Archive for April, 2002

Zombie Alert

Tuesday, April 30th, 2002

The zombies are coming! The zombies are coming!

  • Ninety-five percent of Americans live within two miles of a cemetery or mortuary.
  • Most Americans use and value their brains — the natural food of zombies.
  • Ninety percent of zombie related fatalities occur in the home.
  • The only proven defense against zombie attack is an effective early warning system.

I'll buy three, thanks.

Fuzzy bunnies

Tuesday, April 30th, 2002

Having trouble putting together your evil plan to dominate the world? Just not sure of where to start your mass destruction and annihilation of the human race? Well worry no longer. Now you can use the Evil Plan Generator.

If you're only just starting out as an Evil One and aren't sure of how to handle the Forces of Darkness, the site also contains a wealth of helpful hints.

I'm exactly uncertain as to how many people will think this is geeky

Monday, April 29th, 2002

It seems strange that sports news makes headlines, but geeky quantum physics breakthroughs are hardly mentioned in the press. In order to redress this, I've decided to mention the new version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle formulated and published this month. Apparently it not only provides an exact form of the uncertainty, but enables a direct derivation of Schrodinger's equation.

You know what that sound is? That's the sound of 90% of this blog's audience walking out. Oh well… they don't know what they're missing.

Who would have thought he'd look so good in a jacket and tie?

Friday, April 26th, 2002

The world is a very strange place. This week Elmo addressed the US Education Appropriations Subcommittee to convince them to spend more on musical instruments and research within school programs. For those not familiar with Elmo, he is one of the cutest characters from the children's TV show Sesame Street.

The difficult way to make bacon

Wednesday, April 24th, 2002

Scientists are claiming a victory in cloning efficiency. Only 150 or so embryos had to be implanted to get three animals to be born. That's 2%. Out of the three, only two survived because one was “accidently” killed by its surrogate mother (I'm not sure how you “accidently” kill a piglet). That's now just over 1%. If this was a terrorist situation, would you be happy with only 1% of the hostages being saved?

Efficient or not, out of 150 embryos, we have two cloned offspring. Which aren't identical. That's right; the two clones have different markings. The company that performed the experiment even states that “a percentage of cloned animals may suffer from genetic defects”. If the genetic damage is so obviously affecting these offspring, why is it that we still consider them clones? If the point of cloning is to create genetically identical offspring, surely having this degree of mutation must make the experiment a failure.

So we have an inefficient way of creating non-clones. Go science.

Tax science fiction to pay for science fact

Wednesday, April 24th, 2002

If Michael Williams, a US Republican candidate, has his way, American citizens could soon be be paying a 1% tax on their science fiction. The tax would provide all of the funding for NASA. Only in America.

In related news, it seems that Sauron's One Ring may have fallen into the wrong hands.