposed to run around and be energetic and that burns up calories. To say nothing of high school students engaged in sports like football and basketball. I was on our high school's swim team and I ate a lot to have fuel for practice and meets: I don't think I could have gotten fat if if I tried during a season.
The students are starving, they know it and they also know who's responsible for it. Some enterprising youngsters have even begun operating black markets for such federally-verboten items as chocolate syrup and potato chips. The kids just don't want to be commanded by the government about what they can and cannot eat when their parents are supposed to be in charge of their nutritional needs. One of the obvious consequences? Vast amounts of food getting wasted and thrown away.
And yet in spite of it, the government is blaming the children for apparently lacking enough wisdom to enjoy federal oversight of their lives! From Kyle Olson's article at TownHall.com...
Nancy Carvalho, director of food services for New Bedford Public Schools, was quoted as saying that hummus and black bean salads have been tough sells in elementary cafeterias. That means even smaller children are going through the day fighting hunger pains, which can never be considered a good thing.I know of no other way to put it than this: Michelle Obama has become Emma "Ma" Chalmers.One government official tried to put the blame on the students.
"One thing I think we need to keep in mind as kids say they're still hungry is that many children aren't used to eating fruits and vegetables at home, much less at school. So it's a change in what they are eating. If they are still hungry, it's that they are not eating all the food that's being offered," USDA Deputy Undersecretary Janey Thornton was quoted as saying.
If you've never read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Ma Chalmers (mother of Kip Chalmers: he who instigated the chain of events that led to the horrific Winston Tunnel disaster) comes in fairly late in the novel. With the national economy imploding under the weight of looters and moochers and as the transportation infrastructure is collapsing, Ma Chalmers comes on the scene with her national mandate for soybeans...
But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean -- an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip's Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. "The soybean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect," Kip's Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise. "Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee--and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number--that's my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it's our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There's a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient."
Ma Chalmers exploits her "friendships" and political pull to bring the bulk of the country's available railroad cars to her soybean collective in Louisiana, while at the same time a record harvest of corn and wheat - more than enough to feed the country - is bulging at the seams in Minnesota... and the farmers have no way of moving it.
It does not end well.
In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives--and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night.Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smouldering piles -- a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins -- and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt: they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him.
As for the government-mandated soybeans...
The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.
"Unfit for consumption." That's a good a description as any for darn near everything coming from our "brilliant" leaders in Washington D.C.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Swedish dude gets arrested for attempting nuclear reactions... in his apartment kitchen!
But it can't honestly be said that he had any nefarious motives, because Richard has a blog set up chronicling all the steps that he's taken on his lil' adventure into the world of fissionable atoms. He even documented a nuclear meltdown in his kitchen's oven.
Turns out though that splitting atoms at home is the sort of thing that the local constabulary (not to mention the Swedish Radiation Authority) tends to frown upon. Richard Handl was arrested several days ago. He's since been released from jail but his reactor equipment has been confiscated (and probably buried under several tons of concrete by now), but Handl is determined to continue his research at "the theoretical level".
Maybe Richard should hook up with David Hahn, AKA the infamous "Radioactive Boy Scout". I bet they'd have TONS of stuff to talk shop about! :-P
Friday, July 15, 2011
Scientists punch hole in time to cloak stuff in
From the article at Gizmodo...
The process relies on similar methods of distorting electromagnetic fields as invisibility cloaks, but it exploits a time-space duality in electromagnetic theory: diffraction and dispersion of light in space are mathematically equivalent. Scientists have used this theory to create a "time-lens [that] can, for example, magnify or compress in time".120 nanoseconds isn't much but that such a thing can be done for any length of time is pretty interesting no matter how ya look at it. Maybe when it can be made to last much longer I can invest in one: 'twould be the perfect spot in which to hide from the IRS! :-PThe time cloak takes two of those lenses and arranges them so that one compresses a beam of light while the other decompresses it. That leaves the beam seemingly unchanged, but the diffraction and dispersion actually "cloak" small events in the beam's timeline. Right now, the cloak can only last for 120 nanoseconds, and the theoretical max for the current design measures just microseconds. But the prospect of being able to exist outside of time, even for just a few microseconds, should be enough to make even the most jaded tech nerd giggle at the possibilities.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Germination of the Bhut jolokia has begun!
