If I Needed Proof to Suspect We Were Living in a Video Game ... Mothafuckin' Pain Rays.

I am beginning to think that the Americans are the bad guys.

Alright, I'm not. They might be a bit slow sometimes, but they're not evil.

But they do have the kinds of weapons you would expect of Darth Vader and his dark side ilk. Over the past few decades, for instance, the US military has spent $120 million developing a pain ray.

And the fucker works.

Every aspect of the pain ray - officially titled the Active Denial - feels like it has stepped right out of some shithot sci fi. The key bit of hardware required to make it work is even called a 'gyrotron', which amplifies microwaves by rotating a ring of electrons held in place by cryogenically cooled superconducting magnets. The electrons and the microwaves resonate, and the resulting waves are passed to an antenna, which shoots the beam at the target.

That just sounds cool, doesn't it? In fact, it sounds so cool that I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't mashed together out of sciencey-sounding works by the writers of Futurama.

Actually, since the late 1980s, the Air Force Research Laboratory has been working with military contractor Raytheon Company to develop this beast of a machine.

The Active Denial target pain receptors called thermal nociceptors, which are less than 0.4mm beneath the skin. In a matter of seconds, the target feels as if the surface of their skin is being roasted. The sensation begins with a tingly warmth which rapidly becomes excruciating, a fiery torture encompassing the whole body until either the beam is switched off or you get the hell out of its way.

And then you feel fine again.

The intensity of the pain is such that the body's natural instinct will be to flee. Once said body is out of the line of fire, it just goes away. The pain subsides and you feel better. There are no measurable side effects yet seen, and research done on this gun has been exemplary in its depth and thoroughness. In more than 11,000 tests, less than ten people received any injuries from the Active Denial at all. Six of the injuries were blisters, none larger than a pea; the worst of the injuries were small burns, none more dangerous than a bad sun burn, easily dealt with and free of complications.

The Active Denial has been designed for use in prisons, war zones and riot situations. It causes less damage than current methods of subduing those who get violent, such as batons and tasers. Those currently in use have to be carted around on the back of huge trucks, but the developers have managed to scale them down to the size of a large rifle. They are working on making them more portable still, but the authorities are reluctant to use them.

All the research suggests that this thing is safe. Various experts support it. Its flawless performance is almost what makes it so scary that something with go terribly wrong. But, as far as non-lethal weaponry goes, this is some of the most advanced technology going.

And it is kind of mind-blowing.

It's a motherfucking pain ray.

Black People Officially Cool, Says Science

So, if this...

... when compared to this...

...isn't evidence enough that white guys have absolutely no innate sense of cool, then take a look at this evidence from genuine scientists that suggests that black people actually are the coolest people in the world.

Or, at least, in America. And on Twitter.

Jacob Eisenstein and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology examined thirty million tweets sent from various places within the US between December 2009 and May 2011 and watched for the emergence of new slang terms. They team built a mathematical model that precisely explains the flow of new words between cities.

It showed that areas with large African American tended to be the ones that generated the new terms. There was no conclusive evidence about why terms spread between certain places, and they could not pinpoint one specific area that produced new language more than any other.

But the overwhelming finding was the black people generally created and shared new words and phrases that were cool more than any other demographic in the world.

So, science has finally generated some evidence for the simple fact of the matter that black people are cool.

Plus, they've got the moves...

$1.4 million Raised for Nikola Tesla Laboratory: Faith in Humanity Goes Up Ten Points

(Before you ask, I'm not keeping a tally but, if I was, Tim Minchin and his wonderful nerdy ilk would be responsible for most of them.)

Hardcore nerdism is apparently rife in Shoreham, New York, where the Tesla Science Centre at Wardenclyffe group has raised $1.4 million via online crowd funding to buy Nikola Tesla's laboratory in order to turn it into a museum. As a soon-to-be owner of a Nikola Tesla T-shirt, this excites me very much.

It being in America both disappoints and thrills me. I am disappointed because, unless by some miracle I suddenly get very rich, it is unlikely that I will be able to go. However, considering the sheer stupidity that has come out of America, I am overjoyed that this has happened at all. Reading about it only makes it seem so much better.

The point of the museum is that it is a place that is dedicated to science and education with Nikola Tesla - an inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist and futurist whose work led to the way electricity is used today - at its foundation.

Tesla was born in Serbia in 1856 and emigrated to America in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison. He soon moved on to work for himself and conducted high-voltage, high-frequency experiments, which resulted in inventions that made him world famous. Essentially, he made explosions out of electricity for a living, which is pretty damn awesome as far as I am concerned, never mind everything else for which we have to thank him.

