Monday, August 24, 2009

The Roll-Over Restaurant

Warning: This idea may have actual merit. The authors do not claim responsibility for posting a realistic or otherwise reasonable idea.

Ever been taken to a table at a diner only to see the busdude take away some plates half full of side dishes? Ever think about asking them to leave it behind as an appetizer? It's time to start a new kind of restaurant for all of us dirty kids who don't care about germs and hate seeing all that food go to waste!

Consider the assumption that all parties have equal hunger and order meals of equal sizes. Think about it: One party isn't super hungry and leaves 10% of their meal behind. The next group eats that 10%, and so their hunger is diminished by the same amount, causing them to leave 20% of their meal behind.
The effect snowballs, and every 10 customers, someone gets a free meal! We all get to enjoy a free appetizer (except for that first party, who might receive it gratis for being part of the great cycle), no food gets wasted, and people keep coming back both for our delicious cuisine and in hopes of winning that theoretical every-10-customers lottery! Of course, not everyone has the same hunger, or orders the same-sized meal, but that thought experiment would occur in less-mathematically-precise, less-repeatable ways!

If you think this is gross and unsanitary, you probably won't frequent this restaurant. If you are from the health department, please don't come to this restaurant. But if you don't like seeing food go to waste, this may just be the place for you.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Unified Field Fighting Force, Go!

A brave cadre of heroes lives among us! The Four Interactions is their name, and fighting the enemies of the laws of the universe is their game. Our heroes are:
Graviton Man - Using his great mass, he draws enemies in close like a great Scorpion (the Mortal Kombat one) so that he might pummel them with his vast strength! Though his enemies may flee a great distance, they can only asymptotically escape his grasp.
Electromagnetia - Wielding her powerful Photons(TM), the lovely Electromagnetia can use pulses to throw enemy technology into disarray, extremely shortwave beams to imbue them with a deadly sickness, or simple high-energy emissions to attack many enemies at once!
Strong Nucleo - With his mysterious Gluon Gun, Nucleo can bind enemies together, even causing them to lose mass! If he reverses the gun's polarity, watch out! He might just unbind his enemies' nuclei!
Little Nukey - Strong Nucleo's little brother can drive his enemies to illness and even decomposition with his special power, Beta Decay!

Fighting for the well-being of our physical universe, our heroes must every day battle the scum and villainy of space-time such as their arch-rival, Maxwell's Demon. But their individual powers alone are not always enough to defeat their enemies. Strong Nucleo, his wife Electromagnetia, and their pal Little Nukey can fuse together to form the powerful Grand Unification! This, of course, takes very high energies, so they need the help of their human allies. At the peak of their strength, all four fighters can combine into the Unified Field Fighting Force, an unstoppable beacon of fighting!

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

More than good: They're mandatory

That's what the slogan should be for popular breakfast cereal Frosted Flakes of corn, according to a recent study published in Breakfast Weekly. A new natural law was discovered regarding the sugary part of this complete breakfast - in short, when you see it, you must eat it. The exact cause - biological? physical? chemical? - of this phenomenon is as yet unknown, but one absolutely must consume Frosted Flakes (or any off-brand knockoff) on sight.

The repercussions of this are many. Health aside, the impact it will have on combat is huge. Assassins will merely, shielding their eyes and skin from the package, chuck an individual serving of the stuff at their opponent, who will then be too taken by eating them to defend himself. Automobile accidents were also found to be affected - in fact, the study says, 69% of auto accidents were directly caused by the driver opening his or her sun visor, having a pack of Frosted Flakes fall onto his or her lap, and proceeding to crash his or her car for obvious reasons.
You just hafta eatem.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Tag! You're absurd.

Meet the AA-12, perhaps the most unnecessary weapons ever conceived. Capable of firing 300 nearly-recoilless rounds per minute, and also being A SHOTGUN, it has the added bonus of being banned from combat by the Geneva Convention - which makes it all the more fun to use.

That particular pleasure aside, the main purpose of the AA-12 is for sweet games of tag. Usually, games of tag are limited by the slow firing rate. The AA-12 opens a whole new world of tag-tagback chains, as well as multiple chances for successfully tagging a new "it" despite having missed.

