Science Detemines The Discovery Channel Is Bad For Your Relationships

Nothing brings a couple together like science programming … you’d think. Not necessarily, my friends. Sure, it sounds like gold. What healthy, educated man and woman wouldn’t want to enjoy scientific programming together, right?

The scientific programming I am talking about is the 100 Greatest Discoveries that originally aired on the Discovery Channel … or the Science Channel … I am not sure. I was just happy that the Discovery Channel had some programming that had nothing to do with loud, fat men building motorcycles. Maybe that’s why they created the Science Channel - to have a place to air programming that had science. Kind of like MTV having to create MTV2 to show actual music videos. Now, I am not criticizing MTV. There’s no way I could have been smart enough to create “Rock & Jock Softball.”

(more…)

A team of scientists led by Rudy Schild at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics have kicked other countries in the crotch by wrecking the notion of black holes everywhere. Dr. Schild’s team suggest in The Astronomical Journal that a quasar they observed is powered by a dense ball of plasma called a MECO (magnetospheric eternally collapsing object)and, since black holes have no magnetic field, black holes would therefore cease to perhaps exist.

Governments in Europe immediately rallied to the defense of black holes. It is estimated that authors in at least 15 other countries were working on novels whose scientific premises were based on the existence of black holes and that those science-fiction novels would be in jeopardy if black holes were no longer possible. Other experts contend that if black holes are found to no longer maybe exist, those authors could make emergency revisions and fall back on string theory to satisfy their bullsh*t science quotas.

Sure, it’s fine if foreign authors lose some writing time but what impact will this research have on the US science fiction industry?

If the US no longer has black holes:

1) Card Walker’s family can stop taking grief about his greenlighting the movie that almost ran Disney out of business. His heirs can now say ‘if the physics was bad, how could the movie be good’?

2) Smug scientist Kip Thorne will have to stop milking his design for Carl Sagan’s Contact to get free beer at college rathskellars.

3) Stephen Hawking will have to make a Fifth Law: we suggest, Oops, those first four were wrong.

Scientists outside the US are almost certain to fight in a way their armies cannot. Gerry Gilmore at Cambridge University’s Institute for Astronomy said the theory was “almost certainly wrong” and had yet to convince most scientists.

Those are fightin’ words, for scientists. Still, the most scathing indictment by a a scientist ever came from Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize Winner for 1945 and the guy who helped obliterate Japan in a nuclear holocaust, when he said about a colleague’s paper, “This isn’t right. It isn’t even wrong.”

Less well known is his quote about Rita Hayworth that same year, “That is oh so right”:

Nothing says funny like X-Ray glasses.

And scientists are nothing if not funny. Take those fun-loving guys at Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California. They know that Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois will be shut down by 2010 and that scientists are determined to have the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operating in Geneva by 2007. That means the pressure is on if the USA is going to be allowed the privilege of over-paying around $9 billion for the International Linear Collider (ILC), which should begin engineering in 2010.

The guys at SLAC knew they needed to be bold. To quote from the greatest movie ever made; “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

So what did they do to make a bold splash and get Americans excited about physics again? Did they hire Elisabeth Shue and have her invent cold fusion to solve all of our energy problems?

No.

(more…)

Want To Cure Global Warming? Make Really Big Sunglasses

Sometimes aging scientists get nostalgic for no good reason. Sometimes aging scientists get nostalgic for a very good reason. Environmentalism of the 1970s is a very good reason for scientists to get nostalgic.

You see, when I was a young scientist the big fear was a new Ice Age. Yes, the trend had been that in the 20th century to-date, even with all those big factories pumping out noxious gas and fumes, the earth was cooling. Pollution was the problem, they said. Too much sulfur was preventing the sun’s yummy rays from entering terra firma.

Now it turns out global warming is the problem. That means - you guessed it - we don’t have enough pollution preventing the sun’s yummy rays from entering our atmosphere.

