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And Yet They Breed

September 13, 2017 by Bill McCormick

You have been warned.
A long time ago, on an internet far, far, away, I used to write about stupid criminals in Florida. It was an endless source of material. But, finally, it began to feel like I was clutching low hanging fruit. After all, all I needed to do was punch naked + meth + crime into Google and I’d be deluged with Floridians, and Arizonians, behaving badly. Often at Walmarts. I never understood the fascination, but that could just be me. Maybe getting naked in a Walmart is a fun way to kill an afternoon. God knows I have been naked inappropriately in my life. Not in a chain store, but still not smiled upon. Nevertheless, I stopped. Besides, there were far more interesting topics to handle. I used my new found free time to write about basic science, robot overlords, eugenics, evolution, comics, superheroes, new artists from around the world, and a much broader spectrum of topics. Plus, there are now well funded sites dedicated to stupid criminals in Florida. So why bother competing? I certainly had better things to do. I even did some of them.

But every now and then, the clarion call of HomoIdiotus beckons. It’s keening wail echoing across the virgin plains of social order. While I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, their ilk seems to be spreading. These are just some highlights from the last two weeks.

This headline, Thieves steal U-Haul containing father-in-law’s body, tells you all you need to know about this story. What makes this story rock are the auto-generated related items at the bottom.

Related UPI Stories
  • Border Patrol stops hearse carrying pot-filled coffin
  • Teen arrives at prom in coffin carried by hearse
  • Man steals hearse with body inside from Georgia hospital
  • Hearse carrying veteran’s body left unattended in Hardee’s parking lot

The good news is the Albuquerque cops recovered the U-Haul and the body so it’s on its way to a proper internment. The bad news is the crooks are still at large. Just FYI, while these things come in threes normally, they seem to be multiplying like rabbits in New Mexico.

In order on the rest:

1. Driver arrested with sixty-seven pounds of pot.
2. The kid is a goofball, but harmless.
3. This is the third time this has happened globally in the last month or so. All the thieves have been apprehended. I have no idea why this is a thing.
4. The drivers were on a scheduled stop to eat a burger. No charges were filed.

Another self explained headline comes from Vermont; Williston police seek panda-costume wearing theft suspect. The fan of Ailuropoda Melanoleuca is still among us and carrying a stolen air rifle. I wouldn’t want to explain this to kids. How do you warn them what to watch out for here?

Don’t worry, I didn’t forget Florida.

Florida woman crashes into witness who reported her drunk driving.

Chelsea Todaro, at the Palm Beach Post, fills in the blanks.

Florida Highway Patrol troopers arrested a woman Sunday in Fort Myers, Florida, after she crashed into a witness who called 911 to report her reckless driving.

WFTX reported that Brittany Sharp, 25, faces charges of driving under the influence, driving under the influence causing property damage, driving with a suspended license, driving without insurance, and careless driving.

FHP troopers said a female witness called to report that Sharp was driving erratically on the road around 2 p.m.

WBBH reported that Suzzette Williams, Angelina Powell, and another female passenger followed Sharp for nine minutes, filming Sharp’s vehicle as they broadcasted on Facebook Live.

One clip shows Sharp’s vehicle barely miss others as it crashed into a bridge wall on the highway.

According to News-Press, a witness said that she pulled her car in front of Sharp when Sharp made a complete stop in the center lane. Sharp then drove her car into the back of the witness’s vehicle, News-Press reports.

Officials took Sharp to the hospital for minor injuries. She remains at the Lee County Jail with no bond set.

Jail records show that Sharp was arrested twice this year on charges of larceny and dealing in stolen property, according to News-Press.

So, to recap, the nice ladies mentioned here followed a drunk driver, in the middle of the afternoon, for almost ten minutes before anyone arrived to arrest her. There is a reason for that. Fort Meyers has one of the highest, per capita, crimes rates in the country. Combined with paltry sums available for social infrastructure, like police, you’re going to be on hold a lot down there after you call 911.

Fortunately this ended with no fatalities.

Now, your job may suck, but it doesn’t suck as much as this dude’s at the Marion County Jail’s does. We’ll finish off this cavalcade of dumb with one more stop in Florida.

Florida man stuffs more than $1,000 in rectum in attempt to hide it from deputies

Early morning on Saturday, Pattreon Stokes, 26, was pulled over on the highway for speeding. In the front passenger seat of the car was a 7-month-old child.

The deputy who pulled Stokes over said that he could smell marijuana coming from inside the vehicle. After searching the vehicle, deputies found 197 grams of methamphetamine, rock cocaine and 4 grams of heroin. A scale was also found in the car.

Stokes also had a small amount of marijuana and a large amount of money on his person.

Stokes was charged with trafficking methamphetamine, trafficking heroin, possession of cocaine with the intent to sell, manufacture or deliver, possession of marijuana and possession of drug equipment. He was arrested and taken to the Marion County Jail.

Officials say that when they arrived at the jail, the money Stokes had on him appeared to be missing. Stokes said that deputies had already collected the money.

