Presidente del Gobierno José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain said the Spanish Republic has decided to celebrate Cinco de Mayo by revoking Mexican independence:

“It has always been a common misperception that the 5th of May is a celebration of Mexican independence from Spain. This is not correct, is is actually a celebration of victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, but we know that no one can really be proud of defeating the French so the mistake is understandable. In truth, we never agreed to Mexican independence anyway so we are simply revoking it.” (more…)

Science Helps You Plan Your Weekend

Here Are Your Options:

1. Die In A Cocaine-Fueled Orgy Of Gayness

Just hang out with German nobility. A gay guy in Germany jumping from a balcony while hopped up on drugs during an orgy barely made the news in the U.S., because it is so unsurprising. Cocaine and gay orgies in a party thrown by a German Count? Next we’ll hear they pissed on each other. Yeah. Big shock.

2. Work For World Peace

Use trial and error to act out your favorite scenarios for making the world a happy place. Since you don’t want to spend money on real dictators, use puppets. No one’s afraid of puppets … even puppets with nuclear bombs.

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Scientists Bring Peace To The Mid-East

FADE IN:

INT. A CORPORATE OFFICE, SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA. DAYTIME. Cash pops an “Our Blend” Keurig pod into his coffee maker and prepares for another day of making the world safe for technology, one supermodel at a time. His desk has a Curta mechanical calculator and a Bruce Wayne action figure. NOT Batman. Bruce Wayne. The Science Phone rings.

CASH: Mushi mushi.

VOICE (WITH A MIDDLE EASTERN ACCENT): Is this Cash?

CASH: Oops, wrong language. Sorry, I thought this was Japan calling. Iy-Aksamlar. Or salaam chetori. Don’t make me guess. Who am I speaking with?

VOICE: This is Abu Hamza al-Muhajir. Maybe you have heard of me? I need help from science. Are you not a scientist?

CASH: I am told I am more like a game-show host. That Sigourney Weaver is such a card. What do you need help proving? Ghosts? UFOs? Evolution? I am willing to believe you.

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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.

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