Of course, the anti-recoil feature of the AA-12 renders it useless for use in inertial dampeners, another common application of shotguns (and arguably the one most relevant to space travel). More on that particular technology is forthcoming.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

M.A.D. is Mad, or: How both the Asteroid Belt and Life on Earth Came Into Being

M.A.D. is Mad, or: How both the Asteroid Belt and Life on Earth Came Into Being
(A Spenserian Sonnet)

Our sun once had a planet number Five
That came between our Mars and Jupiter.
In fact, this planet once was quite alive -
And so was Mars, and not at all was Earth.

A terrifying War was raging on:
Destruction was both mutu'l and assur'd,
But days before the tragic denouement,
Fifth planet sent to Earth a seeding bird.

The weapons, all beyond our field of thought,
Came first from Mars, to get an early lead.
Fifth planet didn't get to send a lot,
And only charred Mars' surface with their deed.

The poor fifth planet heard the bigger thunder:
Though seeded Earth, their home was torn asunder.

A Long-Ass History of Time

It has been noted that Jake and Billy, your Authors, are in reality millions of light years across in size. It follows that, each minuscule motion we take, millions of light years pass, and entire species wax and wane into extinction, each of them assuming (if sentient) that the current shape of whatever we're doing (perhaps one of us typing) is and always has been the shape of the local universe. Also, every time one of your Authors completes this slow motion and successfully punches some object, millions of solar systems are destroyed and rendered neutron stars or supernovae.

Friday, April 10, 2009

The NSF and their Future Truman Show

We are all (excluding myself and Jake) aware of the Truman Show that is about me and Jake. The National Science Foundation actually has access to the Future Truman Show, which shows what will be happening on the show about 3 or 4 hours ahead of the present time. They can accomplish this because they have science.

Pending my acceptance or rejection into the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the folks at the NSF must have turned on the Future Truman Show and seen the profoundly stupid, goofy way I informed/pouted at my esteemed colleague Jacob Brunner about my rejection. Namely,
"I didib get da en ed eb belloshib! I didib get da en ed eb belloshibb!"
This is, of course, not the kind of person they want as an NSF fellow. They had no choice but to reject me, not realizing that in so doing they were only fulfilling the potential future they had seen on TV.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Twelve Miles Out

Recent research in the technicalities division has revealed that the space within a doorway constitutes international waters. That is to say, standing inside of a doorway grants one complete freedom from the law.

We know what you're thinking, and yes, it DOES negate the effects of Grimace Cookies, and vice versa (i.e. only one of the two can be active or the effects cancel out).

Interestingly, several governments have attempted to render it illegal to take shelter under a doorway during an earthquake, but quickly found that their law could scarcely be enforced.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Death Rites are One of the Features Common to Every Human Culture

The title is according to E. O. Wilson's On Human Nature, wherein he actually cites it to some other guy. Pretty neat, huh? But this important work was written in the 70s. Had it been able to predict the future as your Authors can, it would have certainly gone further into what will become the sweetest funeral rites of any culture. Namely, the culture consisting of the entire world.

The macro-culture of all of humanity - that is to say, the features shared by every culture - will be transformed by the zombie crisis of the year 2xxx. According to Romero canon, anybody who dies will be reanimated by, uh, radiation. This applies even if they were not attacked by a zombie. It necessarily follows that after quelling the zombie horde and regaining stable footing of civilization, humanity will have to instate new death rites that are swift and entail complete destruction of the body, so that the deceased will not reanimate.

Of course, humanity has their own way of twisting customs past their original functionality. What follows is what this will evolve to after many decades.

  • Anybody who finds the deceased (henceforth referred to as the executor, with apologies to Tassadar) must first be sure that the deceased is in fact dead. Any child can tell you that this is a simple matter of examining whether the tongue is sticking out, and whether the eyes are replaced by letters X.
  • The executor then pushes the deceased up against a wall or some other sturdy object, while shouting "YOU ARE DEAD!" in a scary voice.
  • The executor draws a ceremonial dagger that all people carry. With it, he deeply cuts the throat of the deceased to ensure a severed connection from body to head.
  • With the same dagger, the executor carves a large rectangle into the torso of the deceased, effectively disembowling him. The executor proceeds to rip as many organs and guts from this hole as he can in one rough grab, and to dump them upon his own head to experience spiritual bonding with the deceased. There is no greater sign of respect than to show that the dead's entrails are fit to be the finest headwear.
The preceding steps are, as it is plain to see, the very logical conclusion of cultural evolution after the zombie crisis. The strange bit that seems to stray from the functionality is that, in most cultures, it eventually becomes normal for the executor to slit his own throat, eviscerate himself, and dump his organs upon the head of the deceased. Perhaps this reciprocation is to show that the deceased, too, once respected the executor. Nonetheless, it makes encountering a corpse seem much more troubling from our cultural perspective.