In typical mad-scientist fashion, he spent as much money as he made on more and more experiments and ended up dying penniless in January 1943. But still managed to keep his hair suspiciously neat, judging by the pictures of him.

In 1901, Tesla bought 200 acres on Long Island's north shore where he established what is now his only remaining laboratory. It was purchased with the intention of building a wireless transmission tower but was never fully operational. Wardenclyffe Tower - also known as Tesla Tower - remaining, even if in diminished form, as a tribute to his life and achievements is amazing. It seems only fitting that that the group also hope to have it provide space for companies to perform scientific research.

Aside from his brilliance as a scientist, Tesla was one damn incredible human. He lived his life by a strict routine, squishing his toes one hundred times per foot in the belief that it stimulated his brain. Judging by his work, he may well have been right. He worked from 9am to 6pm, at least, every day, often continuing until 3am once he had had his dinner. He walked 8 to 10 miles ever day to keep in shape; he was elegant, stylish and incredibly groomed (just look at his hair!). His gray-blue eyes, he claims, used to be darker until they lightened due to so much use of his brain.

Tesla never married, but even he admitted that it was a bit of a loss to the world that his genes were not preserved. Then again, he also said that being celibate allowed him a lot more time to devote to his work, which was most certainly a good thing. However, he was sociable, and everyone who knew him loved him. He was considered to be charming and lovely and poetic, and it is almost no surprise that so many women threw themselves at him.

After all, he made shit like this possible...

He was wonderful. If he were alive today, he still would be. It is a shame more men are not like him in this world. I am a little bit in love with him. And with good reason.

If I ever get the chance, I am going to that Tesla museum and I am going to behave like a stalkery little fangirl and I am going to love it.

Funds are still being raised on the Tesla Science Centre website to continue with the restoration of the laboratory and the creation of the museum.

It is going to be awesome!

Neal Stephenson Is Making All My Dreams Come True and Blowing My Mind

Everyone who knows me know that I am quite the little nerd - and proud to be. My hero is Dr Ben Goldacre and there is a video somewhere of a tipsy me describing how I would abuse my patient privileges if he was my doctor. I blog about planets and bacon and the Higgs boson particle, for fun. I love New Scientist magazine and have been grappling with the desire to buy a subscription for a few years. I volunteer at the Science Museum in London and my face nearly exploded with joy when I got offered the job. My Twitter feed is flooded with tweets from groups like The Science Plaza and PhysOrg Science News. I love libraries, book shops and Forbidden Planet. I once cheered aloud when I stumbled across a repeat of Professor Brian Cox's Wonders of the Universe and again when I found Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time for £2 in a charity shop. I kind of have a thing for Iron Man (not Robert Downey Jr.; his kid is nearly my age, so that would be weird - I like Iron Man ... but it doesn't hurt that he has Robert Downey Jr.'s face, body and personality). I am addicted to TED talks. I have cried on three separate occasions when I did not get tickets to see the recording of Infinite Monkey Cage from the BBC (damn them). I have a favourite moon, and it's not even one of ours. I wept in a room full of strangers at the beauty of Adam Rutherford's video about all the history of NASA, with all its achievements and failures, simply because science is beautiful.

But I study Creative Writing and English Literature, which is one of those arty-farty degrees at which real scientists probably sniff. I am an amateur nerd, really, and this is unlikely to change any time soon. I am very much a nerd groupie, but that is hardly the same thing. A friend of mine told me that this is silly of me and that I should be studying particle physics or something, but I would just get too excited being surrounded by all those huge sexy nerd brains all day. I simply could not do it.

Some lovely, lovely nerds, including Ben Goldacre, who is all kinds of lovely,
and Tim Minchin and Adam Rutherford,
who have both made me cry by being wonderful

I do try to combine the two. I once wrote a poem about how the colour magenta exists only in the mind. It referenced The Matrix. I could have written the same one about the colour cyan, because human brains and eyes are strange and wonderful things. I did it because it is true and because it blows my mind a little bit.

But it was not a huge contribution to the mating of science and the creative arts. It was hardly Storm (which licks tits). It was not really significant at all, in fact. But it was an effort, a start, an attempt to combine what these two things that excite my brain cells.

A real achievement in this area, though, has to be the Centre (or Center, as it is in America, but my British computer does not like that) of Science and Imagination. I first came across this in an edition of New Scientist magazine that I had purchased to entertain myself while locked out of my flat (no, really). A couple of days later, it was all over my geek-heavy Twitter feed.

It looked fucking ace.

Yes, I did need to swear. It is just that exciting a development in the world. And my life.

