Archives for April 2011

As Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged discovered not everyone’s lucky enough to ascertain the right mixture with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands. In other words, as far as we know, humans are mortal. But what would happen to us if we could achieve immortality? Or, at least, greatly extended lives? Jack McDevitt, in his book Polaris, postulates that those who are granted this ‘gift’ would be forced to segregate themselves from society in order not to cause long term animosity. That makes a rough sense. After all, if you knew that you were going to live 70 or so years and your neighbor was going to live 10 times that or more, you might feel a little cheated. And while Asimov may have believed that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,” you and I both know that there’d be people with torches and pitchforks demanding that they too get what their neighbor’s got or there’d be hell to pay.

Nevertheless, given the holiday, it seems appropriate to take look at what strides science has made in attempting to ascertain immortality. Jennifer Viegas, from Discovery News Online, says they know more than you might have guessed.

Some animals and plants that reproduce asexually “can in principle achieve essentially eternal life,” according to a University of Gothenburg press release.

Scientists at the university are studying such species to find out how they avoid aging. So far, one chemical appears to be key: telomerase. This is an enzyme that protects DNA. It is more active in the longest-lived people, so its benefits likely extend throughout the animal kingdom.

The animals that can possibly achieve immortality under ideal conditions, such as sea squirts, certain corals, Hydra, and Turritopsis nutricula (the immortal jellyfish), often activate telomerase. Helen Nilsson Sköld of the Department of Marine Ecology, University of Gothenburg, and colleague Matthias Obst are studying sea squirts and starfish to learn more about how these marine creatures seem to ward off aging.

Out of the animal immortality A-list, sea squirts and starfish have genes that most closely resemble those of humans.

“Animals that clone themselves, in which part of an individual’s body is passed on to the next generations, have particularly interesting conditions related to remaining in good health to persist,” Sköld was quoted as saying in the press release. “This makes it useful to study these animals in order to understand mechanisms of aging in humans.”

“My research has shown that sea squirts rejuvenate themselves by activating the enzyme telomerase, and in this way extending their chromosomes and protecting their DNA,” she added. “They also have a special ability to discard ‘junk’ from their cells. Older parts of the animal are quite simply broken down, and are then partially recycled when new and healthy parts grow out from the adult bodies.”

Starfish are also amazingly immune to problems that affect the rest of us. If they lose a body part, for example, many species can simply grow another one. Reproduction involves tearing apart their bodies, somewhat akin to growing a new plant from a broken off piece of a “mother plant.”

Eternal life, from an evolutionary standpoint, however, has a big drawback. Due to asexual reproduction, the species as a whole retains very low genetic variation. This means they could be particularly vulnerable to climate change and not enjoy immortality after all.

Scientists are therefore rushing to study such species, which may hold the secrets of increasing our own longevity. It would be a colossal human mistake if our pollution, habitat encroachment and other activities erased our chances of learning more about nature’s anti-aging secrets.

I don’t think the universe is ready for a clone of me. It has enough issues with the single version.

Nevertheless, above and beyond all of that, you should know that scientists have already genetically engineered a mouse to grow younger. The mouse had been designed to grow older faster than normal so scientists could address issues with aging but then they reactivated the aforementioned enzyme telomeres and the little critter’s organs and muscles returned to youthful vigor.

Moreover, they’re studying a 17 year old girl who, thanks to a very rare disease, stopped aging around the age of 1. I’m not sure I’d want to spend eternity as an infant, but that doesn’t seem to be the final goal.

One advantage of a greatly extended life span would be having the chance to truly get to know the people in my life. For example, I could find out why Ian O’Neill – whose kind permission allows me to rummage through Discovery’s science archives every Sunday – is a big fan of trance music. Or, maybe, I could have the time to get to know each and everyone of you.

That would be nice.

I’d like to take this moment to wish all of our Christian readers a Happy Easter and, since I’m also a fan of trance music, I’d like to share one of my favorites with the class.

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

I know you don’t come here to learn anything but are forced to on occasion anyway. Never anything useful, I’m not cruel, but still something you can talk about after your regular conversation crashes.

“Hi honey, how was your day?”

“Fine. And your’s?”

“Fine.”

(unhealthy pause)

“So, have you seen the new, musical, toilets?”

See? You’re right back in the swing of things.

Before we sing a song of sewage let’s catch everyone up on the history of the flush toilet. Despite popular belief the modern flush toilet was not invented by Thomas Crapper. Nor was it invented by anyone named John. Nope, the original flush toilet was invented and developed simultaneously in ancient Rome, Egypt, India and Pakistan. In Wilbur Smith’s historical fiction, River God, there’s a scene where Pharaoh is introduced to the first flushing toilet and is so enthralled with it that he makes one of his wives demonstrate its use in front of the court. While crude by our standards, it still worked on the same principle; it removed sewage from the home and deposited it elsewhere safely. In this case, the Nile where it would work as fertilizer.

