Archives for March 2011

One of the first stories my Internet spider brought me today was a funny little bit about a Florida woman, naturally, who was warned by police that her bikini was too revealing. So she took it off and continued on her way. Much to her surprise, they arrested her. That was funny, but not worthy of a whole article. Then there’s the story of how Samsung bugged all of its laptops with key logging software so that it could spy on its customers all over the world. While incredibly stupid, it’s pretty much all summed up right there. And now that they’ve been caught lawyers will get involved and lawyers are rarely funny. At least not intentionally. Some of the other findings were awfully dark or wildly technical. Not that I’m prone to avoid subjects like that it’s just that I’m in a good mood today and saw no reason to ruin it.

So I’m going to write about kitties and the cartoon characters in Thundercats. Which is a good thing. So far, there have been three iterations of Thundercats since its cartoon demise. The live action version reportedly had Pantero as a gay panther who pranced around Liono and ….., well, let’s not even think about it. Warner Brothers killed it before it got past pre-production. Then the CGI version met a similar fate when everyone involved realized it was horrible. Now there is, allegedly, a new cartoon being made which may, or may not, see the light of day.

Sorry. Never mind the Thundercats. Instead of writing about abject failure, let’s look for something successful and fun.

I happen to own three cats. All are rescues and each has a distinct personality. If you’re on Facebook, you can read their histories at your leisure. Suffice it to say that I’m familiar with felines. In fact one is trying to help me type this article.

That’s not really as useful as it might first seem. For all her prowess on the keyboard she can’t spell.

Thus, when I read the story of the kitty whose purr is louder than a vacuum cleaner, I knew I’d found my story for today. Raphael G. Satter has all the info that’s fit to print.

No need to bell this cat: A gray-and-white tabby by the name of Smokey has cat-apulted to fame with purring so loud it has been recorded at a potentially record-setting 73 decibels.

The British community college that measured the sound said it peaked at 16 times louder than that of the average cat. By some estimates, that is about as noisy as busy traffic, a hair dryer or a vacuum cleaner.

The 12-year-old, ordinary-size feline first came to national attention last month when her owner, Ruth Adams, decided to run a local competition for the most powerful purr. That led to a local radio show appearance, and from there, media coverage snowballed, with the tabloids full of headlines like “Thundercat” and “Rumpuss.”

“Sometimes she purrs so loudly it makes her cough and splutter,” Adams said on a website devoted to the cat, which was rescued from a shelter about three years ago. Smokey “even manages to purr while she eats.”

Hoping to see Smokey recognized as top cat, Adams asked Northampton College in central England to provide the equipment needed to submit a world-record application. Last week, the college dispatched a team with specialized sound equipment to record Smokey purring in the comfort of the family home in the village of Pitsford, about 70 miles northwest of London.

The recording has been submitted to Guinness World Records, the college said.

Seventy-three decibels is louder than ordinary conversation, which is generally around 60 to 70 dB. On a video posted on the website, the purring sounded like the cooing of an angry dove.

Guinness World Records spokeswoman Amarilis Whitty said she is eagerly awaiting the recording.

While Smokey may have gotten used to the attention, the Adams household seems to be getting a little sick of it all.

“Oh, God, you’re not the only caller,” said a man who answered the phone at the home Wednesday. He then hung up.

Cats purr by moving the muscles in their throats and diaphragm. But precisely why they do it is a matter of debate. Cats can purr when they are pleased — for example, when they are stroked — but they also purr under stress. Some scientists believe that purring has a social or even a healing function.

“She is LOUD VERY LOUD and keeps going,” Adams said on the website, adding: “She is one very happy pussycat and wants to tell the whole world how happy she is.

There are reports that the cat actually purrs at 92 decibels. That would be close to rock concert volume. Obviously those people are what we Yanks call “delusional.”

Anyway, I hope this was the purrfect start to your day.

Yeah, I went there. What of it?