It is not a surprise that science fiction fuels real science. Creative nerds come up with cool technology that they wish existed and scientist who agree that it is awesome try to come up with a way it could work in the real world. Take, for instance, the once imaginary flying machine, or the still semi-imaginary hover car. Just because it is still a work in progress does not mean it is not happening. Also included in this long list is Neal Stephenson's stratosphere-reaching tower, designed to study weather patterns, dock planes and launch rockets; it is currently being studied by Keith Hjelmstad at the Arizona State University to try to conceive of a way in which it could be made in real life.

This is all supremely cool; it always has been.

Author Neal Stephenson, as well coming up with the concept of the 20km-high tower, is taking it one step further, and blowing my mind in the process.

His work has largely been speculative fiction which explores mathematics, philosophy and science. The fact that he also looks quite like a wizard only makes him more my kind of nerd.

He is currently collaborating with the Arizona State University to attempt a project that will bring together writers, artists, scientists and engineers: The Centre for Science and Imagination. Its aim is to further science with radical thinking, to get scientists to go beyond the current parameters of technology and innovation to push the limits of knowledge to achieve the kind of advances that led scientists to the industrial revolution. It maintains that science should remain ambitious and that discoveries made now can be as incredible and life-changing as those made in the past few centuries. The belief is that creative thinking leads more effectively to tackling challenges still faced by mankind, that by not acknowledging the limits we set on technology we can find new ways to create that have not been previously considered.

Its progress - as well as forums encouraging discussions that could fuel these great innovations - can be followed on Hieroglyph, and anyone can join and participate. It is truly an amazing project that could well change the way that technology evolves in the coming century.

The Richard Nixon Effect on FaceBook

I am currently reading an anthology of writings by Hunter S. Thompson, which is essentially a collection of rambling, drug-addled rants about sports, politics and generally the state of the USA throughout the past 50 years. It's very interesting.

Over the past couple of days, I've read his account of Watergate and all of the scandal surrounding President Richard Milhous Nixon's resignation from the White House. Up until now, everything I knew about Richard Nixon can be epitomised by this picture:

It doesn't really matter that I don't know much about him. It might have been pertinent to my life if I was American and wanted to be a politician, but I'm actually neither. But I did find it interesting.

While he was President, Nixon recorded everything that happened in the White House. He had bugs placed in the all the phones and he carried around a tape recorder so that he could make a note of every thought that he had as President of the United States. He had people running around after him making notes to catalogue everything he did. After he resigned, as part the agreement of his pardon for Watergate from his successor Gerald Ford, he was given all the tapes so that he could keep them as a memento of his presidency forever.

Thompson said that Nixon's obsession with recording things made it look like he cared more about having something to put in the history books than actually running America, as if what was important was how he would look afterwards and how he would be remembered rather than actually helping his country. In the account, Thompson often compared him vividly to the Nazis, even going so far as to liken his underlings to Hitler's advisers, so he clearly wasn't perceived well. But he has been remembered, so it would seem that his aim has been achieved.

Thompson described Nixon's behaviour as a form of mental illness. This is coming from someone whose job it was to record everything that happened and who spent much of his career developing a whole new form of journalism based on it. But he nonetheless categorised the voluntary recording of one's own life as a form of madness. The way he wrote it, I could not help but agree. It seemed so strange that someone would do that - would record every second of their waking moment to ensure that they would be remembered exactly as they wanted to be perceived by other people.

But then I realised that it's practically the norm to do that now. No one does anything without worrying about what they'll tweet about it or how the photos will look on FaceBook. The TimeLine feature on FaceBook means that people can scroll back through their lives and edit out the things they don't want other people to see. It's exactly what Nixon did, exactly what made Thompson - who is, quite frankly, brilliant considering how well he can write when blitzed - predict that Nixon would spend the rest of his life listening to those tapes and reliving his presidency over and over again. Now, pretty much everyone automatically uploads and updates and makes sure that everyone else know what is going on at any given time.

It's scary to think that we'll all end up like Richard Nixon.

Then again, who wouldn't want to run the world and have an awesome body despite being nothing more than a head in a jar?

Yes, I realise the irony of blogging about this.

Looks Like I'm Going to Hell...

In my daily Googling and checking of FaceBook and Twitter, I tend to come across a lot of material created by people who don't seemed to understand their own religions. I am well aware and perfectly willing to admit that the reason I see a lot of these because I Liked and Followed a lot of pages that post them and I have no right to complain about my seeing of them. In fact, I don't mind them - sometimes they can be funny; more often, they make me wonder how humanity got to this stage of civilisation considering all the stupid people in it. But it does make me think. Partially about how people can so badly misinterpret a book at the heart of which is "Love thy neighbour" and, more broadly, about how supremely stupid people can be.

