Your favorite friends from the Flat Earth Society are at it again. While the Elks, the Rotarians and the Woodmen of the World are content with a nice annual picnic in the forest, the Flat Earth International Congress is planning a cruise to the purported edge of the world. Not for nothing, of course. They’re looking for the ice wall that holds back the oceans.
The FEIC calls the event “the biggest, boldest adventure yet,” but it is not without some concerns. First, navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels around Earth’s oceans are all based on the irritating principle that the planet is actually round. GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above the Earth; signals from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside a GPS device, and at least three satellites are required to pinpoint a precise location. “Had the Earth been flat,” asserts retired ship captain Henk Keijer, “a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to everyone on the planet. But it is not enough because the Earth is round.”
The flat-Earthers have not commented on whether they intend to rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based navigation system for finding the end of the world.
Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy by NASA and other space agencies to hide the world’s flatness. These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the Flat Earth Society, allegedly the world’s oldest flat-Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s. In diagrams which appear on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the North Pole smack-dab in the middle and an edge surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds the oceans back.
Serious-minded observers have dismissed the FES diagrams out of hand. Local self-taught scientist Freeman Register scoffs, “No right-thinking person is going to accept these grossly inaccurate FES charts. They don’t even have Winterfell on them.”
Current non-believer Bill Killeen is looking for a spot on the trip. “I’m dubious,” says Killeen, “but I’m open-minded. I mean, who knows what’s possible anymore? They laughed when Donald Trump sat down to play, right?”
42
If you are a fan of Douglas Adams’ sci-fi series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” you already know that the answer to questions about the meaning of life, the state of the universe and everything else is 42. But you’re not exactly sure of the question. Recently, however, mathematicians claim they have discovered it after centuries of frustration. The result came from a stumper called the Diophantine equation, which asks whether you can express every number between 1 and 100 as the sum of three cubes. The question is named for the ancient mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria, who proposed a similar conundrum 1800 years ago.
Answers for most of the numbers between 1 and 100 have already been discovered but a solution for 42 required a global network of 500,000 computers, which crunched through huge numbers of possibilities to find that (-80538738812075974)^3 + (12602123297335631)^=42. Got it? Good.
Some people have too much time on their hands.
 |
| The power supply for GEOMAR'S lab; tough to sneak into your purse. |
But It Was There Just A Minute Ago…”
Fans of minor crimes will tell you that the best pickpockets in the world come from Italy or France. Paris is notorious for its clever thieves, and Florence almost as bad. Surprisingly, however, the world champions in the sport are the light-fingered lifters of Prague in the Czech Republic, who are so clever and swift as to be down the road and on the plane to the Maldives before their larceny has been noticed. Now, however, these practiced Czechs have been challenged for supremacy by the Burglars of the Baltic. Last Fall, someone stole a 1600-lb. undersea observatory from the bottom of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Kiel in northern Germany.
Suddenly, the detector, which was run by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, went silent. At first, nobody suspected tomfoolery was afoot. Researchers merely assumed that something had gone wrong with the communications transmission. But when divers went out to check the site—oh-oh!---they were stunned to find the entire observatory had disappeared, with just a shredded power cable left behind to ponder over. No storm, tide or large animal could have done the deed, GEOMAR said, calling the lost environmental data “priceless.”
Police, of course, are investigating, for all the good that will do, and GEOMAR officials have appealed to the public to report any lost-looking laboratories they see wandering aimlessly down the street. The station is valued at $330,000, has little resale value and is too hefty for your neighborhood pawn shop. The owners are offering a discouragingly small reward.
Time For A Change
Ronald Mallett is building a time machine. Before you scoff, that would be Ronald Mallett, PhD, astrophysicist and tenured professor at the University of Connecticut. Still not impressed? Fine, but Richard’s here to tell you he’s not fooling around.
His research into time travel focuses heavily on Einstein’s theory of relativity and the power of light. “In a nutshell,” contends Mallett, “Einstein said that time can be affected by speed. What he meant by that is the stronger gravity is, the more time will slow down.” The professor points out that energy can also create a gravitational field. What he plans to do is to harness the energy and subsequent gravitational fields of “a single continuously circulating unidirectional beam of light.” In other words, a laser.
“Eventually, a circulating beam of laser lights could act as a sort of time machine and cause a twisting of time that would allow you to go back into the past,” Mallet continued. And that’s where he dearly wants to go. The prof lost his father to a heart attack when he was only ten years old and he’s determined to see him again. And to place a big bet for the old man on whoever it was that won the Kentucky Derby that year.