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

I’m not sure if anyone really likes to fly. Oh, sure, we like arriving in new places full of treats for the mind and stomach, or being able to visit friends and so on, but the actual act of being anally probed and prodded prior to being strapped into a tiny chair while being forced to listen to someone (there’s always one) loudly discuss their painful goiters or oozing sores just isn’t all that pleasant. When I was a kid, airplanes had smoking sections, full meals and service that was above reproach. Somehow we’ve allowed ourselves to go from being paying customers to cattle.

There are those of you out there who will quickly point out that we’ve given up some freedoms and tons of common decency for the greater good and mutual safety. To those folks, I politely say “bunk.” Without getting into specifics, I once spent an evening with a friend from a government agency who detailed how easy it is to bypass the current safeguards, should one be so inclined. Not two days later some idiot tried to blow up a plane over Detroit with an underwear bomb. Fortunately for all he did not succeed, but I think my friend’s point was rendered valid.

More recently a gentleman smuggled a spy plane into the US. Was he caught by the ever vigilant TSA? Nope. Was he apprehended due to the efforts of attentive baggage handlers? Sorry. No, he was caught when he tried to sell the classified spy plane on e-Bay.

To put it mildly, as proved by this moron, one need not be a member of MENSA to fool our airport security professionals.

Speaking of morons, a lady in Florida was arrested yesterday after leaving her kid at a stranger’s house so she could go buy drugs.

Okay, back to our blog.

As if we’re not inconvenienced enough when we try to hand over our hard earned money to get from point A to point B, often being routed through points L and R just for fun, AOL News reports that Air New Zealand has hired Richard Simmons to provide the pre-flight safety lecture.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t get enough oxygen in New Zealand.

Richard Simmons, the fitness guru best known for his “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” exercise videos, is now teaching air travelers how to avoid a disaster.

Air New Zealand has recruited the ever-enthusiastic workout guru to recite the in-flight safety instructions in his own emphatic style.

Perhaps you thought a lesson in how to buckle a seat belt for the gazillionth time couldn’t be fun, but think again.

“Hi, everybody, In the next three minutes we’re going to work hard, work out and get you fit to fly,” Simmons begins.

“First let’s stretch it out, and loose that baggage. Stretch it up to the overhead locker or slide it under the seat in front of you. Stretch and slide!

“Yeah! You’re a giraffe!”

Hiring Simmons is a bit of counterprogramming for the airline. The move comes just a few weeks after a Qantas safety video featuring actor and pilot John Travolta. To date, more than half a million viewers had watched the Simmons video (ED NOTE: posted below) on YouTube.

The sad thing is that there’s no escaping it if you’re unfortunate enough to be on one of their planes. They turn the sound on and play the video on every available screen. Whoever thought that replacing their famous, all nude – body painted, flight crew with Richard Simmons was a good idea should be taken out and shot.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

People often talk about what a wonderful world we live on. There are songs, poems and prayers all built around the simple precept that this is a great place and, in the main, the people who live on it are worth knowing. Or, at least, saving. And, I suppose, if you remove the wars, the famines, the catastrophes, the pestilences, the prejudices and the good old fashioned social injustices, then, yeah, what’s left is pretty neato-keen. Unfortunately, we can’t do that. Still, though, from the rubble we can sometimes find nuggets of hope. Like the nice man and woman who went on a hot date only to discover they’re brother and sister. Fortunately for all involved they made that discovery before they sampled their dessert menus, if you know what I mean.

Or maybe you’re one of those people who likes to be inspired by natural disasters. Thanks to the recent tsunami in Japan, there are tons of heartwarming stories depicting heroism and friendship. They’ll make you laugh, cry and then donate money. Even the story of Hideaki Akaiwa, who “found” some scuba gear and saved his family will make you feel good. It’s also nice to note that he won the Badass of the Week award for that little stunt. It’s easy to see how. Diving into a torrent of raging water with stolen scuba gear to swim a couple of miles, save your wife and family and then cop a motorcycle to save your village will get you some hearty street cred in a NY minute.