One of the most famous examples of religious zealotry is the Westboro Baptist Church, who take the conventional "God hates... [insert minority group here]" signs to the extremes of pretty much sending everyone in existence to hell. They are the kind of people who show up at the funeral of a soldier and chant at his family saying that their beloved son has gone to hell because he fought in a war that displeased their God. This is beyond despicable and anyone who has any sense of compassion would realise this. This disgusting behaviour is passed off as patriotism and religious fervour.

It's not; it's hateful.

But when all they have on their sign is "God hates you", it's difficult to know what you can do to change to earn God's favour. That in itself is something of a clue that these people don't really care about saving your immortal soul. They just rather enjoy making you feel like crap simply for existing.

But there are some groups - usually from the same extreme-right areas of America, but not always - who make the effort to specify what you're doing wrong and why God hates you. This is somewhat more useful if you conform to their ideas of a hateful Christian God and you want to fit into their rigid regime.

Take for example the helpful young man in the picture below, who has taken it upon himself to highlight the faults of pretty much everyone he can think of that might have displeased God. To his credit, he has made a thorough and clearly thought out list of all the things offensive to God. Apparently, God also hates the proper use of apostrophes. Either that, or this guy is just making it up as he goes along; you would think that if his writing was driven by a divine hand that there would at least be a basic grasp of punctuation...

I have to admit that some of them make a lot of sense. I am certainly not a fan of Mormons, wife-beaters (the people, not the style of top), racists or Scientologists (note the absence of unnecessary apostrophes in my list). In fact, there are quite a few social and religious groups that I'm not too keen on in that list. And, if there is a God, it's probably not too happy with the atheists - but that is purely providing that there is a God. 

But who are the effeminate men hurting? Really? And the Democrats - whether or not you agree with there policies, that is purely a political prejudice and has nothing to do with religion, as well as being a political party that is exclusive to America and so it is a moot point outside of the States. Then there is the rather broad heading 'liars'. I don't know anyone who hasn't told at least one lie, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, it IS best to say "No, we're definitely not throwing you a surprise party," or "Yes, I loved the birthday present you gave me; I definitely didn't think it was hideous...". I understand that emos sometimes can be a bit annoying, but I also think that sending them to burn for all eternity is a bit extreme. The threat certainly won't do anything to cheer them up. As an opinionated owner of ovaries, I also object to the phrase 'loud mouth women'. And I don't even know what they mean by 'sophisticated swine' or 'high fullutent'. I even Googled the word 'fullutent', and it didn't know what it meant either.

At this point, it would be easy to dismiss it by saying that that's just one idiot, but there are more. A quick Googling will prove this. But, if you can't be bothered to do that yourself, here's another one:

Again, it starts off with some quite sensible ideas. I would be quite happy to see Satanism, Scientology and astrology all disappearing from our culture and into the history books. I don't think that tarot cards, ouija boards, remote viewing or divination have any real affect on the world, but in general I don't care much when people do it. Lycanthropy (werewolves) and vampirism are pure fiction, so avoiding them should be pretty easy. Hallowe'en is famously a pagan celebration that has made its way into American culture, so it's easy to see why especially religious people would oppose it, but it's harmless. And, there at the end, what sensible person doesn't loathe Twilight? Although, apparently, the films pave the path to Satan, but the books don't. Maybe this person just really doesn't like Kristen Stewart and her bland, emotionless acting.

But there's Harry Potter, right there at the top of the third row, beneath video games. As a huge Potterhead and big fan of the Pokemon series, I am definitely NOT standing for that one. They realise that J. K. Rowling is religious, right? And that all the revelations about love and respect and everything that Dumbledore said in the last book was all based on the Christian teachings that she values? And Dungeons and Dragons. Really? Nerd games are going to send you to hell? Oh dear. Then fornication - not even sexual perversions or deviations, but all fornication - that's everyone who has ever had a baby; that's everyone who isn't a nun or a child. Not to mention 'skull and bones' - are they seriously trying to suggest that anyone born with a complete skeleton is doomed for all eternity?

Then, right at the bottom there's both rock music and heavy metal, which puts all that remains of my friends (that is, the ones that don't read Harry Potter or play Dungeons and Dragons) firmly in with the rest of us hell-bound fools.

It can't just be me who thinks that God doesn't really care about all these things, can it? Even if there is a God - and if even it does care intimately about people's private lives - why would these things matter? Surely, such a being would be above our choice of reading and listening material? Isn't it pretty obvious that God doesn't care too much about any of these things and that people are just using religion to justify their hatred and bigotry?

It's disgusting and a repellent use of religion and authority designed to hurt people and, quite frankly, until this behaviour is stamped out, we might as well just enjoy the efforts of winners like this dude:

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." - Anne Lamott