The Ins and Outs of Belly Button Lint

Your navel hard at work

Now for a cultural reference that Star Wars nerds like me will recognize: Remember the Sarlacc from Episode VI -- the ravenous creature in a huge desert pit lined with inward-facing spines that swallowed hapless victims (like Billy Dee Williams) alive?

Well, that's how your navel gathers lint.

An Austrian researcher named Georg Steinhauser devoted 3 years of his life to studying belly button fuzz and here are his in-depth findings: You belly hair scrapes it off your shirt and sucks it remorselessly down into your omphalos.

"The hair's scales act like a kind of barbed hooks," Dr. Steinhauser proudly reported. "Abdominal hair often seems to grow in concentric circles around the navel."

At Home With the Atom

Hard as it may be for us to grasp from our vantage point in the 21st century, in the 1950s and early 60s atomic weaponry was cool. Sure this was due, in part, to our arch-enemies of the time -- "da' Commies" -- having A-bombs and H-bombs of their own, which our nuclear bombs would surely protect us from. Somehow.

But more than that, people generally thought of atomic energy as the doorway to a wonderous new future, despite its being so good at blowing things up. Everything was going to be nuclear powered in days to come, even the family car. As a kid I lived down the road from Arco, Idaho and many a time drove past the sign at the city limits boasting that they were "the first atomic powered city!"

It wasn't just the atom's potential to generate energy, though. Under "Operation Plowshare" (you know, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares..."), H-bomb explosions were tested for excavating new harbors, mining, stimulating the flow of natural gas, widening the Panama Canal or building a new canal through Nicaragua. Click here for a list of all the blasts and the many projects that were planned.

The atom was magic! Back then Americans liked Ike and tended to trust the government, including its custodianship of our nuclear energy in all its forms. We got comfortable with the atom and looked forward to the future it promised. We even bought our kids uranium to play with!

All of which may help to explain why these five guys and a cameraman volunteered (except for the cameraman) to stand directly under a small nuclear explosion to see what would happen. They apparently survived but according to this Atlas Obscura article, no one knows what became of them.

Past Apocalypses

Coming attractions?

(This is a repost of one of my earlier articles that I still kind of like)

Remember the last time we survived the Apocalypse? Probably not. But as it turns out the universe really had it in for us in 70,000 BC. Scientists recently detected a really small, dim star 20 light years away with an even smaller, dimmer star orbiting it, and they are heading straight away from the Earth. That means, if you rewind their path, they came perilously close to hitting us 70,000 years ago. I assume we didn't actually collide because we're still here.

Korg's reaction

Meanwhile, in other 70,000 BC news, the weather had whittled us humans down so far that there were only 40 mating pairs of us left on the earth. That's a verge-of-extinction sized population. And it wasn't just the famous Ice Age, oh no. We also had a Super-Volcano go off and fill the air with badness.

Knowing all this gives me new respect for Korg!

Korg

Atomic Beauty

Photo by DasWortgewand

Call me weird (go ahead; I'm used to it) but I've always been fascinated by nuclear explosions. I just love to watch old government films of atomic tests back in the 40s, 50s and 60s. To me they're beautiful and hypnotic.

Don't get me wrong though: I am very aware that nuclear bombs are terrible weapons, and what Little Boy and Fat Man -- the first two atomic bombs -- did to the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrific. I grew up during the Cold War when the US and USSR had thousands of missiles tipped with H-Bombs pointed at each other. That knowledge was the background music of my childhood. It was an accepted fact of life. I won't say I walked around paranoid all the time, but I did pay attention to where the fallout shelters were.

But that's not what I'm writing about. The thing I'm fascinated by is the aesthetic quality of atom bombs. The instantaneous way a gold and white mushroom cloud appears seemingly out of no where, the shapes and textures and colors of those clouds as they rise through the air, shockwaves speeding across the desert toward the camera, the effects they have on old, decommissioned ships tethered around the fiery column or mannequins and houses stationed in the sandy plains of Nevada -- that's what mesmerizes me.

Yeah, I know. Weird. But then, they are some of the most-watched videos on YouTube. Maybe I'm just not afraid to admit my weirdness?

At any rate, physicists and film experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have been busily digitizing and declassifying thousands of these films, many of which the regular public has never seen. One of my favorite YouTube channels, Dark5, has set five of the most unseen to evocative music that, I think, points up the oddly compelling beauty of weapons that could destroy us all.