We’ve come a long way since those heady, halcyon, days of toilet technology. There are now over 100 different kinds of toilets ranging from the common house flusher, that we all know and love, to toilets that can measure your blood pressure and provide and instant analysis of your end products.

Some of those even provide a printout so people can compare results. With whom is not made clear and I, personally, don’t want to know.

Now, Phil Lamarr of YAHOO! News is announcing that Kohler has taken toilet technology to a whole new level. I’m including his link becasue he has some great video of the toilet in action (but not in use, so don’t panic). However he tries very hard to be funny and, to be blunt, fails miserably. So if you watch with the sound off you should be fine.

Nevertheless this toilet, called the numi, is a wonder to behold. With an asking price of $6,300.00 it’d better be.

It has a pulsing bidet function that can be controlled by the user via a handy remote that comes with their purchase. Given the many options, especially the ‘thrusting wave’ function, there may be some women who’ll never leave their bathrooms again.

It also has a nice music selection that you can access to help you relax while you relieve yourself. And, if you want, there’s a docking port so you can play your own MP3 collection. I mean, after all, who among us hasn’t had that uncomfortable moment where we couldn’t go go without Gaga?

It also comes with mood lighting, an air dryer, a foot warmer, a deodorizer and a motion activated lid so you don’t have to sully yourself with the lowly act of actually touching the toilet.

While all of this may be good news for most of us, it’s not such a great idea for purveyors of elephant poop products. They want their poop on the ground the way God intended. As Monica Garske reports, there is a burgeoning market for paper made from poop.

Finding your desk covered in animal dung doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

When it’s in stationery form, at least.

Whenever entrepreneur Michael Flancman talks about his business, there’s usually an elephant in the room. That’s because he runs the Great Elephant Poo Poo Paper Co., a unique, environmentally conscious company based in Thailand that specializes in turning elephant dung into paper goods and stationery.

On any given day, Thailand-based entrepreneur Michael Flancman can be found scooping up elephant or cow poo at conservation parks and farms. He uses the droppings to make paper goods and stationery for his company, the Great Elephant Poo Poo Paper Co.

Here’s how it works: Every week, Flancman and a team of employees visit elephant conservation parks near Chiang Mai to collect naturally dried elephant droppings.

After the poo is gathered, Flancman said it’s carefully rinsed with water, leaving only the fibrous materials from the grasses, bamboo and fruits the elephants have eaten but couldn’t digest.

Then, Flancman said, those fibers are thrown into a giant pot of boiling water to ensure an even more thorough cleansing and sterilization, leaving the fibers primed and ready to be made into paper.

Once additional fibers from pineapple plants and trees are thrown into the all-natural mix to add thickness, Flancman said his team separates the moist pulp into small cakes that are then spread over a mesh-bottomed tray and left out to dry naturally under the sun for several hours.

Once dry, the cakes transform into sheets of paper, and Flancman and his crew are able to peel them off the tray and start making Poo Poo Paper products.

He said this tedious handmade process is repeated often, and in the end, the paper comes out sturdy and oatmeal-colored without a hint of stinkiness.

I get it, it’s eco-friendly, recycling in its purest form and all that. I still don’t see me rushing to WalMart to grab a ream. But hey, if poo poo paper is your thing it’s nice to know you’re not alone. It’s also nice to know you’re not me.

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

Before I get into this mess today, there are a couple of things that need to be dealt with first. Let’s start with the Ancient Aliens crowd. They believe that humanity could not have developed much beyond the wheel and fire, and they have doubts about that, without guidance from an advanced culture. To hear them tell it, and they do every freaking day on the History Channel – which should be renamed the Crackpot Theories Channel – all of the Hindu gods were really aliens and that’s why they look so different. Moreover, these people claim that said aliens dropped atomic bombs in India and on Sodom and Gomorrah. Because, well – you know, there’s a reason in there somewhere. Ignoring logic and facts for a moment, what’s their motivation? If the idea of a couple of isolated atomic strikes was to cow us into submission, then why didn’t they come down and force us to submit? If the idea was to show us that they hold a very high moral code, then why not bomb Egypt or Greece? In their day they made the antics of Sodom seem like a pre-school. And, since both were major powers, people would have paid attention to that little message. There are those who argue that the aliens are being subtle. To which I ask; what the heck’s so subtle about an atomic bomb?

Despite specious evidence and wild conjecture, these people continue on with their varied, for lack of a better term, hypotheses as though they were written in stone instead of water.