Twelve months after Mallet’s father died, the grieving son picked up a copy of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi classic The Time Machine. He says it’s the book that changed his life. Mallet escaped into Wells’ world, where the past was not locked away forever but instead could be revisited at will. He has nurtured the idea of traveling back in time ever since.
Professor Mallet went on to specialize in relativity and black holes, acquiring his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in physics from Penn State University. An early job working with lasers for the aerospace industry inspired his model for time travel. “It turned out my understanding about lasers eventually helped me in my breakthrough with understanding how I might be able to find a whole new way for the basis of a time machine,” he says. Mallett has now finished a theoretical equation “that could make the whole thing work.”
Make sure you land near a clothing store, Doc. In your Dad’s day, they put people in jail for running around naked.
Attention, Gary Borse!
The newly-formed U.S. Army Futures Command, created to support the “continuous transformation of Army modernization in order to provide future warfighters with the concepts, capabilities and organizational structures they need to dominate a future battlefield,” is living up to its name. The Command is undertaking an intriguing partnership with Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy to test exotic metals acquired by TTSA earlier this year. Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon official reputed to be involved with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, will be a principal investigator for the joint endeavor.
TTSA is best known for its release of headline-grabbing videos purporting to show Navy fighter jets encountering unidentified aircraft. Elizondo suggested these UFOs might have had extraterrestrial origins. “These crafts are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor that of any foreign country,” Elizondo said, further calling them “things that don’t have any obvious flight services, any forms of propulsion, and maneuvering in ways that include extreme maneuverability beyond the healthy G-forces of a human or anything biological.”
The metals to be investigated are reported to have come from an advanced aerospace vehicle of unknown origin and were purchased for the princely sum of $35,000. UFO researcher Linda Moulton claims the materials possess some interesting qualities, including the ability to levitate when exposed to certain electromagnetic frequencies. Oooh!
“I Just Thought The Tylenol Was Out-Of-Date.”
A 25-year-old barista from Australia besieged by migraines two or three times a month for the last seven years was at her wits’ end. When the latest one hit, it lasted for more than a week and brought extra baggage in the form of blurred vision. An MRI showed a suspected tumor.
However, when surgeons operated on her brain and removed the lesion, it was no tumor at all; it was actually a cyst full of tapeworm larvae. Yuck and double-yuck. Somebody get the albendazole and stick my head in the freezer.
A new study of the by The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene published on September 21 showed the Aussie’s aches were caused by the tapeworm larvae taking up too much space in her brain. Since the victim had never traveled abroad, this was the first native case of the disease in Australia. The woman’s condition is now known as neurocysticercosis and can cause neurological symptoms when larval cysts develop in the brain.
People are normally at a very low risk of infection with tapeworm larvae since they would have to be ingested from a carrier. Somehow, this woman accidentally swallowed eggs found in the feces of a person with an intestinal tapeworm. Las Vegas will give you big odds on that ever happening, but it did in this case. The victim had a full recovery with no need for medication after the surgery. According to the World Health Organization, neurocysticercosis is the leading cause of epilepsy in adults globally.
Even your tiniest tot knows the moral of this story. “Don’t eat POOP!”
There’ll Be A Hot Time In The Old O. R. Tonight
Finally, there’s the poor 60-year-old heart surgery patient in Australia. The man was undergoing an emergency procedure under combined inhaled and intravenous general anesthesia to repair a small tear in his aorta when a complication arose. The patient had previously been treated for pulmonary disease at a different hospital and had an enlarged right lung with several permanent air pockets known as bullae.
The lung had stuck to his sternum, which the surgeons needed to crack through to get to his heart. In spite of their best efforts, they punctured one of the bullae in the lung and air began leaking out. To counteract this, the flow of oxygen in the anesthetic inhalant was increased by 100%. Alas, it turned out to be a real big leak, as the doctors were able to smell the sevoflurane anesthetic as it seeped into the air through the patient’s lung. That sevoflurane was now mixed with a strong concentration of highly oxidizing oxygen, making the conditions volatile. The lead surgeon winced, looked at his crew and whined in his best Roseanne Roseannadanna manner, “It’s always SOMETHING!”
Unfortunately, the team was using an electrocautery device, a surgical tool that uses heat to seal wounds. The device was sitting just a smidge too close to a dry surgical pack near the patient’s chest and when a spark from the electrocautery device landed on the surgical pack in the highly oxygenated air, the whole chest area of the man exploded into flames, causing much yipping and yapping and a bit of the famous O.R. hotfoot dance.
Fortunately, the flames were quickly doused and the patient saved. A family member watching the procedure from above, however, was not at all happy. Didn’t you people ever hear of anti-inflammatories?” he hollered from above.
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
