Beer! In! Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

Beer in spaceHot on the (slightly wobbly) heels of tales of drunken astronauts at the controls of the Space Shuttle comes a delightfully scientific report on the theory and practice of, yes,

Beer! In! SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!

…Graduate student Kirsten Sterrett at the University of Colorado in the US wrote a thesis on fermentation in space, with support from US beer behemoth Coors. She sent a miniature brewing kit into orbit aboard a space shuttle several years ago and produced a few sips of beer. She later sampled the space brew, but because of chemicals in and near it from her analysis, it didn’t taste great by the time she tried it.

Did anyone else note that, had it tasted good, it would have been the first beverage produced by Coors that ever did.

orbit beer

But there are drawbacks. Despite advantages like no lanes in space and not much to run into, turns out there are some compelling reasons not to chug your Spud in orbit.

Unfortunately for thirsty astronauts, beer is poorly suited to space consumption because of the gas it includes. Without gravity to draw liquids to the bottoms of their stomachs, leaving gases at the top, astronauts tend to produce wet burps.

On the upside, although in the oxygen-enriched atmosphere astronauts cannot partake of beer bongs, they can, thanks to advanced and high-priority Dutch research, partake of beer balls.

I once dated a guy who had beer balls, or so he tried to tell me in the backseat of his father’s Caddy.

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quiz: how white and nerdy are you?

The results of this should be very interesting, coming from certain of my readers.

As for moi, no surprise.

62%! Go me! To the Renaissance Faire!

How White and Nerdy r u?

Stolen from The Thinking Southerner

for the original video, click here; for the Lego version, click here.
We’re ALL ABOUT Weird Al and the White and Nerdy!

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The amazing comical adventures of lil’ Werner in Physicslandia!

Heisenberg comix

stolen from Neatorama, who also have an interesting backgrounder on Heisenberg.
See more of lil’ Werner‘s adventures on artist Dresden Codak‘s site.

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zombie hamsters, the whores of Lisle street, the Lord of the Flies, and global warming

Zombie HamsterIt’s a long story.

First of all, the zombie hamsters were created by rigging up surplus military material to nuke them back to life after they were frozen solid by the Mad Scientists of Mill Hill.

No, I am not making this up.

Second of all, the scientist in charge of hamster zombification was James Lovelock, who later originated the Gaia Hypothesis, for which he is alternately vilified and deified by the Global Warming is an Apocalypse/Global Warming is a Hoax crowd, depending on how literal-minded the reader happens to be at that particular moment.

Third, the Gaia Hypothesis itself was named by the man who wrote Lord of the Flies. Which gives one pause, especially if one is a happy hippie kumbaya life-in-harmony type. Maybe the “Red in Tooth and Claw Hypothesis” was taken?

Fourth, to obtain the components for the hamster zombification machine, Lovelock had to delve deeply into the Red Light district of London, an area whose denizens, it is claimed, held no charms for him. That’s our boy! I’m sure those spinster novelists who were responsible for the creation of the archetype of respectable “confirmed bachelor” would be proud of him.

Actually (fifth!), microwaving the hamsters was an improvement over what they were doing before, which was putting heated spoons on their chests until their hearts restarted. Was one of those Mill Hillers a freebaser, perchance?

In any case (sixth!), it’s a long, strange journey from reanimating cryorodents to inventing the Grand Unified Theory of Planet Earth. But once you realize that the central question is: what is life, the flight plan makes more sense.

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intellectuLOLs

Who says Lolcats can’t be intellectual? Take a look for yourself, and resolve to feel less guilty in the future:

Schrodingers lolcat

and

Pluto Lolcat