Of course, not all stories are warm and fuzzy. In what’s become too common of a theme, a student in Canada found out that the school secretary was actually a porn star and made the info public. Naturally, the student was suspended. I’d write about this kind of stuff more, but it seems like it happens once a month or so. Why porn stars would want to be involved in higher education, and none of the stories thus far even hint at relationships between the porn stars and students, is beyond me. Given what teachers are paid, it would make more sense if that particular career path went in the opposite direction.

Anyway, back on point here, all of popular culture tells us this planet and its sentient inhabitants are worth saving. All well and good. But what if we were really attacked by aliens from space? Would we stand a snowball’s chance in a furnace? Lee Spiegal interviewed U.S. Army Col. John Alexander (retired) to find out.

The short answer is, “no.”

The long answer follows here.

A giant spaceship from another world arrives during the day and positions itself above the White House in Washington, while more ships do the same over other major cities around the world.

Then, without warning, all hell breaks loose, and the ships begin using devastating weapons and power to destroy everything around them — people, buildings, military resistance.

This continues for about two hours of popcorn-eating enjoyment until the earthlings on screen somehow come up with a miracle to stop these unwelcome invaders from laying waste to our beloved planet.

From “The War of the Worlds,” “Independence Day,” “Mars Attacks!” “Transformers,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “V” and the current box office favorite, “Battle: Los Angeles,” alien invasion is most definitely part of our culture — and maybe our fears.

“The bottom line for a hostile engagement between aliens and humans is not a pretty picture, and there is no happy ending for us,” according to John Alexander, a retired Army colonel who spent 25 years searching top levels of the U.S. government for evidence of a reported UFO cover-up — and couldn’t find one.

From a military point of view, Alexander, author of “UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities” (Thomas Dunne Books), says entertainment depicting alien invasions of Earth is pretty much just a vehicle to blow stuff up.

“Fundamentally, if aliens wanted to take over the world, why fight us? All of the Hollywood movies are based on the paradigm that if you’re going to fight someone, you’re going to have to use physical violence to do that, which involves risk,” Alexander told AOL News.

“The other premise is that humans are so special that something is going to protect them or they have something that these aliens want, which is the reason they come here.”

So, what could Earth or earthlings have that could be of any interest to space-faring creatures?

“It’s a typically human response that anything that comes is going to attack. So the storyline where aliens come down and someone grabs a shotgun and starts shooting at them — that’s probably not the most appropriate thing,” Alexander said.

“We know how we and animals respond when threatened — they don’t try to negotiate, they attack and defend themselves. If we’re supposed to be above that, then it ought to be handled a little bit more cognitively.”

From a strategic point of view, Alexander suggests that invading aliens wouldn’t simply “resort to fighting our military forces directly” when there are so many easy ways to accomplish that mission.

“If they chose to use physical force, they would simply destroy our infrastructure, power, communications, transportation and economic systems. While a terribly blunt approach, it could be accomplished without any danger to the aliens, or direct confrontation with any military system.”

As long as we’re offering a sober, logical, strategic scenario in which unfriendly extraterrestrials want to take over our home turf with the least amount of destruction possible, Alexander speculates there’s a much easier way to do it.

“If depopulation of Earth is an objective, the simplest way to accomplish that would be to introduce one or more biological organisms that kill humans.

“There is no reason for them to engage in the time-consuming effort to physically eliminate the armed forces of Earth. Biological warfare would be the most efficacious, energy-efficient and safest means for them to conquer Earth. For the aliens, this is a no-risk option.”

OK, you say you want yet another reason why we might be targets of an otherworldly takeover?

Try this: The aliens need our DNA.

Vivid accounts of UFO encounters in both the Old and New Testaments, where creatures descended from the sky and intermingled with humans, are similar to modern-day stories where people report being abducted into UFOs by ETs who allegedly conduct some kind of biological experiments on them.

But why would aliens do that? Alexander suggests a genetic reason.