“Aha,” they cry when they realize you’re not buying any of this, “what about batteries?” What about them? Crude batteries were manufactured in Egypt almost 3,000 years ago. The devices could store, and then retransmit, an electrical charge. Egypt housed some of the finest minds in the world in its hey day and those minds would have been curious about many things, including conductivity (see lightning strikes for reason #1). If it was a gift from aliens, it was a truly worthless one. Without an electrical infrastructure there was no use for the contraption. It quickly faded as a novelty and never saw wide use. Later cultures, including the Greeks at their peak, made the same discovery with the same results. It wasn’t until Ben Franklin rediscovered the concept of the battery that it began to make headway into public use. And, even then, it took more than a century for it to have widespread practical value.

Then there’s the story of Thomas Fowler, who invented a terrnary computer in 1840. Well, then, it was called a calculating machine and not a computer and there were tons of those around. It was also built out of wood and not any alien metals. Even so, it would be a quantum leap above anything we have now. Instead of a circuit being either on or off, it would allow the circuit to also be both on AND off. Instead of a binary system, it would use trinary. Right now, due to existing infrastructure, it’s still just a novelty but does that mean that Tom had alien professors?

Doubtful. Even college students would notice something like that.

For the moment let’s follow the prudent course and quote Bertrand Russell. He offered what he called “a form of Occam’s Razor” which was “Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.” Do that and your ancient alien activities turn to mist.

Simply put, I feel safe in dismissing these people and their wild eyed hunches in the aggregate and moving on to the fun stories that have been falling out of the FBI’s secret vault. Well, it’s not really a secret since it’s been open to the public since 1970 and it’s not much of a vault either. But it sounds cooler to say it is so I’ll play along.

For all the voluminous UFO related documents that have come to the fore, they are all based on one simple statement; Between 1935 and 1941, 3 UFOs crashed on Earth. Specifically in Germany, the United States and in Russia. Allegedly all 3 were 50 feet in diameter and each contained 3 dead aliens.

Before we go any further, let’s talk about those ships. About 15% of the ship could be usable space, and I’m being generous with that assessment. Anything in the spinning part of the disk would be crushed by gravity. Remember that the disk has to spin fast enough to counter gravity. It would be like living in a centrifuge. So, in the tiny remainder of the ship, a space about 7 1/2 feet in diameter, there’s the engines, living quarters, pilot’s area and some form of on-board computer. Unless those aliens are about 6 inches tall, that’s going to be hopelessly cramped.

Now, let’s take a look at the crashes. The first one supposedly occurred in Germany. When you consider that, the rest become irrelevant.

Adolph Hitler’s rise to power surrounded him with some very driven people. Xenophobes, racists, psychopaths and so on, all wishing for power and control over the world. Hitler’s great claim to power, the famous Beer Hall Putsch, was actually a dismal failure. It was deemed a success when Hitler’s cronies hastily reformed the facts to fit their needs. This was PR spin on an epic scale. In other words, when reality didn’t fit their needs, they lied. That would be an ongoing theme for the Nazi Party.

Now fast forward to 1935 when Germany was supposed to have discovered the downed UFO. Germany was bound by the onerous Treaty of Versailles. Their military and their economy were both gutted by it. In retrospect, it was about as short sighted as a treaty could be. Germany was trying frantically to get out from under its many oppressions. Hitler had the military working in secret and was aided by the fact that the terms of the treaty were being enforced by a buffoon. Neville Chamberlain was more interested in being popular than being good at his job. For example, when the Nazi’s claimed to be honoring the treaty by keeping the total tonnage of their navy less than that of Britain’s even if they had many more ships, he agreed. That allowed Germany to build many more boats which were faster and deadlier than anything in the British navy. The ships in the British fleet were mammoth. The German navy was built on speed and killing power. It was a mistake that could easily have been avoided had he done something wild like, I don’t know, gone and seen for himself.

Hitler also did something else that no one else in the world was doing. He poured all of his available resources into military and scientific research. Scientists were given free reign to look into any possibility, no matter how irrational, if it could be used to increase Germany’s strength. And that’s exactly what they did.

Rocket technology, despite claims contrariwise from UFO enthusiasts, had existed in basic form for almost 3,000 years. It was invented by the Chinese to make fireworks and some crude weapons. Theoretical advances in different propulsion systems had been made around the turn of the 20th century. Hitler’s scientists started with those and, thanks to unlimited funding and manpower, made tremendous leaps forward.

Jet engines, far from being super secret high tech whims of fancy, had been invented prior to 1930 by Dr. Hans von Ohain and Sir Frank Whittle. Neither knew of the other’s work and Sir Whittle applied for a patent in 1930 when his research was complete.