Two final notes:
  1. Assassins with two targets have a much easier job when this custom is about. They need only wait until the targets are near each other and relatively secluded, and then kill one of them from afar. The custom is so ingrained that the other target would proceed to perform the fatal funeral rites.
  2. In order to protect one's loved ones, someone who wishes to commit suicide would likely commit what is considered a "complete suicide" - that is, do so in some manner that results in his own throat already cut and his own viscera already atop his own head. This way, since the executor and the deceased are the same person, both the first part and the reciprocation of the custom have already been carried out, and any discoverer is safe.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

On a Novel Method of Conducting a War, or: Sleepytime Warfare

There are few who will deny that warfare is a grim and grizzly affair. This is for a number of reasons, but if one primary downside to war could be isolated, we think everyone knows what it would be.
Perhaps it was John Hammond, of Jurassic Park fame, who put it best: "People. Are. Dying."

So war is nasty. Most who realize this call for an end to war in general, but experience has shown this to be impractical due to the insidious nature of global politics and, arguably, human nature itself. People will always say "give peace a chance," and then leaders will say "okay, sounds good," and then later double back and explain that "it's just pretty necessary right now is all."

If war is a feature that refuses to be removed from existence, we propose an alternate solution: to change that feature rather than fail to remove it. If dying is the nastier part of war, then war without death would be a desirable alternative. This can be accomplished with chloroform.

Chloroform warfare would involve two sides battling with supplies of rags and chloroform. Unarmed combat would ensue, resulting in no more than some bruises and at most a broken limb, in order to force one's rag into the opponent's face and cause him to fall asleep. At the end of the battle, the winning side would have more people awake and therefore be able to drag the opposing side away from their fortification or what have you.

Administering chloroform is a delicate operation. Too little causes mere dizziness, and too much can cause death. Two likely opposing arguments are:
  1. That soldiers may still kill their opponents, be it through lack of skill or under orders to reduce the number of enemies for a later battle.
  2. That some sort of chloroform arms race would ensue and armies would attempt to build better and better means of deploying the stuff, i.e. chloroform bombs and grenades, launchers, etc.
This is why each soldier's chloroform must be imbued with a unique tracer, and killing is strictly outlawed in such a war. The charge would be murder, or perhaps manslaughter if the soldier can prove the death was accidental. Indeed, many opponents of war would be happy with this, as they already often say that a war-killing and murder are one in the same. Note that tracers would be benign and degrade within a few months.

The resulting procedure is as follows: when a man is found dead on the battlefield, an autopsy is performed to determine if he indeed died of chloroform overdose. If so, the tracer is found. It is possible that, say, soldiers A and B both chloroformed this man. Perhaps soldier A did first, and did so properly, and soldier B, perhaps having a personal grudge against the victim, arrived and gave him more. The tracers would coat the lungs in the order in which they were administered, and in a quantity proportional to the amount of chloroform. It could therefore be seen if soldier A overdosed the victim, or of he dosed him properly and then soldier B administered an unnecessary dosage that pushed him into death.

If no tracer is found, but the cause of death is chloroform, the commander of the opposing outfit is charged for allowing one of his men to use untraced chloroform. This would keep commanders on their toes about regulating all chloroform in their unit. Some may call this unfair, as it is hard for one commander to keep a close eye on every one of his men, but it is a lot more fair than people dying in war the way it happens today. Becoming a commander of any sort should be a big responsibility, and anyone who becomes one should either really want to despite the risk, or be afraid of their responsibility (also because of the risk) and therefore more careful and watchful with their power. It is likely that units would be smaller and armies would self-regulate very strictly because of this.

There would likely be some kinks to work out as the world got accustomed to this new system of warfare. This is inevitable but necessary; to once again borrow from the wisdom of John Hammond, "When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!"