“Detention deputies then noticed something quite unusual…” Marion County Sheriff’s Office posted on their Facebook page. Deputies observed $20 bills falling from Stokes’ buttocks area.

After a “necessary but undesirable process for everyone involved,” MCSO detention deputies located $1,090 in U.S. currency hidden in Stokes’ rectum.

“(A) necessary but undesirable process for everyone involved” may be the greatest understatement I’ve heard in years.

Since those bills had to be cleaned before they were bagged and tagged, this may be the first time the phrase “laundering money” had a legal basis. I hope they wore rubber gloves.

And haz-mat suits.

BTW, if you’re over fifty, the video below will ruin your childhood. If you’re younger it will make your day. Either way, it has naughty words and guns, and you can sing along with it.


Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Filed Under: News Tagged With: america, crime, dumb

Ban the Ban

August 31, 2017 by Bill McCormick

A very bad idea whose time keeps coming back.
As three of you know, I’m a writer. As such I use words to convey ideas. As others may attest, I’m also an adult. As such I sometimes wish to discuss things that may, or may not, be salient to other adults. Some of those things are violent (read the news for reasons why), others may be sexual (surf the internet to see why), or some may be just about food. I happen to like food. Click that link if you like food too. But, and this is important, if a discussion arises wherein I’m uncomfortable with the subject matter I have choices. I can walk away, I can stay and learn, or I can light someone on fire. Actually, no, I can’t do that last one. I bet you can name some solid reasons why. Yet, for some, burning ideas is accepted. If you don’t like it you BAN it. Usually in high dudgeon, with much gesticulating (to prove you’re earnest), and wrapped in a cloak devoid of common sense. So, yes, joy of joys, censorship hath returned to rear its distorted, ugly, head.

Jim Millot, over at Publisher’s weekly, takes a look at the latest idiots to try and make the world a blander place.

Nook.

A new content policy instituted by Nook Press last week has resulted in the termination of the accounts of numerous self-published authors.

In recent days, authors have been receiving notices from Nook, which is owned by Barnes & Noble, informing them that their titles are in violation of Nook’s updated content policy. The authors have been told that their titles have been removed from sale, and their accounts have been terminated.

A number of authors who’ve received the notices have taken to social media to vent their frustrations. In a blog post about the situation author Georgette St. Clair said she would have acted to conform to the content policy, had she known it was needed. She writes: “I have never gotten a single warning or complaint from B&N about any of these titles; if I had, I would have taken it down immediately.”

Conformity is not what they’re after. At least not in any literary sense. What they want is “safe” literature. Words that could be read in any Sunday school.

Ooops. More on that in a bit.

Let’s first take a look at the new rules and then we’ll parse out the most obvious violations.

… works portraying or encouraging incest, rape, bestiality, necrophilia, paedophilia or content that encourages hate or violence.

For the record I’m not a fan of any of those activities, but that’s not the issue here today.

There is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to incest in literature. It, amazingly, leaves out Oedipus Rex. Long story short, dude has sex with his mom, kills his dad, and has a bad day.

Since I write Sci-Fi, let’s go play in my backyard.

Science-fiction

  • Incest also appears in the writings of two major authors of science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert A. Heinlein. Le Guin’s short story “Nine Lives” (1969) features ten clones (five male, five female) of the same person, whose intimate relationship includes incest. Her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) contains a story of two siblings who mate, despite a taboo against it.
  • In Philip K. Dick‘s novel, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), Inspector McNulty is in a sexual relationship with his sister.
  • In Piers Anthony‘s Bio of a Space Tyrant (from 1983), the main character’s sister has sex with him when he is 15 and she is 12.

Heinlein wrote numerous books advocating incest as a great way to teach kids the joy of sex. There are those who argue he was satirizing the logical end of the Free Love movement in the 60’s. Maybe. But if satire was his goal he missed it by a wide margin.

Ian Bertram, at Without the State, sums it up nicely.

I have to confess that I find Heinlein’s exploration of sexual themes in these later books disturbing. Although books like “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and “Stranger” allegedly promote an open attitude to sex and sexuality, his final series of books goes far beyond that, dealing extensively with incest and child sex. In “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” for example, his main protagonist Maureen Johnson (mother of Lazarus Long) connives with her husband to enable him to have sex with two of his daughters – one of them sixteen at the time. She also tries to seduce her own father and speculates on whether he has had sex with one of his granddaughters. Stripped of its SF elements and submitted without Heinlein’s name attached I wonder how easily such a sleazy tale would have found a publisher. A lot of the sexual element of the story is covered by misdirection about ‘Mrs Grundy’, but in real terms a significant element is about child abuse, justified moreover in terms that any paedophile would recognise. Positive representations of incest also turn up in “Job”, “Farnham’s Freehold” and “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and most explicitly in “Time Enough for Love” where Lazarus Long makes love to his mother Maureen – a sequence reprised in “Sunset” as part of the wider sequence of incest involving Long, Maureen and her husband, their two daughters and Maureen’s father.