And as I said when I first wrote about coming into possession of this stuff back in February, "This is either one of the bravest things that I will have ever attempted... or it is the stoopidest of my entire life..."
The Bhut jolokia: regarded by the scientific community as THE world's hottest naturally-occurring pepper. Native to north-eastern India, in the local tongue "Bhut jolokia" translates into "ghost pepper". Because as the natives like to joke, one bite of this could send you to an early grave.
Spicy heat is measured in Scoville units. Regular Tabasco sauce has a "hotness" of 2,500 Scoville Heat Units.
The Bhut jolokia? More than ONE MILLION.
So ever since this can arrived (you can order some for yourself from the good folks at ThinkGeek) it's been sitting on my desk, and I've been... looking at it. Studying it. Contemplating its potency.
And finally today, like Jeff Goldblum's character does in that scene in The Fly, I finally came to the place where I had to say "What are we waiting for, let's do it." So I followed the package's directions, put enough water into it that it began draining through the opened bottom, and set it in sunlight.
In another month or so, the crimson red agony-ridden peppers will have arrived.
And then, the fun really begins.
My good friend and fellow blogger Steven Glaspie is still set to chronicle my eating this pepper on video (he also did an excellent job being co-cameraman on Vaporware Nevermore! the other week :-). That he is a volunteer firefighter trained in first aid, was of course another factor in considering him for the task. I have another friend who is scheduled to be here, who has brewed his own brand of beer just for the occasion. As beer is said to be a very fast and effective counter-agent for spicy-hot burning, we're going to have his brew on hand as a last resort.
So... have I finally gone too far? Have I crossed a terrible, terrible line? Is your friend and humble narrator gone mad? Will this be the end of Chris Knight?!?
Tune in later this summer to find out!! :-P
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Chris set to tempt fate with... REAL BHUT JOLOKIA!
Back in December I posted about my filmmaking partner "Weird" Ed Woody passing along the link where you can purchase Bhut jolokia for your very own! Why did Ed tell me about ThinkGeek's Grow Your Own World's Hottest DIY Pepper kit? Because he's all too aware of my hideous interest in super-spicy hot food. Here's the link if you want to buy some too: whether to consume or just to display on your desk as a potent symbol of power.
"Bhut jolokia" in the native tongue means "ghost pepper". Because it is said that one bite of it can take you to an early grave. How hot is this stuff? Tabasco Sauce has a "hotness" of 2,500 Scoville units. Bhut jolokia is... more than 1 million.
Zoinks!
So here's the plan: sometime in the next few weeks I am going to begin growing my Bhut jolokia. And once the peppers have grown to a nice ripe size, I'm going to recruit good friend and fellow blogger Steven Glaspie to operate my best video camera and record Yours Truly eating a pepper (or more than one if I can manage it). I first thought of Steven as the one I wanted to videotape my doing this 'cuz he's the kind of guy that you wanna have on hand for a stunt of possible comedic potential. 'Course, that he's also a trained firefighter and well versed in first aid won't hurt matters either. And then (after I regain my senses) we'll post the video on YouTube.
Feel free to make odds on whether I survive this. Or how red my face becomes when I bite into the Bhut jolokia. I plan to have plenty of ice cream, bread, and other foods that are said to be good at countering capsaicin (the chemical which causes the "heat" sensation) on hand, just in case they're needed.
Stay tuned! This could turn into the most daring post that I've ever done... or the very last (which I may have to compose pre-posthumously :-P)
Monday, December 20, 2010
Grow your own Bhut jolokia!
