Tinfoil hats — who you calling “fringe”?

MIT puts science to good use:


Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

By the way, this is why I have a problem with scientists: always pointing out problems, never solutions. Nevertheless, it’s important to keep asking. Here is the proper form of address when formulating a question for scientists.

Slow News Day

Wetmachine is a bit sclerotic of late (content wise). Maybe it just needs an emitic or whatchacallit, an enema. Or a little more science. In any event, here’s a link to some earlier work I did towards A General Theory of Everything.

Sample quote:

My theory will not account for the chemical or atomic or subatomic: that’s covered elsewhere (See: scientists). Nor will I deal with cosmic stuff, for that’s too big to be of concern to us. Astrophysicists are on some kind of trip, we’ll agree on that, but what it has to do with you and me and the price of dough nuts is a closed question. So that leaves us with the human scale, that where we live, us’ns, and that’s what my theory shall reconcile, just like Milton, only updated.

Maybe that will be enough to scare some of the other wetmachiners in to action. After all, there’s more where that came from.

Grey goo, coming soon to a planet near you!

Grey goo is what happens when little machines convert everything-there-is into manifold copies of themselves.

Now the nice scientists in England — All-the-England-there-is — are hastening the day!

Well, good show old chap, I must say! Just make sure that they’re British self-replicators and once again the sun shall never set (on the British Empire, &c &c, ).

AofA Technology: Monster Cells

As many of y’all know, I wrote Acts of the Apostles, (a nanotech thriller about (among other things) Iraqi bioweapons programs)during the years 1995-99.

As the book was science fiction, it contains a lot of stuff that I just made up. Since then it’s been fun to collect instances where the real world has caught up with Acts.

Here’s a link to an article in the Washington Post that describes an effort by Craig Venter(!!) to create an artificial cell that’s in many ways similar to the “monster cell” of AofA.

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