The most explicit example of what I can only call a fixation on young girls – other than ‘Sunset’ – is probably ‘The Door into Summer’ where the hero Dan Davis uses a combination of ‘cold sleep’ and time travel to persuade the 11 year old daughter of his business partner to take cold sleep herself when she reaches 21 so that he can marry her, having gone back into cold sleep himself to come out at the same time. A similar situation arises in “Time for the Stars”, although in this case the hero has been in telepathic communication with the young girl since she was a baby as he travels on an interstellar expedition. The effects of relativity allow her to age so that when he returns to earth he can marry her.

Examples of this fixation can be found to a greater or lesser degree throughout his work. In “Moon” for example, describing the death of Ludmilla, one of Mannie’s wives, he writes, “An explosive bullet hit between her lovely, little-girl breasts”. In “Cat” there is an extended and sexually charged discussion of the delights of spanking a 13-year-old girl. In “Time Enough for Love” Lazarus Long marries a young woman he first meets as a very young child of about 6 years old, his longevity serving the same purpose as time travel and relativity did in “Summer” and “Stars”. Even in his so-called ‘juveniles’ there is a usually a strong dissonance between the actual behaviour and the calendar age of his female characters, all of them demonstrating extreme precocity.

The remaining limitations from Nook seem laudable until you realize they aren’t defined. Hate speech sounds like a great thing to avoid until they decide that “I hate broccoli” should cost an author their placement.

The point here is that all of the terms used are subjective and I, whether you ask or not, am not comfortable having a nameless functionary decide what is, and is not, acceptable.

Beastiality?

Not a fun way to kill an evening at my house, but still legal in many states in the U.S. As I noted before.

Pop quiz, if you’ll pardon the expression. What do Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont & Virginia have in common? You can marry your first cousin in every one of them. Well, as long as your first cousin is a member of the opposite sex anyway. But all is not lost. If you’re in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont or Washington D.C., then you’re one of the lucky few who can marry your gay first cousin. In fact, if you’re in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, New Mexico & Vermont you can even have sex with the horse you rode to church after you marry your cousin. Which means that in Connecticut you can marry your gay first cousin while having sex with a horse and be completely within the law.

Plan your vacation now.

Rape? Goodbye Shakespeare, goodbye Jessica Jones comic books, goodbye most literature from the 1600’s forward. If you’ve read The Three Musketeers you’ll know why. It wasn’t subtitled The D’Artagnan Romances #1 by accident.

Above I mentioned Sunday school. The Bible hits all of the offending categories in spades.

Dinah was raped in Genesis.

Beastiality gets four mentions in the Old Testament. To be fair, they are verses condemning it. But, you can only condemn something if it’s happening. Kind of like seeing signs reminding people not to have sex in the birthing rooms in a maternity ward. Someone did that. So, just think about it for a moment and we’ll move on.

Paedophilia gets a shout out in the Old Testament, five times, and it seems like it was heartily approved.

Hate speech? Well, there’s not a lot of positive press for Romans, Samaritans, any non-Jews actually, or others in the Bible.

In fact, just to make it easy on you, Kings, the story of David, hits all the high points, minus beastialtiy, in one long story. Just think of the Godfather movies with a different accent.

So how is Nook enforcing its new rules? Not by banning the Bible, that I can assure you.

Nope, they’re going after low hanging fruit. Self published authors who dream of writing the next 50 Shades of Gray. Given how low that series set the bar you can see why these authors would think it was an attainable goal.

They are attacking the most vulnerable (i.e., people who can’t afford lawyers) just to make themselves feel better.

I’m not saying you should read your favorite rape stories at Sunday school. Nor do I think everyone of every age should read everything. Age appropriate is a thing for a reason. But banning these books isn’t going to make people stop thinking about these things.

More importantly, this crazy stuff called science, has shown that a healthy, and active, fantasy life involving sex is good for you. It promotes happier relationships. Or, to put it another way, the majority of women who read, and enjoyed, 50 Shades, have no real plans to get kidnapped and used as a sex toy for a billionaire.

I know, you find that hard to believe. Just ask your mom. She’ll tell you the truth.


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Filed Under: News Tagged With: ban, bible, fun, nook, sex

Strange Days Indeed

January 21, 2016 by

Just walking around the new WNC offices.
Just walking around the new WNC offices.
People have asked me why I quit writing about Florida, specifically, and stupid things people do in red states in general. Most seem to assume that the idiocy has been tamped down to levels seen everywhere else. Most would be horribly wrong. In Florida, alone, the amount of people doing stupid things has risen to such epic levels that the South Central Sun-Sentinel has been forced to hire staff just to keep tabs on them and, for a while, even offered the content as pay-per-view. Oddly enough people weren’t stupid enough to pay to read about stupid people, so they just increased their ad rates and now everybody’s happy. But, quite honestly, I’d be writing about them day and night and still not cover it all. Consider me officially whelmed on that topic. I moved on. Besides, I have to admit, it’s kind of draining. No human should ever read a sentence containing the words “naked” “meth-lab” “strip-club” “infant” and “gun used as dildo” which is delivered without irony. I have read such sentences numerous times. So I don’t do that to myself anymore.