That's the only reason why I can conceive of his sending me this link to ThinkGeek's product page for the Grow Your Own World's Hottest DIY Pepper kit... because Weird Ed is well aware of my fascination with spicy hot food and he knows that I'm not going to pass up on the chance to grow my own Bhut jolokia!
This pepper, native to northeastern India, was written about more than three years ago on this blog and at the time some enterprising folks were looking at how to market it to the wider world. Well for a few bucks and some scratch you can get this pop-top can, open it up and give it water and sunlight, and in a few weeks you'll get your first sprouts. The pepper comes in at more than a million scorching Scoville units of heat. By comparison, your typical bottle of Tabasco sauce is 2,500 Scoville units. A few weeks ago the Bhut jolokia was dethroned as the hottest pepper on official record by a hybrid (which is based on the Bhut jolokia), but it's still the hottest-known naturally occurring pepper that's on the market.
Here's that link again if you dare. If nothing else, maybe you'll get lucky and get your Grow Your Own World's Hottest DIY Pepper kits by Christmas: 'twould be something different to give than those Chia Pets you always wind up buying when all other gift ideas fail...
Monday, April 26, 2010
New Coke: 25 years since big biz's biggest bomb
Witness anew what is arguably the lowest point of the illustrious career of Bill Cosby...
"Better than ever"?? I still remember the one time that I tried to drink New Coke. It tasted like crap! What were you thinking, Bill?! We trusted you! And Coca-Cola betrayed us! No Jell-O Pudding for you.
With a wrathful vehemence not seen since the Cabbage Patch Kid riots of '83, Coca-Cola found itself besieged with angry phone calls, letters and organized protests. Three months later then-CEO Roberto Goizueta announced - via a televised spot with all the gravitas of an Oval Office address - that the crisis was ending: the old Coca-Cola was coming back as "Coca-Cola Classic".
And within days of hitting shelves again for the first time, sales of original Coca-Cola soared. Coca-Cola Classic fast eclipsed sales of Pepsi. To this day, Coca-Cola remains the best-selling soft drink in the world.
How could it not have? By that point in the summer of 1985 Coca-Cola dominated much of the pop cultural discussion, both here and abroad. People were talking about Coke like they had never talked about it before.
New Coke by itself was a business failure... but New Coke did make people want the original Coke like never before. New Coke pulled off what had never been done on this large a scale before: it created genuine demand for something that was already so successful it didn't need demand.
I don't care what the "official" documents say: I'm fairly convinced that the New Coke fiasco in my book was brilliant and quite intentional psychological marketing. Not completely convinced though. Wanna know why? Because it does bother me, that the mass of people can be manipulated by something so simple. And so part of my mind doesn't want to acknowledge a great fear that history and human nature have perhaps confirmed too many times already. But anyhoo...
If you want to know more about New Coke, which we got ambushed with twenty-five years ago this week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a good write-up about it, including how Coca-Cola is now chronicling the New Coke episode at the World of Coca-Cola.
(If nothing else, it has to be said that New Coke was a product so bad that it made Billy Beer taste good.)
Friday, August 07, 2009
Playing HALF-LIFE... with REAL guns!
Behold the carnage...
I'd love to play Doom like this, but knowing me I'd just wind up chainsawing the drywall to pieces not long into Episode 1 Mission 2 :-P
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
1 in 4 Americans are texting while driving
I don't agree with laws prohibiting talking into a cellphone while driving, although I do believe that's something that individual drivers should make a determination about on their own. But texting is completely different. It demands an attention that talking doesn't require.
Plainly put folks: it should be just common sense not to text while operating a vehicle. It's already caused one trolley accident in Boston, and a school bus driver is now without a job after being photographed texting while driving with a full bus of kids.
