Much was made over the last few months about the apparent discovery of faster than light neutrinos at the CERN laboratories. The neutrinos appeared to travel at 60 seconds faster than the speed of light. Of course, this would stand in contrast to Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Now, those results seem to be attributed to an error in the process.

This will certainly be seen as a reason to celebrate for those professional frowners who did nothing but rain “we should wait and see…” negativity on the parade of interest in this particular scientific breakthrough.

Those people, are terrible.

Allow me to qualify, this is not about respecting the scientific process. Of course, we shouldn’t rush off and proclaim the preliminary research on neutrinos scientific fact, damaging a fundamental physics concept in the process. But it is it wrong to hope that it could change everything? Isn’t hope and enthusiasm for a better understanding of our natural world tempered with rigorous and constant verification the backbone of why science is awesome?

So the neutrino test turns out to be flawed. Fine. It was going to wind up here no matter which road we travelled. I am happy that a large population of folks who only kind of care about science got to take a route that included a possibility of Earth shattering realizations about time, space and our relation to it.

We’ve talked, a lot about space elevators on the Weird Things podcast. For good reason. We are in an exciting period of engineering evolution where our drive to get things into space cheaper and cheaper is merging with stronger and cheaper components.

The future or is now.

Or 2050 if you are the Obayashi Corp., a Tokyo based company which hopes to use carbon nanotubes to built an elevator to freaking space.

In Obayashi’s project, a cable would be stretched up to 96,000 kilometers, or about one-fourth of the distance between the Earth and the moon. One end of the cable would be anchored at a spaceport on the ground, while the other would be fitted with a counterweight.

The terminal station would house laboratories and living space. The car could carry up to 30 people to the station at 200 kilometers per hour, which would mean a 7-1/2 day trip to reach the station. Magnetic linear motors are one possible means of propulsion for the car, according to Obayashi.

The problem? Right now there is no estimated budget for the project and Obayashi brass simply hope to make incremental progress until… boom… space elevator. We aren’t sure how a project this big and this ambitious can survive a 40 year construction cycle with no solid budget. Hopefully, when I am 68 years old you can call a Double Dumbass on me during our seven day trip to outer space.

[Yumiori via Gizmodo]

The thrilling second Chronological Man Adventure!

Who is the Martian Emperor?

When a giant airship descends on New York City in 1892 and threatens destruction if the world doesn’t submit to the Martian flag, it’s up to the mysterious Smith, inventor and adventurer to find out what forces are at work.

From the dangerous basement fan-tan parlors of Chinatown to the top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, Smith and his brilliant assistant, April Malone, will have to unravel the clues and avoid danger lurking behind every corner. To stop the menace they’ll need they enlist the help of Theodore Roosevelt and other early twentieth-century heroes.

The second book in The Chronological Man series, The Martian Emperor combines mystery, airship battles and backroom Tammany Hall politics against the backdrop of a world on the verge of war.

53,000 words – approximately 160 pages.

[BUY IT NOW ONLY 99¢]

After an episode that left my expectations for this episode in the same shape as Lori’s car. I was ready to quit. Done writing recaps. I don’t like crapping on TV that other people like.

Unless it’s Heroes. Because, seriously, f— Heroes.

But with that said, last Sunday’s installment was… good? Yeah, it was good. It was definitely good. In fact, it is only the proximity to the previous week’s poop storm which qualifies my praise.

Like a beaten dog, I can’t help but flinch even when given a treat. I digest this snausage AFTER THE JUMP Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a revolution best served with pickles and onions on a sesame seed bun.

The first test-tube grown hamburger will be produced this fall. Although still in the laboratory phase as of now, the experiment will eventually produces thousands of small tissues recreated from a cow’s stem cells. This proof of concept could be a very powerful one, reshaping agriculture as we know it.

Could meat grown in a lab and not from a slaughtered animal be considered vegan?

Only time and possibly some Bar-B-Q sauce will tell…

[Fox News]

It streaked through the sky and made a loud boom in South Carolina, but what exactly crashed to Earth this week in the Palmetto State?

A local astronomer claims it was a meteorite, but we will leave it up to you dear readers to determine for yourselves. Could this be a rogue alien craft, crash laded on our home planet?

Not that Adolf Hitler is really hurting for further reasons to categorize him as a first-class jerk, but we can add one more log to the fire.

Adolf Hitler was a deadbeat dad.

At least that’s what new evidence suggests. As an idealistic young soldier in France during World War I, Hitler befriended a 16-year-old farm girl named Charlotte Lobjoie. One night, after getting a little liquored up, Ol’ Adolf blitzkrieg’d young Charlotte and nine months later Jean-Marie Loret was born.

That baby went on to join the French resistance in their struggle against the Nazi menace. Loret’s claim of being fathered by Hitler is not new. He spelled out his case in a 1981 memoir, which was long thought to be discredited.

Until now.

The new evidence — which includes handwriting analysis, documents indicating Hitler secretly supported the woman financially and paintings signed “Adolf Hitler” discovered in her home — is outlined by Le Point magazine, whose report Friday was widely picked up in the French media but largely ignored by German news outlets.