I’ve got a few things in que for you today, so let’s start with aliens. By now most of you have heard of the star KIC 8462852 a/k/a Tabby’s Star, named after Tabetha Boyajian, the woman who led the team that discovered its behavior, it was supposed to have an alien megastructure around it. Like a Dyson Swarm, an array that would collect all the sun’s energy and distribute it evenly across the system for the inhabitants to use. Cool idea, but there was no evidence of transmitted energy. Others, such as yours truly, posited that it could be a swarm of comets. Many smart people said “Yep, that makes sense” and went back to reading Dilbert. Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, says one dude said “oorrrrr, maybe not.” And here’s where the weird turn pro.

But still, the star is weird. And we just found out it’s even weirder than we thought.

Bradley Schaefer is an astronomer at Louisiana State University. He’s a clever fellow and has a habit of thinking outside the box when it comes to astronomical mysteries. When it came to Tabby’s Star, Schaefer realized there might be older observations of it that could help inform its study.

He found that Tabby’s Star has been photographed more than 1,200 times as part of a repeated all-sky survey between the years 1890 and 1989. Using two different methods, he examined those observations and measured the star’s brightness over time.

fading star

Tabby’s Star is fading over time. The blue diamonds are measurements made between 1890 and 1989. The solid line is a linear (straight-line) fit to all the data while the dashed line is just a fit to the starting and ending points. The gray points are from two other stars as controls; they don’t fade over the same period.

Graph from Schaefer, 2016

What he found is rather astonishing: The star has been fading in brightness over that period, dropping by about 20 percent!

That’s … bizarre. Tabby’s Star is, by all appearances, a normal F-type star: hotter, slightly more massive, and bigger than our Sun. These stars basically just sit there and steadily turn hydrogen into helium. If they change, it’s usually on a timescale of millions of years, not centuries. Schaefer examined two other similar stars in the survey, and they remained constant in brightness over the same time period.

The long-term fading isn’t constant, either. There have been times where the star has dimmed quite a bit, then brightened up again in the following years. On average, the star is fading about 16 percent per century, but that’s hardly steady.

So it appears Tabby’s Star dims and brightens again on all kinds of timescales: hours, days, weeks, even decades and centuries.

Again. That’s bizarre. Nothing like this has ever been seen.

So what’s causing this? Well, think Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is probably the best place to start, and in this case that means one thing is probably behind all this weird behavior. Schaefer looks into this in his paper and concludes that the comet family idea doesn’t explain all the behavior. It might explain the short-term dips (maybe, kinda) but are hugely unlikely to be behind the long-term fading. You’d need truly vast numbers of comets, and they’d have to be huge, much larger than reasonable. And they’d have to be slamming into each other just as we happen to be looking.

So, yeah. Unlikely.

Phil goes on with a list of other, logical, things which could account for the known facts. All of them have been dismissed or deemed highly unlikely. Just for giggles, I posted on a NASA blog what I thought it could be. A ringworld. I expected to get laughed out of the room. Larry Niven’s flight of fancy, a single structure to replace all the planets in a system, has very little practical value.

Except …. it kind of fits. If you were building something like that there would be periods of massive dimming and periods of increased brightness. Also, since the structure would only be capturing solar energy, there would be no transmissions to track. Plus, once completed the dimming would be constant. So my stupid suggestion got added to the list of possibilities. I’ll keep you posted.

A little closer to home Pluto’s still a dwarf planet, but that’s okay. Scientists now know it’s got lots of company out there so it’s not some lonely little wanderer. The problem is that its wanderings, and the wanderings of its buddies, are a little off. As in, off enough that something must be disturbing them. Something big.

Irene Klotz, over at Discovery, says that something is a planet as big as Neptune.

The astronomer who helped kick Pluto out of the planet club believes a much larger body may be lurking in the outskirts of the solar system.

If it exists, the solar system’s ninth planet is estimated to be a gas world about 10 times bigger than Earth, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer Mike Brown wrote in this week’s Astronomical Journal.

Brown and colleague Konstantin Batygin, also at Caltech, used mathematical models and computer simulations to deduce the planet’s existence, but they also have some observational evidence to support their claim. Several small icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt region beyond Neptune have quirks in their orbits that may be explained by the gravitational influence of a larger, more distant planetary cousin.

Scientists then realized that six of those bodies follow elliptical paths pointing toward the same direction in space.

“It’s almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they’re all in exactly the same place,” Brown said in a press release, adding that the odds of that happening are about one-in-100.

The orbits also are tilted in the same direction, roughly 30 degrees downward relative to the orbital plane of the solar system’s other eight planets.

“We thought something else must be shaping these orbits,” Brown said.

After checking if a batch of other Kuiper Belt objects might be responsible, the scientists started doing computer simulations that included a distant outer planet in various orbits.

They found an unusual match: a massive planet in an anti-aligned orbit, which is an orbit in which the planet’s closest approach to the sun is 180 degrees across from the closest approach of the objects and known planets in the solar system.

“I was very skeptical,” Batygin said in the release. “I had never seen anything like this in celestial mechanics.”