“Human DNA might be necessary to rejuvenate their genetic lines. However, if the aliens understood DNA sequencing, they would certainly comprehend the cloning process. They would only need a few samples of human DNA in order to create a population that meets their requirements for regeneration.

“It would be far easier to grow their own population that would have no propensity for violence towards them, than to subjugate inherently impetuous and pesky humans.”

All of these reasons seem to support the belief by some scientists that we really shouldn’t be trying to contact any other civilizations that live in the Milky Way galaxy.

Last year, renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned everybody of the potential dangers of interacting with an alien species.

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans,” Hawking said.

And yet, other scientists actively looking for extraterrestrial signals from deep space take a different approach.

“Hawking is concerned about the possibility of betraying our presence, that if they were to come here, it might not be good for us,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “It’s hard for me to believe that they actually have (hostile) intentions on us.”

Alexander acknowledges Hawking’s fear of ET contact.

“According to his hypothesis, there may be marauding bands of ETs that scour the universe for the raw materials they need to survive. Therefore, inhabitants of any planet possessing those substances would be merely inconveniences, subject to removal.”

It’s a less-than-utopian view of an alien invasion presented by Alexander. And regardless of what we try to do to save ourselves — in the movies or in real life — any kind of hostile intentions toward us by aliens is going to turn out badly for us.

Could I have extra butter on my popcorn, please?

Okay, put down the razor and relax.

There are only two reasons to traverse the cosmos. The first, enumerated above, is clear enough. However, many scientist believe that the second would be more likely. That would be a quest for knowledge and self improvement.

If you think about it, the second is far more likely. To invest all of your planet’s resources in the thin hope that you’ll find what you need in a timely manner is not a recipe for success. It would be like randomly digging for water in a desert. You’d be dead from dehydration long before you accomplished your task.

So we can all rest easier. At least until I’m proven wrong.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

Humans are interesting creatures. We want to know how stuff works. The littlest kid, when confronted with a radio and a screw driver, will spend hours trying to figure out how those voices got in there. They will also, unfortunately, destroy the radio. I know, as a child, I caught the business end of a switch for trying to figure out how all those people fit inside the TV. Fortunately for my family, the TV repairman was able to undo my handiwork. God knows if they could have survived without their weekly dose of Lawrence Welk. This was especially true since my mom had dated his son for a bit and this fact greatly increased our family’s standing in the accordion lover’s community.

Nevertheless, it is our innate curiosity that led us to become the beings we are today. That being said, there are some things that were never meant to be known. And, naturally, Chinese scientists have discovered another one. Steven Hoffer reports that they have discovered how to make mice gay.

Because, ummm, well because the world needs a bunch of mice that drive little Miata’s with rainbow bumper stickers.

If your pet mouse doesn’t find the lady mice attractive, he could be lacking in serotonin.

New research from scientists in China argues that the so-called happiness hormone plays a role in the sexual orientation of mice, the BBC reports.

The study, published in the current edition of Nature, finds that male mice bred with brains unreceptive to serotonin lost their preference for female mice. The same was true for mice bred without the tryptophan hydroxylase 2 gene, which is necessary to produce serotonin.

“This is the first time, to our knowledge, that a neurotransmitter in the brain has been demonstrated to be important in mammalian sexual preference,” the report said.

Researchers found that when a male mouse was introduced to either of the serotonin-deprived groups, mice from those groups were more likely to pursue and give the male mouse the “mating call.”

Just a shot of serotonin to the brain, however, and the preference for female mice was restored.

As for the implications for humans, that remains inconclusive.

“We have been using psychoactive drugs which either increase or decrease serotonin function for quite some time now, and while effects on sexual arousal, impulsivity and aggression have often been reported, no effects on sexual preference/orientation have,” Keith Kendrick, a neuroscientist at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, told the BBC. “At this time, therefore, any potential links between serotonin and human sexual preferences must be considered somewhat tenuous.”

Well, that’s some good news I guess. We wouldn’t want some demented whack jobs wandering through Boys Town randomly injecting the residents with high doses of serotonin.

In other words, this information is completely useless.

