Month: August 2009

Let’s get moving

This has to be the weirdest global warming solution I’ve ever heard. NASA Wants to the Move the Earth:

Hence the group’s decision to try to save Earth. ‘All you have to do is strap a chemical rocket to an asteroid or comet and fire it at just the right time,’ added Laughlin. ‘It is basic rocket science.’

The plan has one or two worrying aspects, however. For a start, space engineers would have to be very careful about how they directed their asteroid or comet towards Earth. The slightest miscalculation in orbit could fire it straight at Earth – with devastating consequences.

It is a point acknowledged by the group. ‘The collision of a 100-kilometre diameter object with the Earth at cosmic velocity would sterilise the biosphere most effectively, at least to the level of bacteria,’ they state in a paper in Astrophysics and Space Science. ‘The danger cannot be overemphasised.’

There is also the vexed question of the Moon. As the current issue of Scientific American points out, if Earth was pushed out of its current position it is ‘most likely the Moon would be stripped away from Earth,’ it states, radically upsetting out planet’s climate.

These criticisms are accepted by the scientists. ‘Our investigation has shown just how delicately Earth is poised within the solar system,’ Laughlin admitted. ‘Nevertheless, our work has practical implications. Our calculations show that to get Earth to a safer, distant orbit, it would have to pass through unstable zones and would need careful nurturing and nudging. Any alien astronomers observing our solar system would know that something odd had occurred, and would realise an intelligent lifeform was responsible.

‘And the same goes for us. When we look at other solar systems, and detect planets around other suns – which we are now beginning to do – we may see that planet-moving has occurred. It will give us our first evidence of the handiwork of extraterrestrial beings.’

Meanwhile, there’s apparently a polystyrene planet out there, moving backwards. I’m not entirely clear on what the scientific implications are, but it’s equally fascinating.

Links via Warren Ellis and SF Signal, respectively.

I scream, you scream

In the fall of 2003, the Penn State Creamery announced that it would debut a new ice cream the following summer, “as part of a yearlong series of events and celebrations commemorating Penn State’s establishment in 1855.” I left Pennsylvania in July of 2004, the very month the new flavor was to be announced, so I never did find out what it was, nor how the new flavor was received by the hungry masses.

However, I recently learned that some librarians are petitioning for their own ice cream flavor from Ben & Jerry’s. (Or at least, somebody’s started a Facebook group around that idea.) And, in the rush to make up silly names for it like “the Dewey Caramel System,” it occured to me that the Penn State Monty Python Society had once spent way too much time thinking up silly ice cream flavor names of its own. Then this afternoon at work, we had an “ice cream social” — one of those office events they trot out now and then to force people to mingle with coworkers — and so I thought I’d look through the list the Society came up with six years ago and maybe post them here.

In 2003, I printed nearly 100 of the best names in the club’s weekly newsletter — which I edited as a labor of deranged love for several years — but in retrospect most of the names aren’t very funny. Like a lot of the newsletter’s content, in retrospect it’s mostly just filler. Some of the suggested flavors were local inside jokes — like CATA Bus Crunch, Sproul Hall Elevator, Nittany Nutz, and We Don’t Know the Goddamn Flavor — and some were just vaguely college-related — like Freshman 15, Student ID Number, Tüition Increase, and Condom Co-op Mint. Some were even more specific to the club — like Free the Hole, FROH, or Wimpy (“it’s gerbilrific!”) — while others just defy understanding half a decade later — like Skrinchie, OMG!!!!!1!!!1!!one!B-P, or Contains No Potatoes. (That said, I would totally order a scoop of Contains No Potatoes, if just to try it.) Most of the rest are just juvenile and/or sex-related — like Syphilicious! and Delicious Wang. And those are the best of them.

In fact, looking over the list now, there’s only a few I find genuinely amusing, like No Means Nougat!, or Soylent Cream (“Good people, good ice cream!”), or even the bizarre Explode! (“the Russian Roulette of ice cream: every 15 cones has a bomb!”) There were some nice meta ones, like The Creamery is Now Closed, or simply Ice Cream. And there’s a weird over-abundance of umlauts — which actually makes me nostalgic for a time when I got to hang out with people who were way too amused by umlauts every week.