Besides accounting for peculiarities in some Kuiper Belt objects’ orbits, the predicted rogue planet, located at least 200 times farther away from the sun than Earth, also would pin other Kuiper Belt bodies into orbits perpendicular to the plane of the rest of the planets.

“I realized there are objects like that,” Brown said. “We plotted up the positions of those objects and their orbits, and they matched the simulations exactly.”

If true, and all signs point to it being so, a planet like that should have moons. And, as we’ve discovered, many moons have water. That could easily become a staging area for extra-solar exploration.

But first we need to find it.

Even closer to home, the nice folks at the Irish Examiner have noted that aliens may already live among us and, even odder, I may have eaten some of them.

Not to send you into a meltdown or anything but octopuses are basically ‘aliens’ – according to scientists.

Researchers have found a new map of the octopus genetic code that is so strange that it could be actually be an “alien”.

The first whole cephalopod genome sequence shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified – more than in a human.

Not only that, the octopus DNA is highly rearranged – like cards shuffled and reshuffled in a pack – containing numerous so-called “jumping genes” that can leap around the genome.

“The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even other molluscs, with its eight prehensile arms, its large brain and its clever problem-solving abilities,” said US researcher Dr Clifton Ragsdale, from the University of Chicago.

“The late British zoologist Martin Wells said the octopus is an alien. In this sense, then, our paper describes the first sequenced genome from an alien.”

The scientists sequenced the genome of the California two-spot octopus in a study published in the journal Nature.

They discovered unique genetic traits that are likely to have played a key role in the evolution of characteristics such as the complex nervous system and adaptive camouflage.

Analysis of 12 different tissues revealed hundreds of octopus-specific genes found in no other animal, many of them highly active in structures such as the brain, skin and suckers.

The scientists estimate that the two-spot octopus genome contains 2.7 billion base pairs – the chemical units of DNA – with long stretches of repeated sequences.

And although the genome is slightly smaller than a human’s, it is packed with more genes.

Reshuffling was a key characteristic of the creature’s genetic make-up. In most species, cohorts of certain genes tend to be close together on the double-helix DNA molecule.

A gene is a region of DNA that contains the coded instructions for making a protein.

In the octopus, however, there are no such groupings of genes with related functions. For instance, Hox genes – which control body plan development – cluster together in almost all animals but are scattered throughout the octopus genome.

It was as if the octopus genome had been “put into a blender and mixed”, said co-author Caroline Albertin, also from the University of Chicago.

Okay, breathe, relax, calm down. Their genes are ordered different than ours, they aren’t actually different than ours. All the parts are there, just like in us, they just never came together like ours did.

Just in case you, for some reason, think we’re the most advanced beings on the planet, I’ll remind you that, in 2016, Louisiana banned oral sex, or any form of sodomy, but kept necrophilia legal.

Now you know why I don’t write about them any more.

Toadies : Summer of the Strange (NSFW) from Kirtland Records on Vimeo.

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Stuff That Makes You Go Hmm

December 6, 2015 by

Chicago, 2115.
Chicago, 2115.

People always ask me why I tend to favor pictures of sexy women on my blogs. The answer is easy, I like sexy women. If you like pictures of sexy men I suggest you go visit my buddy David Onassis. His pages are festooned with them. He’s also a nice guy and it won’t kill you to meet a nice person once in a while. Anyway, sexiness aside, there’s been a lot happening in the wonderful world of science and I thought today might be a good day to fill in some gaps. NO! Not the sexy gaps! Sheesh, I leave you alone on the interweb for a lousy minute and you get all pervy on me. No, I mean the gaps in your knowledge. I’m tired of writing about mass shootings. Let’s just admit it. If people truly want change they need to get out and vote. If they don’t, just get used to the weekly “thoughts and prayers” bullshit. And then buy bullet proof everything. Or move. Either works. I’m also a little burned on the whole super hero thing right now. Don’t get me wrong, I will see every single film and show as they come out, but writing about them becomes redundant after a while. I’ve completely stopped writing about Florida and its ilk simply due to the fact there are only so many ways to make the phrase “Wal-Mart meth lab” funny. Worse still is Texas which has fallen into the realm of self parody. I wrote a blog once entitled Nude Texas Ugly Bacon Vibrators and it made sense.

So, instead, I’d like to take a moment to talk about useful stuff.

Let’s start with something simple. M. M. Sullivan wrote about a handy invention that allows people to turn polluted water into pure drinking water. Even better, it tells them all sorts of stuff about water safety and other hygienic issues.

Each year, 3.4 million people die from water-related diseases, and many of those deaths are the result of a lack of knowledge about what water is safe to drink.

Finally, there is an affordable and effective answer to solving the world’s drinking water crisis. The Drinkable Book is the first-ever education-water filter hybrid. Not only do the pages teach readers about water safety, but the pages themselves are filters that can reduce waterborne bacteria by over 99.99%!

That’s right, a simple book with synthetic pages could save over three million lives a year. He’s got videos and more so make sure to check it out. And, yes, it’s available now if you’re thinking about a cool holiday gift for the Red Cross or something like that.

Speaking of synthetics, Justine Alford writes that science is pretty darn close to creating synthetic shrimp.

