APPROVED: Let’s Build A Giant Laser To Tear Apart Outer Space

November 1, 2011
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APPROVED: Let’s Build A Giant Laser To Tear Apart Outer Space

“Flawless” is not a word to toss about lightly. That is not to say that we here at Analog Nation are, for want of a better term, perfection snobs. We have no problem enjoying stuff that may have an element of lack to it — movies, books, sandwiches, whatever. It’s pretty hard to get things firing on all cylinders, which makes it all the more gratifying when something does.

A few examples off the top of my head:

• The “Timmy O’Toole” episode of The Simpsons
• Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack to “A Charlie Brown Christmas”
• The first half of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay
• Pancakes

So when I came across this article while perusing the Internet for photos of kittens napping on large dogs news of the financial situation in Greece, I was gratified. Brother, I was gratified like a son of a bitch. Because this right here? This science article? This science article does not fuck about. It may well be flawless.

Have a look at this headline, then tell me with a straight face that journalism is dead:

World’s most powerful laser to tear apart the vacuum of space

Will I click that link? Yes. I will click that link. I will click the beer-swilling Christ out of that link. Fetch me this article, Chrome, and so help me you had better fetch it faster than Firefox.

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The Kosher Cops: Defenders of Entenmann

October 6, 2011
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Friday nights at Brandeis were strange. Come sundown, there was a palpable sense of conflict among some of the freshmen: How seriously should I take the Sabbath situation? These were the in-betweeners. Not the ones from traditional Jewish homes, whose routines were set; not the ones who paid attention only on High Holidays or not at all. The in-betweeners were still figuring their shit out. And I mean, good God, so were we all, but specifically they were figuring their shit out Judaism-wise. They were away from home for the first time, saw the trappings of their more devout classmates, and needed to try them on.

So they wouldn’t turn their lights off.

Among the modern interpretations of “no work on the Sabbath” is that no electricity should be implemented. Some students used only candlelight after sundown on Friday. For the in-betweeners, this meant they could touch no power switches, but if someone else touched some power switches … After a few weeks, we knew which ones would ask the Gentiles in the dorm to turn their stuff on and off for them. “Hey, could you hit play on my stereo real quick?” they’d say. “I just want to listen to some Cranberries while I read.” Later, they would ask someone to turn off the stereo. And the overhead lights.

Not too long ago I coughed up something like eight thousand words prattling on about the University of New Hampshire, but I actually transferred there after a year at Brandeis. It was my brother who suggested I apply. He nearly went there himself, and drove me down for a tour. We saw the Celtics in their on-campus practice facility. It was the only time I ever saw Kevin McHale in person. The school stunned us with their financial aid offer, and suddenly I was packing for Waltham.

Brandeis isn’t technically a Jewish institution, not in the sense that, say, Boston College is a Jesuit institution. But man, it is pretty darn Jewish. As a Catholic who had just added “former” to the title, I was solidly in the minority. Which was cool, to be honest. Not that it came up all that much, but when it did, it made me seem half a percent more interesting. Probably less interesting than my hip-hop Texan Vietnamese roommate, but half a percent is better than nothing. Plus, it made not being Catholic anymore super easy.

The power switch requests dwindled to a stop by Thanksgiving, and besides, that wasn’t even the weirdest thing going. Every day in the dining hall, you could watch the Kosher Cops.

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Part Cat, Part Monkey, Part Jellyfish — Did I Leave Anything Out?

September 19, 2011
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Part Cat, Part Monkey, Part Jellyfish — Did I Leave Anything Out?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

“Seriously though, what you guys are doing right now has me tripping balls, and I’ve only been dead for three years.”
-ibid.

Let’s say we had access to a time-voyage device. If we went back and grabbed Benjamin Franklin, brought him to the present, and showed him the Large Hadron Collider, here’s how he would most likely react: “Dancing Jesus, you guys have toilets? That is completely and utterly fantastic.” The stuff that gets taken for granted is what makes a society’s tech look like magic. Which is why I saw a headline last week and wondered if I’d somehow slipped forward in time without noticing.

The article described work done by researchers at the Mayo Clinic, who were investigating how genetics could be used to build resistance to HIV. Basically, they took an antiviral gene from rhesus macaques (which Google assures me are a type of monkey) and inserted them into cats. The maquacue macqu monkeys have a natural resistance to immunodeficiency viruses, and the researchers hoped that the cats would likewise develop a resistance to FIV — the feline equivalent of HIV. “Monkey-cat” does not present the same apocalyptic visions as certain other combos I could name, so I say go Mayo Clinic.

Which is not to say this doesn’t get weird quickly.

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Would You Rather: A Series of Hypothetical Conundra for Conversation and Assessment

August 31, 2011
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Would you rather …

One

… be with someone who is a perfect match for you both physically and emotionally, but who leaves green paint on you (and only you) whenever you touch them,
~or~
… own a stylish, luxurious car that never needs refueling, but whose stereo only ever plays a running commentary of your life’s regrets over a slowed-down record of carnival music?