"Manimal!"

What he thought he looked like

Photo credit: Appaloosa

Naturalists sometimes set up cameras in the woods to get an idea of the current animal population or to spot rare or dangerous animals. Usually they just catch fairly normal creatures like bobcats, bears, Bigfoot, Chupacabras -- you know, the common woodland creatures.

And then sometimes they capture naked men on LSD who have transformed into Siberian tigers.

Just like an old episode of Manimal!

A Random Question

Photo credit: Joe Sullivan

"Mommy? Where does face powder come from?"

"Why, from a magical wonderland far away, full of colorful chemicals and high-pressure machines. Here, let me show you..."

To Boldly Go

Humanity's Greatest Conundrum

Photo credit: HeroX

Some problems are so intractable that even a rocket scientist can't figure them out. Sure NASA overcame the myriad challenges we faced to put a man on the moon, but this one has them stumped. The mission: to boldly defecate where no one has defecated before!

On the International Space Station they have a cool little space toilet with a spinning rotor that collects the astronaut poo and stores it for disposal at a later date. In their spacesuits they wear cosmic Depends™. But this system depends on the assumption that in an emergency you could wear your suit, hop into your trusty Soyuz capsule, and be in Siberia in just a few hours. At most you might spend a day in a dirty diaper... with the 6 or 8 Gs of reentry pressing you into it... Wait. No. Let's not go there.

How we poop now

Photo: Polimerek

But what if you're on a mission to Mars -- 6 months there and 6 months back (actually longer while you wait for it to line up with Earth again) -- and something happens. Mars is much closer to the Asteroid Belt, you know. High speed space rocks galore! If you lose air pressure you could end up spending 2 years in a space suit. They're tight and very bulky with all sorts of essential equipment already installed; no room for a personal-size space toilet in there. What do you do with all that fecal matter in your suit? And how do you avoid terminal diaper rash??

NASA does not know.

So they're tossing the problem over to us, fellow citizens, in a contest aptly named "The Space Poop Challenge." If you come up with one of the 3 best solutions to this vexing dilemma they'll give you $30,000 of your tax money as a reward.

Do have the right stuff within you? Better hurry though because the deadline for submissions is Dec. 20, 2016, 10:59 p.m. CST.

Respect Your Liquids

Please, don't be mean to the water!

Eating the future

Bacon -- it's the future, man!

Graphic buried somewhere deep inside this game

In the year 2020 we will all get our food by jumping on counters at fast food restaurants and yelling. What a utopian wonderworld that will be! We know this thanks to the helpful efforts of a man from that far-distant time with the strange futuristic name of Dante Rashad Anderson, who came back to show us how it will be done.

His first attempt to demonstrate the future occurred at an Oklahoma City Carl's Jr., but they did not understand his ways and ejected him. Undeterred, the time traveler walked across the street to Arby's, where the patrons were slightly more enlightened and allowed his demonstration to proceed after he shoved the manager up against a wall.  After the obligatory yelling, the visitor grabbed a fist full of bacon and chicken, thanked them all for their kind attention by breaking a window, and left.

Karate-kicking random cars as he walked down the street (possibly an obscure greeting gesture from his time), the man beyond time was found passed out at a taco restaurant due to the strain of passing through the Time Vortex without a TARDIS.

Oklahoma police were skeptical at first of the man's description of the future until they remembered that Donald Trump will have been President for 3 years by then. Hence, all bets are off.

"Get Outta My Yard!"

Mr. Newman, World's Saddest Dog ™, realizes he's going up the river

Photo by Christopher Michel

Sick and tired of that dadgummed neighbor dog doin' his business in your petunias? Yeah, we all are. But now we can turn the big guns of technology against those consarned rapscallions (and their owners, who are probably standin' right there, watchin') and catch 'em dead to rights! That's right Rover, you can't hide under the porch anymore.  We're going to solve the mystery of whose poo that is in our yards the same way we crack all the big cold cases nowadays: DNA.

A Tennessee company named PooPrints makes a business of swabbing every dog in an apartment complex (in their mouths, not other more poo-oriented orifices) so they can match them to the genetic fingerprints of offending anonymous defecators.

Canine crime doesn't stand a chance. You can even become a distributor!

Edison: History's greatest humanitarian!