But I think my personal favorite — in a list to which I’m no longer entirely sure how I directly contributed, and which nowadays just strikes me as kind of dumb — is the no-doubt sinfully delicious You Can Take Our Ice Cream, But You’ll Never Take Our Freedom.

Okay, that or Squirrel Nuts. It’s kind of a toss-up.

Wednesday various

  • Molly Ringwald remembers John Hughes:

    Eventually, though, I felt that I needed to work with other people as well. I wanted to grow up, something I felt (rightly or wrongly) I couldn’t do while working with John. Sometimes I wonder if that was what he found so unforgivable. We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back. And, true to his word, not only were we unable to return, but he went one step further. He did away with Neverland itself.

  • The Daily Show Is Now Hiring Real Reporters. I think this has less to do with a desire for verisimilitude at The Daily Show, or a blurring of the lines between real and fake news, and more to do with somebody over at the show just finding Radosh smart and funny. The piece he says first caught their interest, after all, is amusing, and it does a good job of laying out the absurdity of the political situation. The Daily Show is best at providing commentary and context. Millions of Americans may get their news from John Stewart, but I don’t think this signals their intention of doing independent, investigative reporting. I could be wrong, though. [via]

  • The first rule of Write Club… John C. Wright’s rules for writers are as good as any I’ve ever read. [via]

  • I love these lesser-known editing and proofreading marks and plan to use them at every opportunity I get. [via]

  • And finally, while everybody’s making a big deal about this upcoming Sesame Street Mad Men parody, it really hasn’t struck me as so far outside their norm. After all, if Sesame Street can parody Desperate Housewives and Law & Order, why not this?No, what I found oddly compelling was a bit from this report on the parody plans:

    The panel was introduced with a clip with President Barack Obama, saying, “This video is brought to you by the number 40.” Along with TBS’ George Lopez talk show, this is the second program featured at press tour that’s nabbed an intro clip from the president leading some critics to say, “enough already.”

    I can see the President introducing Sesame Street — it’s an educational institution — but George Lopez’s talk show? Surely the Commander in Chief has better things to do with his time.

    What I do find interesting about the Sesame Street parodies, overall, is that the show has increasingly skewed younger, aiming more squarely at pre-schoolers than in its earlier days. (One could argue this started with Elmo, but it was all but inevitable as more edutainment options became available outside Seasame Street.) Yet these parodies skew way beyond pre-school. The show is courting two very different audiences, while increasingly widening the gap between them.

Random 10 8/8 (just one day late)

I’ve been having computer issues for the past couple of days, first with my iPod — I wound up buying a new one — and then with my internet connection — I tweaked the router settings and now can’t log on with either the new or old laptop. Still, just a day late, here’s that weekly musical quiz I keep doing and you people keep answering. Last week, it went like this. This week, it goes like:

  1. “Super Agent” by Public Enemy
    But you can’t pledge allegiance to the block
  2. “Ramshackle” by Beck
    Your old bones are on their own
  3. “Trinco Dog” by Bedouin Soundclash
    The road we’ve traveled is rock and gravel
  4. “One of Us” by Joan Osborne, guessed by Kim
    What would you ask if you had just one question?
  5. “Getting Better” by Fionn Reagan (orig. the Beatles), guessed by Kim
    I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved
  6. “Don’t Worry About the Government” by Talking Heads
    I see the clouds that move across the sky
  7. “Long Way Home” by Norah Jones
    Money’s just something you throw off the back of a train
  8. “Paranoid” by Kanye West
    You wanna kill the vibe on another night?
  9. “Take it Easy” by Jackson Browne (also the Eagles), guessed by Kim
    I’ve got seven women on my mind
  10. “Why Do I Lie?” by Luscious Jackson
    I don’t want to be hazy

    11. Good luck!