So why would someone’s estate work so hard to prove they are the only biological descendant of the most reviled dictator in modern history? Mein Royalties!

Cash collected for Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf could be collected by Loret’s children.

Or… you know… Hitler’s grandkids.

[MSNBC]

Heard your friends talking about Andrew Mayne’s books but don’t have the coin to pick one up? Now you can listen to his first three book for free in audiobook podcast form.

The Grendel’s Shadow: T.R. Westwood, distinguished professor of biology and the galaxy’s greatest hunter is in for the biggest challenge of his career. When an unknown animal starts killing off settlers on a backwater planet run on coal and steam power, he’s the only person who can help stop the slaughter.

GET The Grendel’s Shadow audiobook HERE!

Public Enemy Zero: The world is out to kill Mitchell Roberts. A strange virus is on the loose sending everyone he comes in contact with into a homicidal rage. He’s got to stay a step ahead of everyone around him if he doesn’t want to get ripped apart alive.

GET Public Enemy Zero audiobook HERE!

The Chronological Man: The Monster in the Mist: When the citizens of Boston begin to go missing in the fog in 1890, it’s up to the mysterious Smith, inventor and adventurer, to figure out what’s going on with the help of his assistant, April Malone.

GET The Chronological Man audiobook HERE!

Don’t dig iTunes? Find all the raw RSS feeds at AndrewMayne.com/books

GUESTS: Bonnie Brushwood, Kimmy Kim, Frutron (Hollywood is Hard)

Recorded on Valentine’s Day… Love is in the air as we are joined by not one, not two but three actual women. Bonnie The Invisible Wife is joined by Kimmy Kim and Frutron from the YouTube series Hollywood is Hard. Ritual cannibalism as a sign of respect for a fallen loved one is discussed. Frutron is bit by a deadly snake that could lead to all the wrong kinds of weight loss. Brian is consistently confused by descriptions of a Woolly Mammoth. A purple squirrel is loosed in a peaceful Pennsylvania town.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK The Chronological Man: The Martian Emperor just click on the image below.

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Picks:

Andrew-

Gladiator

Brian:

The Name of the Wind

Justin:

Chronicle

Kimmy Kim & Frutron:

Death and Return of Superman

Bonnie:

Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer

It’s finally happened. The endless bleating of Boing Boing commenters has summoned a creature neither God nor man will lay claim to.

The sheeple are here.

Although many surely thought sheeple was only a derogatory slur for those blind to the bought and paid for government controlling our every move, the truth is far more sinister. Nigerian locals believe a sheep gave birth to a sheep/people hybrid this week.

Garba Aminu, a commercial motorcycle rider, averred: “This is an abomination in our land. To see a sheep give birth to a half human being is a mystery and that shows how terrible some people are. It is unimaginable that some people will be having intercourse with animals.”

Of course, doctors (no doubt in the employ of the Federal Reserve) claim this is simply a horrific deformity and not a mutant sent to open the eyes of a weary proletariat. But those of us paying attention know far better.

The sheeple are here! Wake up other sheeple that are actually humans! The truth is right in front of you.

[The Blaze]

“There’s no hope left, I see that now.”

Herschel, our ever-optimistic farm host is now crestfallen over the events of the zombie barn party. He’s now come to the conclusion that he was wrong about zombies, it’s not a disease, it’s a death sentence.

But he isn’t really talking about walkers. No. He’s talking about this show. One insanely stupid character decision piled on top of more trite plot devices and topped itself off with a TWD hallmark, repeated conversations between characters that aren’t that interesting the first place.

Abandon all hope ye who click AFTER THE JUMP. Read the rest of this entry »

The whole gang is back! After an inexcusable hiatus, breaking up the momentum just as the season got reasonably interesting we finally return to meet back up with Rick Grimes and company this Sunday on AMC.

Either the series rebounds to the form of the first season and the flickering promise of the final act of the mid-season finale. Or we return the plodding nonsense that was the heft of first half. In genre television, a realm where concepts and execution mean so much, you either pass or fail.

The Walking Dead is at the tipping point.

Two sides of a coin. Two paths in a wood. Is TWD ready to step up its game?

Let’s consider the possibilities.

Remember true believers, we’ve been here before. Worse even! It was late November, 2006. In order to avoid maddening rerun breaks in the schedule of their suddenly popular cult hit Lost, ABC came up with a brilliant plan. Run it with no repeats, but in two parts. One six-episode run in the fall and the bulk in the spring.

The results were awful. The six-episode arc plodded, new characters added nothing to the show and took away screen time from old favorites and at the end of six hours we got a tense yet predictable climax that delivered on none of the mind blowing awesomeness we’d come to expect from Lost.

Run Kate! Run (away from this show because it’s boring)!

But something miraculous happened when the show returned in February of 2007. The creative spark was back. We got the first of what would become a trilogy of great episodes centered around Desmond’s time defying, reality hopping prowess. Our big bad Ben Linus became both more ruthless and sympathetic through an artfully told backstory. Found out why Locke was in a wheelchair. AND.. AND… AND they cleared the new character dead weight with a flourish. And Billy D. Williams.