Shove over those lab-grown burgers; we need to make room for the synthetic shrimp on the barbie. Yep, scientists are no longer just working on trading our beloved beef for a greener alternative, but seafood too. Rather than trying to grow a meaty feast from stem cells, though, startup New Wave Foods has opted for a slightly different approach: algae. And while the team hopes to eventually create a range of faux seafood, they are focusing on shrimp for now, and for good reason.

The world has developed a real hankering for these crustaceans. Over the past few decades, global production of shrimp has more than tripled, and it’s estimated we now eat more than 6 million tons of them each year. It’s popular worldwide, but it’s the favorite seafood in the U.S., with citizens peeling their way through about 2 kilograms (4.1 pounds) each per year.

Needless to say, our hunger for shrimp is a big problem. We could try and reduce our consumption to tackle these issues, but trying to take meat away from man is about as easy as taking a bone from a dog. Opting for a similar approach to the veggie burger that “bleeds,” New Wave Foods is going for natural sources and trying to mush them together into a meaty, flavorful formulation. Their ingredient of choice is algae, or more specifically those that shrimp typically dine on anyway. This means getting a similar nutritional value to real shrimp is fairly easy, the team reported to Motherboard, but as always texture is proving tricky. Apparently, they’ve also managed to nail the flavor, but they won’t spill the beans as to how they did this.

At the moment our two main sources of shrimp are farming and trawling, both of which have serious repercussions on the environment and ecosystems. You’re probably aware of the consequences of trawl fishing: catching unwanted species, or bycatch. Shrimp trawling is said to have the worst rates for this out of all fishing techniques, with up to 2.7 kilograms (6 pounds) of unintended species per half kilogram (one pound) of shrimp sometimes caught up in nets, which includes turtles, sharks, dolphins and small whales. Not only that, but dragging the nets along the seabed also destroys it.

But by no means is farming a sustainable alternative. Important habitats are sometimes cleared to make way for shrimp farms, including mangroves, the loss of which can have a huge impact on coastal areas given their role as wildlife havens and buffers from the effects of storms. In addition, huge amounts of pollution, including waste and antibiotics used for growth, can leach out and contaminate other water systems.

I have friends who have tried the vegan meat products listed above and claim they’re, finally, the real deal. Since one friend is a cattle rancher, I’ll take their word on it. Anyway, one side benefit of synthetic shrimp is that people with shellfish allergies will now be able to eat shrimp until they can’t eat shrimp no mo.

In other synthetic news, a few weeks ago I wrote about how science had found a way to send huge amounts of data via light, instead of radio, waves. Victoria Ho writes that some other scientists said, “Ah, hell, that’s easy” and went and developed Li-Fi.

The world might eventually have to shift its reliance on Wi-Fi to Li-Fi, an alternative technology that scientists say can reach speeds of 1 Gbps in real-world use — 100 times faster than average Wi-Fi speeds.

At those speeds, you could download a high-definition movie in just a few seconds.

A company called Velmenni told the IBTimes UK that it took the technology out of the labs and into real-world offices and industrial environments in Estonia, where it was able to achieve those speeds.

Li-Fi transmits data using LED lights, which flicker on and off within nanoseconds, imperceptible to the human eye. It was invented in 2011, and in the lab, has been able to reach a mindblowing 224 Gbps.

Unlike Wi-Fi signals which can penetrate walls, Li-Fi is based on light and can’t, so its range is theoretically more limited. However, because of that limit, Li-Fi is also potentially more secure from external sniffing.

Li-Fi also opens more possibilities for smart home appliances. In the future, LED lightbulbs for the home could serve two functions — lighting up a room and helping to create a network in the house for devices to talk to each other.

Traditional cable companies are bidding on the tech now. Believe it or not they can use existing technologies to make it all work. The expense would be minimal.

So what else has science done with light? Would you believe “invent time travel?” Mary-Ann Russon says you should.

The (University of Queensland) scientists simulated the behaviour of two photons interacting with each other in two different cases.

In the first case, one photon passed through a wormhole and then interacted with its older self.

In the second case, when a photon travels through normal space-time and interacts with another photon trapped inside a closed timeline curve forever.

“The properties of quantum particles are ‘fuzzy’ or uncertain to start with, so this gives them enough wiggle room to avoid inconsistent time travel situations,” said co-author Professor Timothy Ralph.

“Our study provides insights into where and how nature might behave differently from what our theories predict.”

Although it has been possible to simulate time travel with tiny quantum particles, the same might not be possible for larger particles or atoms, which are groups of particles.

As she notes elsewhere in the article, there are reasons time travel is problematic.

The grandfather paradox states that if a time traveller were to go back in time, he could accidentally prevent his grandparents from meeting, and thus prevent his own birth. However, if he had never been born, he could never have travelled back in time, in the first place.

The paradoxes are largely caused by Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the solution to it, theGödel metric.

They won’t know what the results of their experiments will cause until they replicate them in different labs. But the basic idea is that you can go back and not cause your own death. Which is a good start.