What a difference that is from a mere century or so ago. Then, Swiss watch makers working for the Chinese Emperor created a series of time pieces that are still the envy of collectors the world over. Paul Casciato reports that the Chinese hoi-paloi liked to watch a little porn while they checked the time.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Open-minded collectors seeking an unusual conversation piece may want to snap up one of a rare assortment of erotic watches coming under the hammer in Switzerland this weekend.

An important private collection of 33 watches from the 18th and 19th centuries featuring racy tableaux will be offered for sale Sunday at Antiquorum, a Geneva-based auction house specialising in fine timepieces.

Among the sale’s highlights is an uncommon early 19th Century 18-carat watch by Genevan craftsman Henry Capt expected to fetch $70,000 to $90,000 and featuring two automata — one on the front of the watch depicting an idyll of doves and musicians and another hidden one showing a couple in an amorous embrace.

Buyers with about $20,000 to $30,000 to spare meanwhile could be tempted by a very rare heart-shaped gilt metal watch by London watchmaker James Cox around 1780. It has two concealed paintings on enamel that include a lady secretly spying two partially clothed lovers caught in an adventurous position.

The watches, mainly crafted in Switzerland, are part of a wider collection of more than 700 erotic artefacts painstakingly assembled over 25 years, including walking sticks, statues and ivory objects designed for autoerotic stimulation, Antiquorum Director Etienne Lemenager told Reuters.

The collection’s septuagenarian Swiss owner, who wants to remain anonymous, plans to sell the remaining objects in a separate auction in France later this year as nobody in his family is interested in carrying on his work, Lemenager said.

“He enjoyed collecting and now he is enjoying selling because he was involved with us doing the catalogue and was happy to provide comments on some of the pocket watches,” Lemenager said, adding that preparing the sale was a lot of fun.

The manufacture of watches with explicit motifs — often concealed from immediate view — began in the 17th century for the Chinese market, with the most luxurious timepieces created for the Emperor and his retinue.

In the 18th century watchmakers introduced rhythmic interest by incorporating tiny automata to the erotic scenes and watches containing libertine scenes were made for the Far East, followed by India and more recently by the Middle-East.

Only a very few, highly skilled horologists crafted these items, most of which feature finely painted miniatures on enamel and varicoloured gold ornaments.

I looked up some images (NSFW) of these fine items and realized I’d soon be unemployed if I posted any of them here. But it does make one wonder how the Chinese went, in such a short time, from very useful and fun hobbies to creating gay mice.

Oh, and just FYI, a horologist is a watchmaker. Get your mind out of the gutter.

By the way, those ads you see about how America gets sold to China? Ignore them. Even China outsourced China Town to India.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, THIS MORNING around 9:20!

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was nothing. A nothing so total that no human mind can truly conceive it. If you were suspended in a room, unable to touch anything (not even the floor) and there was no light whatsoever, you might have a glimmer of what I’m talking about, but that’s about it. As, the late, Douglas Adams once famously said, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.” He also said “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” And with that last one, it appears he might have been right.

You and I muddle through the dimensions of height, width, depth and, when we think about it, time. They’re all we know or can perceive, and even that perception is limited. However some scientists, those wacky people no one understands, believe that we actually live in 11 dimensions and that there is no correlating zero dimension to work from. Others believe that, since the universe is infinite, then there should be an infinite number of dimensions as well. The latter group tends to end up sounding like philosophers or theologians, so we’ll leave them aside for the nonce.

But somehow that still doesn’t seem weird enough. Ian O’Neill at Discovery News says that when the whole thing started, we wouldn’t have recognized the place.

I mean, we’re talking seriously weird.

Today, looking out across a seemingly boundless cosmos filled with an unimaginable variety of exotic objects, it’s easy to forget that the Universe we currently admire is the product of a violent event that occurred 13.75 billion years ago.

As we know, the leading theory for universal birth is the Big Bang, where everything came from nothing, in a single energetic burst of inexplicable creation. So, if we turn back the clock back 13.75 billion years, what would we see?