Meanwhile, the season finale ended with perhaps the biggest sucker punch in a series known for sucker punches. A brilliant example of why you need to consistently blow up your mythology to keep things interesting.

We have to go back Kate! We have to go back (to watch this seasons again because it ruled)!

What can TWD learn?

Dead isn’t Lost. But it is the most important show about zombies since… well… ever. The first season showed so much outside-the-box promise. The CDC and Merle Dixon explored concepts like global hope and power dynamics in a thrilling and exciting way. Although Herschel’s farm certainly gave us a careful examination of how to consider the humanity of the undead, it took it’s sweet time to do it and diluted the point like a homeopathic cold remedy.

In the second half of season three, Lost focused on telling great one episode stories. Some dealt with previous mythology but many (like Desmond’s Flashes Before Your Eyes) did not. Let’s get more of those! You have an endless possibility of character interaction in show about post-apocalyptic survivors. What strange people? Cultures?

Think about how many terrible episodes in the first half hung their entire dramatic arc on the search for a little girl they knew they weren’t going to find? The complications they found were either easily solvable or had no dramatic consequence.

Not to beat a dead horse, but the sure fire way to fowl this up is to follow the comic series closer than they have. Until we get to Woodbury and meet The Governor (whose casting rumors are quite juicy) there’s a whole lot of sloooooooooooow burn in this source material.

This is not a slow burn series, it’s a story about survival and the forces against it. Or at least it shouldn’t be if it wants to be watchable.

The Foundation is a sprawling series of novels by Issac Asimov revolving around one core conceit. In the future, a brilliant man cracks the source code of the universe. He boils down the seemingly random emotions and decisions of billions into mathematical certainty.

He understands that civilizations will rise and fall and rise again only to again break down and rebuild.

So, he makes a choice for the betterment of humanity. He creates a society, far away from the hub of humanity, where a core group will curate the whole of human knowledge. The idea being, if he cannot stop the universe from descending into chaos he can certainly help it rebuild faster.

Today, we live in a world where that source code gets clearer every day. In a report published this week, we’ve begun to find mathematical patterns in seemingly random group decision making.

In the Jan. 29 Nature, for example, a team led by Scheffer reported success using one mathematical test of an approaching tipping point. Theory says that when a shift is coming, a system exhibits what scientists call a critical slowing down. Normally, a really stable system quickly recovers after being perturbed. But when everything is about to come unglued, the recovery time from even a small perturbation becomes slower and slower.

But the question remains, as we get better at this, how do we handle the knowledge? If we know outcomes won’t we become determined to change them? Doesn’t this effect the calculus? It is ironic that Asimov saw all this coming? Or was he truly the Seldon of our age?

[Science News]

I guess this means we can stop trying to clone them, right?

[The Sun]

Two movies, ten years apart, one friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Both were preceded by teasers which didn’t quite hit as intended. Sam Raimi’s independent mini-story containing all original footage that wouldn’t be seen in the film was understandably shelved after 9/11 due to a final shot of a baddie helicopter ensnared in a web between the World Trade Center towers. Meanwhile, Marc Webb’s first peak into his Spidey universe was criticized for an over-serious tone, origin story fatigue and underwhelming “MADE FOR 3D” first person perspective sequence.

But let’s focus on the big trailers… the one that in 2001 proved to give us the most accurate look at 2002’s film and whose modern-day counterpart will hopefully do the same for July’s Amazing adventure.

The biggest difference upon watching both back to back is how differently Peter Parker is handled. Toby Maguire is an affable goofball who is gaining a sense of purpose by way of his powers. Oozing likability, Raimi gives him the trappings of a nerd (glasses, ill-fitting clothing, square hair cut) but aside from an awkward pass at Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson, we don’t see much of that evidenced in his character.

Even the Parker narration over the first minute of the trailer has a “Holy Moly, you wouldn’t believe what’s happened over the last few weeks” tone.

Compare that to Andrew Garfield’s far more brooding, introspective Parker. We skip the “spider bite shot” and get right into web swinging action. 20 seconds into the trailer, Parker is inventing his web shooters. A few seconds after that he’s defending Spider-Man in a heated conversation.

If there were a character narration over this trailer, one might assume it would sound much more like a Captain’s Log. He knows he’s smart and draws strength from that when dealing with others. His weakness comes for abandonment issues which makes him quiet, but not necessarily unsure of himself.

In a word, the difference is confidence. The Maguire’s Parker never truly understood his powers and was constantly struggling to make sense of them. Garfield’s version appears to look at them more like an experiment. He’s not afraid to push them past their limits and doesn’t view them as a reflection on himself.

Our new Peter Parker seems determined to make his mark on the word through science. His new abilities just give him another tool to do it.

“While wobbegongs eating sharks has been recorded before from stomach contents, this is the first time it has been photographed in action.”

[NewScientist]