Feed the Machine: A God Named Higgs
Standard Model So the Higgs Boson was confirmed last year was it? I can’t remember. Anyway, it won Mr. Higgs and that other guy who also theorized it a truckload of krona. Meanwhile, the men and women who actually discovered the damn thing got no love. But fear not, you honorable CERN employees, because you still have the best jobs in the world. The article above theorizes about the Higgs particle/field creating an entire particle landscape with its influence. If you could control the Higgs field, could you turn raw energy into whichever particles — both mundane and exotic — that you’d like? Wormholes would become practically commonplace if one could
A Book by Its Cover: The Curiosity
Timothy “Buttons” McBanks is the greatest door-to-door cane salesman of his generation. There isn’t a cane he cannot sell: bamboo sticks from the heart of the Orient, wrought iron from Detroit City, and even twisted lengths of cursed yew from the blackest depths of the Queen’s England. A plaque set into the
Feed the Machine: Blunderdome
This week’s Feed the Machine will be a little different. Before I go on, here is the link to the article in question: Following the missteps of giants — Phys.org It’s a short article, more a review than a science article really, but it got me thinking, and I want it to get you thinking. Why would one of the most respected scientists of the 21st century knowingly make such a blunder? Beyond this, what if, on an alternate earth, there was a scientist who was so respected, so smart, so right about everything, that her discoveries weren’t examined? In fact, they were taken as LAW the moment she set them down to paper? What if the world conformed to her laws, even when they were wrong? What if it didn’t? What if someone called her on it? Imagine a
A Book By Its Cover: I Am Pusheen the Cat by Claire Belton
I Am Pusheen the Cat by Claire Belton Padhusheen Singh — Pusheen to her friends — starts the day like any other: realizing that she will be late for class. What makes this day different? She is scheduled to present her dissertation on phytoquantum felineconomics in fifteen minutes! Grabbing the bag that contains her experiment, Pusheen jumps on her cherry Vespa motorscooter and jams it into top gear. She slaloms through traffic like Peekaboo Streak. As the college comes into view, she glances down at her Hello Kitty watch. She’s going to make it in time! Pusheen doesn’t see the cement mixer until its too late. Lifting into the air, Pusheen clutches her bag and waits for the ground to send her to the reincarnation bingo hall (or however the gods do it; she was never very orthodox). Click. In a haze of strange quarks, she activates her experiment. A moment later, she is twisting through the air to land safely on the ground…on all four of her paws. I Am Pusheen the Cat puts readers inside the bell on Pusheen’s collar while she tries to negotiate school, life, and love as a woman-sized cat. While Pusheen is a chubby, cuddly-wuddly striped gray kitty on the outside, inside she’s your typical twenty-something Indian-American. Just because she’s as adorable as a newborn baby in a suit of teddy bears doesn’t mean she can miss her shift at Pizza Moat (“Can I get a supreme, but hold the hairballs please.”) or stand Chet the Quarterback up on Friday night (“You’re lucky I’m a Furry.”) No, life as a one hundred sixty pound cat with the mind of a Ph. D. student isn’t easy, but it is interesting. ——————————————————————— A Book By Its Cover comedically (re)imagines stories, plots, and characters of books based entirely on the cover.
Feed the Machine: Black Hole Son
Goodbye Big Bang, hello black hole? A new theory of the universe’s creation This week’s article is a doozy. It has everything a science fiction fan could want — branes, four dimensional stars, black holes, hyperspheres — and it is all completely true. That’s a bit misleading. Mathematically, the theory is plausible. There are still a few kinks and refinements, but it does posit some interesting possibilities for the origin of our universe. Now let’s get down to making that Purina Machine Chow.
A Book by its Cover: Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer
Back cover blurb: “By the author of “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” one of the great Midwestern marine horror novels of the 21st century, comes a novel so chilling that it comes with a wool blanket at the check out counter. Finnigan Mt. Belucci, estranged son of the famed Belucci Fishing Family, just wants to lead a normal, northern Wisconsin life with his wife, Margaret. He wants to get a few chickens, maybe a cow — lord knows enough of wild beasts roam the countryside — and a little shack on Bayfield’s idyllic coast. Everything is blue bonnet’s and walleye fish fries until a heavy fog rolls in February 14th. The Mt. Belucci’s, on a romantic ferry ride, get stopped half-way between Madeline Island and Bayfield. As strange noises begin to emanate from below deck, all semblance of humanity leaves the ferry goers. As the Belucci’s try desperately to escape the madness around them, one thing becomes immediately apparent: they’ll never look at candy hearts the same again.” Ann Packer made her name in Midwest Gothic, and this is a blissful return to form. Having taken a departure to study French Buddhism, Packer immediately began work on the fevered dreams that would become Swim Back to Me on her return to her native Green Bay. Six years and two dozen drafts later, this little masterpiece dropped on my desk. It’s a slim volume, and innocuous looking. The faded pastels of the cover betray the transgressive musings inside. Packer’s parallels between the color of prop churned seabed and human carnage are nauseating. The early decline of the Mt. Belucci’s relationship over a misinterpreted text message give Packer the opportunity to rebuild their relationship on the boat ride. However, even though [spoiler alert] Finnigan gets his hand cut off in the second act, forcing Margaret to protect and coddle him back to health through the incredibly rapid onset of infection (one gets the sense that time is distorted on the ferry), we never get the sense that love will retake a hold in their relationship. They rely on the familiar in unfamiliar, and terrifying, surroundings, but, as in King’s 1408, the relationship never re-materializes. This would be my main criticism of the book: the rekindled relationship Packer sets up never comes about. I may have been misinterpreting the foreshadowing, but it seemed as if it was inevitable, and inevitability is a main theme of the novel; from the sense of foreboding that Margaret gets when she sets foot on the ferry, to the mutated fish that claw their way up the hull and begin disemboweling anything with a heartbeat, to the ultimate sacrifice of Captain Helena using her own body as a replacement prop shaft. It seemed out of sorts to have the most inevitable outcome of the book to go by the wayside, but, again, this could be Packer putting us on edge once again. In the end, this is a great example of old school horror done with a deft hand. Recommended. (A Book by its Cover is our new weekly column in which we review a book based solely on the cover, without any other knowledge of what it is about. Any similarities in our review to the book are purely coincidental and proof that we are awesome)