Okay, but what about sound? Can’t we do anything with sound? I saw a sonic screwdriver on Dr. Who and that seemed kind of cool. It was and it is and Science Alert says it might be the way we cure Alzheimer’s.

No, I’m not kidding.

Publishing in Science Translational Medicine, the (Queensland Brain Institute) team describes the technique as using a particular type of ultrasound called a focused therapeutic ultrasound, which non-invasively beams sound waves into the brain tissue. By oscillating super-fast, these sound waves are able to gently open up the blood-brain barrier, which is a layer that protects the brain against bacteria, and stimulate the brain’s microglial cells to activate. Microglila cells are basically waste-removal cells, so they’re able to clear out the toxic beta-amyloid clumps that are responsible for the worst symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

The team reports fully restoring the memory function of 75 percent of the mice they tested it on, with zero damage to the surrounding brain tissue. They found that the treated mice displayed improved performance in three memory tasks – a maze, a test to get them to recognise new objects, and one to get them to remember the places they should avoid.

“We’re extremely excited by this innovation of treating Alzheimer’s without using drug therapeutics,” one of the team, Jürgen Götz, said in a press release. “The word ‘breakthrough’ is often misused, but in this case I think this really does fundamentally change our understanding of how to treat this disease, and I foresee a great future for this approach.”

The team says they’re planning on starting trials with higher animal models, such as sheep, and hope to get their human trials underway in 2017.

I think that’s enough for one day. I don’t want to cause permanent brain freeze for anyone. Suffice it to say some people have done some very cool stuff that will benefit us all.

By the way, should you run into an idiot who claims we don’t need science, just send them here and ask them when’s the last time ignorance saved millions of people.

Romance In Plastic Minor from SHOOT THE BOSS on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Joining the Green Gang

October 6, 2015 by

Nature lovers are naturally nice.
Nature lovers are naturally nice.
When I was a kid my grandmother, a devout Catholic, had an interesting phrase she used to say. “Nature takes its own.” It was her, slightly pagan, take on the whole “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” thing from Genesis. It also served as a reminder of her second favorite phrase, “The bible says the world is without end. It says nothing of man.” While her theology might have been a little skewed it worked for her. One thing she did harp on is that we were supposed to be custodians of the Earth. Being top of the food chain meant we had a great responsibility to all around us. I can honestly think of worse philosophies. She kept a garden, raised flowers, bred dogs and, with my grandfather, fed and kept squirrels and bees. Because of them I never grew up with a fear of nature. That had its good points and bad.

Let’s start by taking a look at a few of the bad things that man is doing right now. There is an unsubtle irony that rising waters are going to render NASA, the home of climate research, useless in a few decades if the trend isn’t reversed. The walls that some are trying to have built around Miami and other places in Florida are short term stop gaps, at best.

But, as my granny would say, God does have a sense of humor. Which is why, the home of the constant obfuscation and denial when it comes to climate change, Washington D.C., is sinking.

John Johnson tells us all about it.

It sounds like a metaphor but is geological reality: Washington, DC, is sinking. In fact, researchers led by a team at the University of Vermont predict that the ground will drop another six inches by the end of the century, reports UPI. The cause isn’t man-made: It’s the result of an age-old geologic process that will continue to unfold for thousands of years. But it’s presenting the DC region with a dangerous double-whammy—the ground is sinking at the same time that sea levels are rising because of warming temperatures, say the UV researchers. The study confirms a long-held theory on why sea levels around DC are rising faster than any other stretch along the coast, reports the Washington Post.

“Right now is the time to start making preparations,” says lead study author Ben DeJong. “Six extra inches of water really matters in this part of the world.” He and his team drilled dozens of boreholes around the Chesapeake Bay to figure out what’s happening. The culprit is an ancient ice sheet that covered much of North America, then retreated, and the land is oh-so-slowly settling back into place. DC was actually in an area just outside the sheet and “bulged upward,” as the Post puts it. “It’s a bit like sitting on one side of a water bed filled with very thick honey,” says DeJong. “Then the other side goes up. But when you stand, the bulge comes down again.”

At least that one’s not our fault. Just bad planning. Although rising water levels due to warming could exacerbate the problem in unforeseen ways. Swimming at the Smithsonian anyone?

But one that is our fault is happening in the wonderfully backwards state of Arizona. Rob Quinn says that the state is literally fracking Phoenix into a pit.

Researchers say that while there’s no need for residents of Phoenix to panic, parts of their city are slowly and unstoppably sinking into the ground. Land subsidence caused by the extraction of huge quantities of groundwater over the decades is to blame, and the Arizona State University researchers say it’s causing some parts of the metropolitan area to sink by roughly 0.75 inches a year, Sonoran News reports. Residents may not notice much change year to year, the researchers say, but over time, the problem will affect things like canals, utility lines, and sewers and, eventually, the foundations of buildings. The depletion of groundwater has changed the sediment under the area, so the drop is irreversible.

