Colbert was Right

Bears!

Bear Run! 125-pound black bear wanders into Wis. grocery store, chills out in beer cooler

Officials from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources tranquilized the animal and took it out of the store. Store workers say the bear seemed content in the cooler and did not consume any alcohol.

No alcohol? The bear did not have ID, and was going to be supplied drugs anyway, which makes the situation worse. Now they’ve got a bear with a drug problem.

Wackiness is not a Conserved Quantity

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Update: Good discussion of why this is crazy, but not crackpot, over at Cosmic Variance

Next Generation GPS

I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced “Wesley-Ann”.

Victor: You NEED to remember to put the GPS in your car.

Me: No. I’m not using it anymore.

Victor: Why not?!

Me: It’s trying to kill me.

Victor: *

Me: Remember last week when I had to go into town and I got the driving instructions from mapquest and you made me take the GPS as a back-up but then halfway there the GPS is all “Turn left now” and I’m all “No. Mapquest says to go straight” and it’s like “TURN LEFT NOW” and I’m all “No way, bitch” and then she’s all sighing at me like she’s frustrated and she keeps saying “Recalculating” in this really judgey, condescending way and then she’s all “TURN LEFT NOW!” and then I’m all freaked out so I turn left exactly like she says and then she’s all “Recalculating. Recalculating.” and I’m like “I DID EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID TO DO. WHAT’S WITH THE TONE, WHORE?”

I got my mom a GPS unit for her car last Christmas, and she makes similar comments about the tone and meaning of “recalculating.” She doesn’t think it’s trying to kill her, though there’s a funky map anomaly we noticed, where the directions were to turn left and then immediately turn right and left again, when you were just supposed to go straight. (It’s at the light just before you go North over the bridge into Rexford, NY on Rt 146). Hadn’t really considered that it might just be a conspiracy.

Oh, and there’s this, too.

I'm a Monkey! Monkey, Monkey, Monkey!

Fewer paying speed-camera tickets in Arizona

[W]hen state Department of Public Safety officers served 37 unpaid photo-enforcement tickets to Vontesmar recently, he wasn’t fazed.

The photos all show the driver wearing a monkey mask.

“Not one of them there is a picture where you can identify the driver,” Vontesmar said. “The ball’s in their court. I sent back all these ones I got with a copy of my driver’s license and said, ‘It’s not me. I’m not paying them.’ ”

Blown Up, Sir!

I don’t recall how the conversation arrived on the topic, but I was explaining that one could use explosives to tenderize meat to some colleagues recently, and had to go find the story on the interwebs. And so I share with you:

Ka-Boom! A shockingly unconventional meat tenderizer

The idea of bombing meat came to Long some 30 years ago, while he was floating in his backyard pool. A mechanical engineer at Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory, he worked as an explosives expert on the design of triggering mechanisms for nuclear weapons. He was very familiar with conventional explosives and the shock waves created when they go off.

“My body has about the same density as the water,” he observed, “so if somebody threw a bomb into my pool, the shock waves should go right through me.” He started thinking about what those shock waves might do to his muscle — or to a piece of steak. To find out, he recruited friends for an experiment at a privately owned explosives testing site a few miles away.

They sliced a piece of tough beef in two, bagged half of it in plastic, and dropped it into the bottom of a 50-gallon paperboard drum of water. Then they suspended conventional explosives in the water and retired to a nearby bunker. From there, they watched in safety as a television displayed the ensuing detonation.

“The drum totally disappeared. There were just little pieces of paper fiber all over,” Long recalls. The meat, ejected to the side of a nearby hill, was missing for fully 15 minutes.

Once the treated meat had been retrieved, Long cooked it, along with its untreated counterpart, on a grill he had lugged to the site. The unshocked meat proved “so tough you could hardly chew it,” Long says. “But the one we shocked — it was delightful, as tender as a $10 steak in those days.”

This article is a decade old, but Long has been busy. He has several patents relating to the process.