It's little known today but famous inventor Thomas Edison was actually the greatest humanitarian who ever lived. Sure, we're all used to hearing of Edison the jerk, Edison the man who battled Westinghouse up one side and down the other to block much more efficient Alternating Current, Edison who crushed the dreams and buried the vision of Nikola Tesla, Edison the elephant electrocuter, Edison the... well, you get the picture.

But when you weigh all that against his magnificent invention of 1878, it's no contest. Edison ranks right up there with Mother Teresa and the entire Doctors Without Boarders organization. Because Thomas Edison, with a single stroke, eliminated hunger from the Earth.

It happened like this.

One day, Edison was riding through the streets of New York in his gold-plated carriage with J P Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and several Rothschilds discussing how there were simply too many ragged street urchins clinging to their vehicle begging for money. The Great Inventor took the opportunity to demonstrate one of his latest inventions, running 50,000 volts through the skin of the carriage, thereby efficiently dislodging the grubby, starving children. As they watched smoldering little beggers dropping like over-ripe fruit into the street, Edison commented triumphantly, "I call that my 'Poverty Eliminator.'"

The Plutocrats chuckled and drove on.

Later, as they sat down to a posh but impromptu dinner at Edison's home, one of his butlers sheepishly informed him that there weren't enough Delmonico steaks to go around.

"What?! Not enough steak?? I'll soon fix that!"

When Edison returned from his basement lab 2 hours later the wondering tycoons stared in amazement at his "Food Creator," a portable, easy-to-use device capable of transmuting any type of matter into any food imaginable.

The wealthy magnates sat down to the best steaks they'd ever eaten and the Daily Graphic spread the happy news throughout the land on that joyous first day of April:

Huzzah! A new age dawns!

For more information about this wonder, click on the headline!

Jupiter takes one for the Gipper!

Jupiter does its stuff!

You may have heard about the planet Jupiter's altruistic ways, how it protects the Earth from gigantic planet-killing rocks by flinging them back out of the solar system, using its mighty, mighty gravity.

Actually there's some debate about this. Spoil sport astronomers (the same ones that demoted Pluto from being a planet no doubt. Jerks!) like to point out that, while Jupiter does a good job of catching asteroids rocketing in from the depths of space, it also has this habit of bumping into friendly, stable rocks already here, sending them in our direction.

But, however that may be, our planetary big-brother did take a bullet for us the other day.  While the ever-ready amateur astronomers accidentally watched on March 17th, something smashed into Jupiter and blew up!

Thanks, bro!

Meanwhile, the French invent something wonderful!

French science hard at work!

Photo by la Nouvelle République

The french are geniuses! While we slave away on space ships and robot cars, they've created the marvel of the modern age: The steak and sausage machine!  Hopefully, there will soon be one on every street corner as part of our long-promised Jetsons-like future.

But in case you're wondering, France does have its share of epic outer space adventures that have never been equaled.

The Power of Scientists

L. eltoni

Photo by James Thomas, the discoverer

A scientist in Florida just named this newly discovered Indonesian shrimp L. eltoni. After Elton John. Because he can.

All About Theremins

On the outside, grace and elegance...

Today's Google doodle salutes Clara Rockmore, a virtuoso at playing the Theremin which evidently inspired the Rolling Stones and led on to the once-popular Moog Synthesizer, for which I used to own a copy of Bach's greatest electronic hits. It was interesting one time, just annoying after that.

This all begs the question, "What the heck is a Theremin??"

Well, it's a large, dark piece of furniture that would look quite at home in your den next to the cabinet with your good china in it, except for 2 or more metal antennae sticking out of it. As it turns out, instead of china, your lovely Theremin is packed with electronics that are designed to do one irritating thing: emit loud feedback when you cause interference by waving your hands around between those antenna.

Mr. Theremin, who invented the Theremin, discovered in his russian lab that by gracefully moving your hands within the electric field between the 2 antenna you could control the noise created by the interference and actually make spooky musical notes.  For Theremin players like Ms. Rockmore it provided the added performance value of hypnotic hand-dancing for the audience during the concert.

And on the inside...

Theremins hit the big time right after WW II so you hear them in creepy science fiction movies of the 1950s like The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing (From Another World). The Beach Boys play a quasi-Theremin (controlled by a knob and a slider) in Good Vibrations. Someone once described Theremin music as, "a cello lost in a dense fog, crying because it does not know how to get home."