The lead researcher tells the Arizona Republic that the subsidence has “the potential to cause costly structural damages, and is something to keep an eye on.” The sinking is happening at an uneven rate—with some areas actually rising a little—meaning floodwaters could cause major problems in affected areas. Another problem, the lead researcher warns, is that the sediment changes have left the ground unable to store as much water as it used to. “We live in a desert, and our underground canteen is getting smaller,” she tells the News. The Republic notes that the problem is widespread across the US, with Denver, parts of California, and the New Jersey coast among the many areas starting to sink.

Just FYI, in case the above wasn’t clear, fracking uses a ton of groundwater.

Also, as noted above, the constant mining of subsurface water is also to blame. And, while not sinking at the moment, Oklahoma has seen a meteoric rise in the number of Earthquakes in ares where fracking is practiced. That leads to weakened infrastructures such as sewer lines, roads (which require stable beds) and pretty much anything you thought was built on solid ground.

Things like businesses and homes and stuff. Maybe they don’t need those in Oklahoma.

So, where is the good news? East of here. As in the Far East.

In countries where they don’t use harmful methods of energy extraction or have come around to the fact that maybe, just maybe, we might not want to kill the planet, they are taking measures to reduce the human imprint. And they are using some creative methods to accomplish that goal.

Dan Lewis reports that China is surrounding the Gobi Desert with billions of trees to stop dust storms and encroachment. He also reports its working.

One Chinese news agency, citing the State Forest Administration, reported in 2007 that “more than 20 percent of the lands affected by desertification in the project areas have been harnessed and soil erosion has been put under control in over 40 percent of the areas that used to suffer soil erosion in the past.”

And in 2014, the Daily Mail echoed these results, reporting that “a study says the measures are working, despite previous criticism.”

There are still problems. Trees tend to wither and die in desert conditions. So they are having to reroute water to stabilize the environment. The good news is that, as China clamps down on pollutants around the country, they have more fresh water to work with than ever before.

But, because China is still China, one of the methods they are using to save and reroute water, the Three Gorges Dam, is so large it will alter the rotation of the Earth.

Raising 39 trillion kilograms of water 175 meters above sea level will increase the Earth’s moment of inertia and thus slow its rotation. However, the effect would extremely small. NASA scientists calculated that shift of such as mass would increase the length of day by only 0.06 microseconds and make the Earth only very slightly more round in the middle and flat on the top. It would shift the pole position by about two centimeters (0.8 inch). Note that a shift in any object’s mass on the Earth relative to its axis of rotation will change its moment of inertia, although most shifts are too small to be measured (but they can be calculated).

Just remember this when someone tells you that man can’t alter anything on Earth.

Speaking of trees, and here altering the Earth in a good way, Amanda Froelich reports that Milan Italy is building the world’s largest vertical forest.

In an age where harmonious innovation is becoming more celebrated, sustainable designs to preserve the Earth and contribute to wellbeing are being implemented at a rapid rate. One such innovation to recently be accepted for development is a vertical forest designed by Stefan Boeri Architects.

The first ever vertical forest will soon be the greenest building in Milan. Because the average household in a city produces approximately 25-30 tons of CO2 per year, implementing greener architecture in highly populated areas cannot come soon enough.

This stunning development is part of a vision presented by BioMilano which promises to incorporate 60 abandoned farms into a greenbelt surrounding the city. Part of the mission is to create a vertical forest building which boasts a stunning green façade planted with dense forest systems to provide microclimate and to filter out polluting dust particles. According to Inhabit, there are two buildings currently under construction.

The greener architecture will help absorb CO2, oxygenate the air, moderate extreme temperatures, and lower noise pollution. The bio-canopy is not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but it helps lower living costs.

So it saves money, makes living in a city healthier and helps the earth be a better place to live. Bonus? It’s pretty too. Here’s a pic.

But how do you put all of those ideas together? How do you stop erosion while simultaneously upgrading the planet?

Amy Frearson says that one answer is to build a really fucking cool school and that Vo Trong Nghia is doing just that.

According to Vo Trong Nghia Architects, the structure is intended to promote sustainable development in Vietnam, in response to rapid industrialisation that causes frequent power shortages, increasing temperatures, high levels of pollution and reduced green space.

“It is our goal to create a green university building that counters these problems as well as instils sustainable practices to these future generations,” said the design team.

Creating 11,000 square metres of floor space, the seven-storey facility will feature a prefabricated modular concrete structure that can flexibly accommodate different uses, while also keeping construction costs to a minimum.

The building is orientated to face the prevailing wind, allowing for efficient cross ventilation, and large trees positioned in front of every window will help to lower the temperature of the air flow through the interior.

A shallow plan will also allow daylight to permeate each storey, reducing the need for artificial lighting.

Vo Trong Nghia Architects – whose previous projects include a naturally ventilated school and a thatched bamboo bar – says the structure provides an alternative to the air-conditioning-reliant buildings that dominate South-East Asia.

That’s important because not only does it reduce waste created by artificial air systems it reduces, dramatically, the amount of power needed for people to live.

Bonus? It’s pretty damn pretty too. Here’s a rendering from the architect.

Look at it this way, if monkeys and other primates really are evolving to full sentience (spoiler alert: they are) at least we’ll leave them a nice place to live.

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