My instinct would be to say “energy, the Universe was filled with pure, violent energy,” but according to some mind-bending work by Jonas Mureika from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif., and Dejan Stojkovic from SUNY at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York, the answer may be a little more complicated than that. In fact, it may be so weird that we can’t even imagine what it would have been like.

According to an interview with PhysOrg.com, Mureika and Stojkovic have calculated that the early universe didn’t only possess a hot, energetic primordial state of matter, but it also had a primordial state of dimensions.

If they’re correct, the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that make the four-dimensional spacetime we live in today isn’t how it’s always been — the Universe may have existed in a lower dimensional state in the past.

The Universe, But Not As We Know It

The thinking goes like this: Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe possessed only one dimension of space and one dimension of time. It was basically a straight line. As the Universe began to cool, and expanded, this one dimension of space became “wrapped up” in such a way to create two dimensions of space and one of time — a plane, like a sheet of flat paper.

The transition from one to two dimensions of space was calculated by the researchers to occur when the Universe “cooled” to an energy level of 100 TeV (tera-electron volts, a measurement of energy commonly used in particle physics). A period of time after that, the Universe continued to expand and cool until it reached an energy of 1 TeV. At this point, the Universe got promoted to a higher dimension; three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, i.e., the Universe we live in today.

Mureika and Stojkovic think the Universe will eventually be promoted again, to a five-dimensional state, at some point in the future.

Evidence in Cosmic Rays?

This is all well and good, but isn’t it just a fanciful notion that our universal dimensions are evolving to higher and higher states? Even though string theory predicts there could be many dimensions and those weird hypothetical Higgs singlets (yes, the ones that kill grandfathers) need to travel through a fifth dimension for their time-traveling shenanigans, what’s the evidence for the Universe existing at lower dimensional states?

It turns out that Mureika and Stojkovic may have found some of that much needed evidence: When measuring cosmic ray particles with energies above 1 TeV, they appear to align themselves to a two-dimensional plane. “This means that, above a certain energy level, particles propagate in two dimensions rather than three dimensions,” the PhysOrg.com article clarifies.

This effect would suggest these very high energy cosmic rays originated from a period of time before the Universe acquired three spatial dimensions.

It gets better. As gravity cannot exist in 1- or 2-dimensional space, if we ever detect a gravitational wave signal, there should be a very strong cut-off in gravitational wave frequency. This cut-off could represent the transition of when space changed from a 2-dimensional to 3-dimensional state. Gravitational waves can only exist in three-dimensional space!

Also, the particle physicists’ Swiss Army Knife of particle accelerators, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), may be able to probe this 1 TeV transition when colliding particles beyond these energies — if a two-dimensional signal is received, perhaps that is evidence of this dimension-energy relationship.

So What?

Apart from trying to prove the early Universe was a very weird one-dimensional straight line, how else would this research be useful?

There are a huge number of cosmological conundrums that don’t seem to “fit” with our current knowledge of the Universe (hint: dark energy and dark matter), so the dimensional “evolution” of our Universe might be able to help.

But how could we even begin to comprehend what a “lower-dimensional” Universe would have been like? Well, that would be like trying to describe a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional lifeform, in reverse, but I’ll let Carl Sagan explain that bit.

When you click on Carl Sagan’s link, and I know you will, you’ll be treated to a primer in dimensional physics and the precepts of altered perceptions.

Simply put, when this all got started, the rules people parrot without comprehension didn’t seem to apply. Speed of light being the ultimate speed limit for the universe? Nope. Dimensional space having conceptual barriers? Sorry. Time a linear constant? Not even close.

In fact, there was so much there that isn’t here that it boggles the mind. Who could come up with something that bizarre? I think the answer is obvious. Stoners!

They may be the most useless people on the planet but they also are unrestrained by reality or logic. The only way all of this makes sense is if God kicked back and said; “Hey, Asherah baby, pass me that hookah and some matches. I’ve got this gnarly idea!”

Let there be light!

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!