Fear of a new Ice Age at least made sense. Throughout earth’s history, 90,000 of every 100,000 years has been Ice Age. And it’s been 12,000 years since the last one, which means we are overdue.

Global Warming doesn’t make as much sense. Most global warming doesn’t come from people or factories, it comes from plants. I don’t know about you, but I get tickled trying to think of ways environmentalists can blame Big Business for too many plants. Then again, TIME Magazine can write most anything with a straight face - they did a big cover story on global warming that had in its first paragraph, “Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.”

Maybe the guys at TIME are confused about what the words “suddenly” and “unexpectedly” actually mean. I can’t pick up a newspaper without reading about global warming. TIME goes on to say that we’re all going to Hell in a handbasket because of glacial ice sheets melting and a 20-foot rise in the oceans. It’s like WaterWorld, only with better actors.

Wait … Archimedes lived a long time ago and even he knew better. Those glacial ice sheets can melt all they want and it doesn’t make a bit of difference in the level of the oceans. Now, if all of Greenland melted, that would be a problem - but the temperature of Greenland itself isn’t rising at all.

Some scientists are no different from any other government pork-barrel recipients. They only think about funding. Like the saying goes, “No bucks - no Buck Rogers.” Since global warming is the cause celebre du jour, that is where some will go to get money.

So what are those scientists claiming is the answer to global warming? Make really big sunglasses. Or mess with the clouds to act more like our old friend pollution - the easiest answer of all is to inject more sulfur into the atmosphere, which is one of the proposals geo-engineers have out there.

Yes, you read it correctly. We spent trillions of dollars creating government regulations and re-tooling factories to halt the emission of sulfur into the atmosphere so now we will need to spend trillions to create a government agency to inject sulfur into the atmosphere. Sometimes I hate scientists. And I am one. And I hate irony!

Let’s not panic just yet. After all, global warming only became a problem when George Bush took office in 2001. Al Gore says we still have 10 years before catastrophe occurs. And 10 years just happens to be 2 years until the next election plus the 8 years to the end of his second term as President if he wins. So at least we know he has a plan.

There once were two girls, Betty and Veronica, who loved a boy. One was a cute blonde girl who didn’t like being called cute and one was a sexy brunette with big cans who wanted to be respected for her brains. The blonde girl liked the bad boys and the the brunette girl liked … the bad boys. Yes, even when they were over the age of 30, Betty and Veronica still liked the bad boys, which defies logic and common sense. That they both like the same bad boy makes even less sense.

So Betty marries a bad boy whose whose music I have never listened to, mostly because I don’t use hairspray. Veronica marries a bad boy with a penchant for hookers and cocaine. They both figured this would be a recipe for success, because bad boys love to be changed. Betty and Veronica learned a valuable lesson about why they should have fought over Archie instead.

Why bring this up? Because one of the science groupies in blogdom who lurk without commenting wrote me an email poem which quite cleverly referenced the whole David Spade/Heather Locklear madness of a few weeks ago. There is no more fitting allegory for Betty and Veronica than Heather Locklear and Denise Richards, which is why this parable needs two parts. The question via poem goes:

Cash, you are my final chance
Of finding the true happenstance

What I don’t understand is just why they
Can’t like one another, at the end of the day?

I agree about the baffling nature of this whole thing. You know things have gone crazy when the girl from Wild Things is trying to take the moral high ground.

And you know she is playing for keeps when all Charlie Sheen does is ask to see his kids and she demands it be in the presence of a police officer, calls him a pedophile, and tells the world he kills hookers.

Thus my answer, in rhyming verse:

You came to Cash, guru of physics
Who writes sexy equations and confounds his critics

My prediction is this, sure they’re all just plain crazies,
But their pussy’s are still purring, not pushing up daisies.

In other words, Betty and Veronica aren’t exactly done with their bad boys yet. And you can bet there will be a poem with updates in the future.