Science Made Cool

A Cornucopia of Weirdness

Here at Science Made Cool we pride ourselves on being scientific. And yet . . . every now and then it's fun to go slumming with the crackpots. As a fiction writer and game designer I must admit that crazy people and con men can come up with  ideas every bit as good as the ones scientists have. They just aren't, you know, true. Anyway, here are some of my favorite sources for High Weirdness Online. Note that many of these sites are still skeptical or at least neutral toward the weirdness they chronicle. One must have some standards, after all.

Counterknowledge is a 'blog covering conspiracy theories, creationism, quackery, and pseudoscience from a very hard-nosed skeptical viewpoint. If you ever start wondering if any of this stuff might be true, this is a good site to get a refreshing blast of rationality.

The Weird Encyclopedia is an eclectic site with a vaguely "Discordian" tone to it -- call it "Stoner Forteanism" and you're pretty close to the mark. No, I don't know why there is a bimbo photo on the home page.

The Arcana Wiki is a Wikipedia-style site devoted to miscellaneous weirdness, specifically as it could be applied to roleplaying games and fiction.

Finally, Bill Beatty's Weird Science Web site is a forest of links to Forteana, fringe science, and crackpottery. He links to the sources -- which means at any given time about a quarter of them are dead links because crackpot scientists can't seem to maintain their Web sites very well.

And when you're done and need some mental floss to clean the gunk out of your brain, the Skeptic Blog.

Scientists Gone Wild!

Scientists are frequently assumed to be slightly insane, but they seldom get depicted as paragons of physical courage. NewScientist tries to correct that impression with this article, about scientists who used their own vulnerable bodies as experimental subjects. (This is a technique much more commonly applied in comic books, although the results are a bit more dramatic for all concerned.)

Interestingly, the editors at NewScientist should cede priority in this topic to that other well-known scientific publication, Cracked.com, which ran a startlingly similar article back in 2008.

Friday As Pirate

In honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day (you did know about Talk Like A Pirate Day, didn't you?) the excellent zine Shimmer is giving readers a free look at the electronic version of their famous Pirate Issue, including fiction by, well, me, among others.

Otherwise, enjoy the day and keep your sonic blaster handy!

Gibbering Fangirl

I hope you're all watching Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. That is all.

Happy Birthday Superman!

Today is Superman's 70th birthday. As pretty much everyone on Earth knows, the character Superman is an alien from the lost planet Krypton, who gains super powers on Earth because of its yellow sun. Needless to say, this makes absolutely no sense. If the color of sunlight gives you superpowers, so would a string of colored Christmas-tree lights.

Which is not to say that an alien on Earth couldn't be superhuman in various ways. A creature from a high-gravity world would indeed be tremendously strong compared to ordinary humans. It would also be able to jump around like an astronaut on the Moon. This is about the level of super-ness that Superman exhibited in his original incarnation, created by science fiction fans Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster.

But later comic writers kept upping Superman's power level, giving him the strength to lift battleships or skyscrapers, the ability to fly, nearly complete invulnerability, and, of course, "X-ray vision." To compensate, they also gave Superman a weakness to Kryptonite, a mineral from his home planet. Kryptonite meteors began landing on Earth with remarkable frequency.

Surprisingly, all this can actually be made to make sense scientifically. The key is the Kryptonite. For so many meteors from Krypton to land on Earth, the lost planet's explosion must have filled this part of the Galaxy with debris. That means Krypton itself must have been extremely massive. Really extremely massive. How massive? Well, we assume it didn't collapse into a black hole, so the "planet" Krypton would have been a neutron star or quark star about four times the mass of the Sun.

Suddenly, it all makes sense. A humanoid like Superman capable of standing and walking on a neutron star would have to be made of degenerate matter himself. Now we understand why he's bulletproof -- he's effectively a single giant atomic nucleus shaped like an ace reporter. This also neatly explains his strength and even his flying ability. To a being used to conditions on the surface of a neutron star, it would be difficult to even notice terrestrial gravity. Neutronium eyes also explain how he can see x-rays.

This all works out quite well, except for one little problem:  Superman's weight. A man-sized blob of neutron-star matter would have a mass of about 100,000 tons. To such a being, the solid surface of the Earth would be like water -- just standing still he'd sink into anything, even hard rock. He couldn't even swim in rock, any more than a human can swim in air. He'd sink down to the core of the Earth and remain there, fighting a never-ending battle for truth and justice in the liquid iron.

So, to Clark Kent, alias Kal-El, in his comfortable refuge 4,000 miles below our feet, happy 70th birthday!

Because They Can

Want to know what's going on with the Phoenix lander on Mars? It has a Twitter account. Written in first person, no less. Damn, that soil is tough.

Wear A Monster Suit To Lunch

May 7 is the birthday of legendary Japanese movie director Ishiro Honda. Mr. Honda is best known as the creator of the Godzilla films, and therefore of the entire big-rubbery-monster genre (or "Daikaiju" for purists). He died in 1993, but I'm sure he'll be remembered as long as there are giant monsters and 8-year-old boys.

Now We Know

When we started doing this Web log, nobody told us how to do it. We just typed up various cool facts, personal rants, and links to weird stuff. If only we'd had an expert to teach us how 'blogging should be done. Well, now there is:  here's How To Blog.

A Threat

All right, we've tried being nice, but now it's time to resort to threats. We've completed construction on a device which will destroy the Moon, and we're going to use it tonight unless everybody in North America buys two copies of BONE WARS: The Game of Ruthless Paleontology. 

The deadline is 1:43 Greenwich Mean Time (8:43 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in the United States).  If we haven't got 300 million orders by that time, the Moon will disappear!

Chicken

Tonight's Ig Nobel ceremony keynote address was delivered by Google's Doug Zongker. (He gave the same talk at AAAS earlier this year, captured in the video below:)