So much for aliens. All Hitler did was steal existing, human, technology and throw a lot of resources at it.

Anyway, back to our crashed UFO in Germany.

Just FYI, these must be the most incompetent space-farers in the universe to have crashed into the same planet three times in such a short span.

Nevertheless, it’s well known that Hitler was fascinated by the unexplained, he even hired psychics to guide him, and he was surrounded by excellent liars and sycophants. Add in the fact that he was being pestered by the WWI allies (excluding Chamberlain who seemed content to watch cricket and sip tea) to explain where all this tech was coming from, as the rest of the world was fighting through a depression, and you have a recipe for what followed.

Hitler and his scientists obviously hashed out a rough idea of what an alien space ship would look like and created forged documents to claim they’d found one. Of course, super secret documents that would scare the pants off of high ranking officials the world over are useless unless they aren’t all that secret. So, SURPRISE! SURPRISE!, these highly classified documents quickly ended up in the hands of western spies.

Within 5 years American and Russian documents made their way back to Germany showing that these countries had, amazingly enough, captured their own downed UFOs. Unfortunately they did so without the advantage of garnering any new technologies. Both the American and Russian armies were built with conventional weapons and tactics.

But, HEY!, somewhere somehow they still held to their claim that they each had a shiny UFO.

Oy vey.

After that, the rest is obvious. Since no side could admit the fallacy, and no side had any true advantage, the ruse continued on. Yes, the Nazi military was the best in the world in it’s time and, yes, they probably would have won the war had not Hitler been a military moron. But none of those facts require alien technology to be explained. A simple combination of resources and hubris covers all the bases.

Does all of this mean that aliens don’t exist? Of course not. The odds are overwhelmingly in favor of there being life on other planets. But does that mean that our backwoods planet is the crossroad of the universe? Not bloody likely.

So, when you hear people like Professor Bill Wickersham calling for a Congressional study of UFO phenomena, feel free to send him this link.

It’ll save the world a lot of time and money.

Hit'N'Hide – Space Invaders by SECRET-REALITE

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

I’m always looking for new tips when it comes to makeup application– and I found this awesome article from the fabulous, Jenny Patinkin. Jenny is the owner of Dollface Beauty School. Dollface offers a variety of makeup classes for women of all ages, too!

I LOVE wearing eye lashes… have you ever tried? It was pretty tough when I first started gluing them on, but after a little practice it wasn’t so bad. There’s even a class coming up on May 14th, 2011— where you can learn how to correctly apply lashes yourself. You know how Kim Kardashian always has that ‘lushes lash’ look these days?? Well, it’s not easy to accomplish that same look if you haven’t mastered the lash application. So, check out the Lush Lash Seminar– it’s for a small group of women who want to up their makeup game. Lashes are such a huge trend right now, but even for a more natural look, false lashes can really open up the eyes and add a lot of dimension and interest, not to mention drama.

I love Jenny’s tips when it comes to makeup for all ages…CHECK them out, below!

 

Eyeshadow Evolution:
Daughter – Enjoy glitter while there are no fine lines in which it can collect.
Mother – Use shimmer in a strategic way to create the look of brightness and space.
Grandmother – Stick with sheer, natural colors that have a subtle, satiny sheen.

Concealer Continuity:
Daughter – Spot treat pesky pimples.
Mother – Disguise exhaustion and the passage of time by covering under-eye circles, large pores and uneven skin tone.
Grandmother – Switch to a creamy highlighting formula to regain the look of hydration and restored luminosity.

 

Lipstick Lineage:
Daughter – Experiment! Anything goes!
Mother – Always have a hint of shine, even it’s just clear balm. Matte colors and dry lips can be very aging.
Grandmother – Embrace pinky tones – they really perk up the complexion.

Check out DollfaceBeautySchool.com for more information on Dollface Beauty School. OR! You can “LIKE” them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter  like I did!

Fans of wistful, breezy indie rock, listen up.

Brooklyn-based Beach Fossils bring their jangly melodic tunes to Empty Bottle tonight.  Lo-fi, catchy hooks with delicate vocals–it would be the perfect stuff for spring…if we were, you know, actually having spring weather right now.

The group’s new EP entitled What A Pleasure arrived in March, and their self-titled full length was released a year ago.  Not that you shouldn’t trust your own ears, but both have received excellent reviews and each earned a rating of over 7 from Pitchfork.  As we finally emerge from our winter hibernation cubby holes, this is just the stuff to have on your mp3 player.

Beach Fossils – “What A Pleasure”

The show is at 9:30, with Beach Fossils playing last.  They’re joined by California’s upbeat indie outfit Craft Spells and local boys Brain Idea, and tickets are $10 now or $12 at the door.

Craft Spells – “You Should Close The Door”