Two

… have a weekly billiards game with Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain in a fully stocked bar, but once per evening you would have to watch them suffocate a piglet,
~or~
… be the first human to walk on Mars after only a week of space travel, but never be allowed to use a towel again for the rest of your life?



Three

… be great at any skill for a month at a time, but you could never choose the same skill twice and would always be terrible at bathing yourself,
~or~
… have a portable button that, when pressed, would make up to five nearby people dance gracefully, with a one in ten thousand chance they would become ravenous zombies?



Four

… be able to travel back in time once per year for a period of forty-eight hours without affecting the present, but be plagued by nightmares about spiders with clown faces,
~or~
… have the ability to teleport anywhere on Earth, but scream uncontrollably for an hour each time you arrived?



Five

… smell like lavender all the time, regardless of your actions, but taste gasoline any time someone says the number seven,
~or~
… have a room in your house that is always filled with puppies that need neither food nor cleaning, but be required by federal law to provide freeze-dried “astronaut ice cream” for anyone who asks, day or night?



Six

… automatically be friends with famous individuals anywhere in the world, but have high-powered flashlights grafted to each forearm that you can never turn off,
~or~
… have the ability to communicate empathically with animals, but be terrified to the point of uselessness by hats and socks?



Seven

… be able to manipulate electronics with your mind, but permanently forget everyone’s name ten minutes after you meet them,
~or~
… understand of the mathematics behind the world’s economy, allowing you to predict markets with eighty percent accuracy, but honestly and fervently believe that you were raised by goldfish?



Eight

… excel at a line of work that you truly love, but constantly be followed by a skeleton that tells people what you’re thinking,
~or~
… be able to forego food and water indefinitely, but have a Blu-ray recording of your own conception that you had to watch any time you watched a movie?



Nine

… spend alternate days with the powers of flight and invisibility, but only talk by belching words with your eyes closed, and compulsively slap anyone who looks at your hands,
~or~
… never feel anger again, but lack a fundamental knowledge of what fire is, where it comes from, and what it does? Plus the slapping thing?



Ten

…wake up one morning to find that you have the whole planet to yourself for one year, during which you will not age, but you won’t find out until the year is over that all your actions were filmed,
~or~
… wake up one morning to find that one hundred years have passed, but you can return if you convince someone to eat an entire baby?


Spaceships, and the Damn Dirty Apes That Fly Them

July 20, 2011
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“Hey, you know what would be hilarious? When the space shuttle lands, everyone should be dressed as apes!”
-The entire Internet, July 2011

Over the past week, I’ve seen the shuttle/apes joke no fewer than five times — three via Twitter, twice on Reddit. And that’s just what I’ve seen. It’s not like I’m a one-man Google, jotting down every word that happens on the Internet, so there were probably a couple more. Hey, it’s a perfectly fine joke, and had I thought of it myself I would have tweeted it too. But I didn’t have to, because every time someone did, the joke was scooped up by tiny hands and pulled into the cloud, seen by thousands of strangers.

(Besides, I refuse to believe that NASA landing crews have never pulled this prank on astronauts. It HAS to have happened at some point, right? Since the premiere of Planet of the Apes in February 1968, there have been 149 US astronaut landings. At least one of those missions ended with fake apes. Guaranteed.)

Here’s why I mention the joke thing: No part of this scenario was possible when the space shuttle first launched. The very idea that some guy’s joke could accidentally become a piece of mass media would have been science fiction. We have reached a point where the spaceship that flies on rockets to the orbiting international research station and then glides back down to Earth is quaint next to the worldwide computer network that lets us share jokes about the spaceship.

To me, that seems backwards. Despite its age, the space shuttle is something that should always be seen as the far-flung future. It’s a spaceship! Doing spaceship things! IN SPACE! So what if my phone has more processing power than the original shuttles? They’ve been upgraded since then, for Pete’s sake. To do even more spaceship things.

A couple Fridays back, as the countdown to Atlantis’ launch sat streaming on my desktop, I kept trying to think of something funny to put on Twitter. Nothing. Total blank. Finally I realized I had to go the dreaded sincere route. What I came up with was this: “Keep trying to think of something funny to say while streaming the shuttle launch, but really I’m just a kid in 1982 watching the future.” Which was true. I’ll admit that I long since took the shuttle program for granted, and haven’t watched the launches in years. This one managed to feel a little bit like the old days, like walking into the big league ballpark for the very first time all over again.

Look, maybe this is the beginning of a long nadir for manned space flight in America, maybe not. Maybe private companies will spark innovation, maybe not. That’s fine. Right now, the space shuttle Atlantis is from the far-flung future. That is, until it lands in a few hours, when it will instantly become a relic. In the meantime, if the first two minutes of this don’t strike you as completely bad-ass, then I’m not quite sure what to tell you.