Soon enough though Theremin fever cooled when the public got sick of it and musicians moved on to newer, better instruments -- like the Moog Synthesizer.  But a nostalgic 1993 movie called Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey reignited interest in the old thing. Less awkward miniaturized Theremins are now available. Composers are writing Theremin concerts and Sheldon is playing one on Big Bang Theory.

You (Almost Certainly) Missed It

If you happened to be in Namibia or the South Pole 8 hours ago as I write, and looked up, you would you would have seen a partial solar eclipse. But since you probably didn't, here's an artist's recreation:

Mystical Mars

More evidence of Mars' highly advanced magic powers!

Thanks to Curiosity the Martian Rover we are learning more about the red planet than we did in all the centuries of scientific endeavour before it got there. As you know if you faithfully read these pages, we've discovered the first evidence of petrified lizards in space. In addition, Sleestaks from Land of the Lost have also been found next to the last of their bowling balls.

But now, in possibly the most mind-boggling revelation yet, NASA has uncovered (and simultaneously denied, as they always do)  great feats of magic performed millennia ago by the now-fossilized lizards. Apparently, the mighty power of their levitation tricks still floats spoons in the reddish wilderness to this very day!

Danger: Texas

Texas

Texas is a dangerous place. Back in June a gentleman named Frank Reyes was changing a trailer tire when the jack slipped, trapping him.

Worrying that somebody might not happen along would be your major concern in any normal state. But this wasn't Seattle or Poughkeepsie.

This was Texas. In June.

The apocalyptically hot Texas sun heated the trailer's metal to 10,000 degrees (or thereabouts), and slowly seared the flesh of his hand right off down to the bone.

Did you know that in the 1800's, when land barons were trying to get people to immigrate to this place, the publicity hapless Easterners heard (from Davy Crockett himself!) was that Texas is "the garden spot of the world?" Davy Crockett was a bald-faced liar because Texas will try to kill you every chance it gets.

Fortunately, we now have central air conditioning that makes Texas habitable, and that has made the appearance of highly intelligent medical doctors possible. Today they sprout in hospitals and medical centers all across our gigantic state, on stand-by to leap into action and work their clever wonders on Texans who venture outside and suffer, as they surely will. Because this is Texas.

Belly -- best place for a desicated hand

Mr. Reyes, sadly, did not have the benefit of central air conditioning that day. But he did have skilled doctors waiting in chilly hospitals, ready to apply their healing arts to his hideous hand that the Texas sun had gnawed to bits.

Realizing eventually that nothing else was making the remainders of his fingers grow back, they chose the ultimate option, something only a highly creative, comfortably refrigerated, Texas doctor brain would dare to think of trying: cutting a hole in his belly and sewing his hand inside. Blood-filled vessels from his abdomen swiftly permeated his digits, filling them with life.

And now, weeks later, Frank's rejuvinated appendage is free of his stomach and living comfortably, changing trailer wheels left and right.

Once again, central air saves the day!

Mysteries of History #1

Shigir Idol

In Russia there is a mysterious wooden statue covered with pictographs and faces called the Shigir Idol. It was discovered in Western Siberia in 1894, having been preserved for years in an old bog. Scientists have always known it was ancient, but through various modern gizmos they have now discovered that actually it's the oldest wooden sculpture in the world -- carved 11,000 years ago!

Nobody knows what the markings hacked into it mean, though most every expert insists they were intended to communicate unfathomable mesolithic knowledge, as opposed to, say, just being some whittlin' to fight off the mind-numbing boredom of prehistoric Siberian nights. For all we know this may be their god of monotony and despair, worshipped in the name of nothing else to do. The fact that the idol is the height of a 2 story building shows the central place tedium held in their world.




Meanwhile...

Kinfolks??

Another Martian Beastie

As all good readers of A Few Paragraphs know, we chronicle the ever growing list of strangely rock-like creatures NASA keeps finding on Mars. Well, not really NASA per se; actually a few guys (Strangely, I've never heard a woman announce a Mars lizard, have you?) who spend their long, lonely nights incessantly staring at Mars probe photos in painstaking detail.

And when they spy one through bleary eyes, it is a cause of great rejoicing. Because it's just another proof of the massive space-lizard cover up that extends to the highest levels. The truth is out there, man!

You may recall my concise but fascinating expose of Sleestaks on Mars. Now, allow me to introduce the awesome findings of professional weird-stuff-researcher Scott C. Waring: One-eyed lizards from the Red Planet!

Apparently, he's also located a crashed spaceship and a reptile head!