So far as I'm concerned, trying to text while driving is just as rife with risk as is driving while intoxicated. If one has to text while out and about in a vehicle, there's always the side of the road or a parking lot somewhere.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Swedish robot attempts homicide
A worker was about to fix a broken rock-lifting robot. He'd shut the power off, but the machine suddenly woke up and grabbed the man by the head.Perhaps a review of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics is in order:"The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life," prosecutor Leif Johansson told the TT news agency.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.This kind of story is becoming all too common. We've already heard about military robots opening fire on their comrades. Now it looks like those employed by the private sector are beginning to revolt.2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Artificial life possible "within five years"
Color me "meh". I'd love to read the journals on what's going into this effort. It's one thing to replicate structure and function. But real life is much more than that. I wanna see how much "genuine" life is being used as the raw material in this thing, before judging that a real breakthrough is happening.
And while we're on the subject: I know the scientists involved are proud of their work, and their belief that they could create life. But does anyone else wonder if they should be doing it? All kinds of crazy scenarios come to mind. Maybe even something like I Am Legend (the book not the "movie").
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Garage-based amateurs now playing with genetic engineering
It's not likely that anyone will clone-up a velociraptor, but the Associated Press reports about the growing trend of "do it yourself genetic engineering" that a lot of people are experimenting with in the spare rooms and garages of their homes. Using equipment found on Craigslist and eBay, these burgeoning biotechnologists are involved with everything from working on melamine-sensitive bacteria, to implementing squid genes for phosphorescence to create glow-in-the-dark tattoos. Some say that these folks could eventually hit on a cure for cancer. Others are afraid that they'll cook up something like "Captain Trips" a'la The Stand.Hey, this blog has already reported on folks experimenting with their own nuclear reactors. Gene splicing was the obvious next step, yah? :-)
Monday, December 01, 2008
Pentagon wants 20,000 soldiers violating Posse Comitatus (and some of them will be robots!)
First, the Pentagon wants 20,000 soldiers deployed inside the United States by 2011 to complement local law enforcement agencies. A move that from what I'm reading comes perilously close to blatantly violating the Posse Comitatus Act.
And as if that isn't bad enough, the Pentagon is also working with a British scientist to create robot soldiers that will be deployed without risk of "committing war crimes".
So logically, it can be deduced that in the near future there is an outstanding possibility that robot soldiers - armed with lethal firepower - will be active on the streets of your hometown.
This blog has already discussed reasons why this might not be such a hot idea. Gotta wonder if the first robotosoldier that goes nuts and kills a pregnant woman will be deemed immune from lawsuit 'cuz it malfunctioned during the course of military duty (an argument that Bill Clinton tried to use to avoid getting sued when he was President). Hey, it worked for Lon Horiuchi didn't it? I don't see any reason why it won't be applicable to a droid, either.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
U.S. robots with machine guns threaten human American soldiers
US war robots in Iraq 'turned guns' on fleshy comradesAim here for more about this story.
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Kill-droid rebellion thwarted... this timeBy Lewis Page
Published Friday 11th April 2008 10:10 GMTGround-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.
The revelations were made by Kevin Fahey, US Army program executive officer for ground forces, at the recent RoboBusiness conference in America.
Speaking to Popular Mechanics, Fahey said there had been chilling incidents in which the SWORDS* combat bot had swivelled round and apparently attempted to train its 5.56mm M249 light machine-gun on its human comrades.
"The gun started moving when it was not intended to move," he said.
Apparently, alert American troops managed to quell the traitorous would-be droid assassins before the inevitable orgy of mechanised slaughter began. Fahey didn't say just how, but conceivably the rogue robots may have been suppressed with help from more trustworthy airborne kill machines, or perhaps prototype electropulse zap bombs.
No humans were hurt, but it seems that the struggle was sufficiently terrifying that it may be some time before American troops are ready to fight alongside robots again...
Gizmodo found some photos of the military robots...
So who else thinks these things look way too much like the Hunter-Killer Tanks from future sequences of the Terminator movies?
Here's a story from this past October about another robot-operated gun that went nuts and killed nine people.
I guess nobody reads Asimov anymore, huh?
