More Science

Over the weekend, I watched part of a TV series about ancient alien visitors. It explained how extraterrestrials built the pyramids, wrote the Bible, and taught Benjamin Franklin the art of kite flying...not to mention noting that the moon is obviously hollow and that all Egyptian Pharaohs were spacefaring hybrids with the ability to manipulate DNA. I was already familiar with most of those facts, but didn't realize that most Rennaissance religious iconography incorporates tiny spaceships into the painting's background...usually just over the Virgin Mary's left ear. Fascinating.

What they did NOT explain was why my last two bags of Peppermint Patties have contained so many individually-wrapped packages where the candy has secreted a clear, sticky goo that makes it hard to open the wrapper and gets slime on your fingers as you attempt to "get the sensation." Is this because the delivery truck sat in the heat too long...or is it the result of radiation leaking from the Ark of the Covenant, which obviously contains some sort of 2000-year old nuclear weapon? After hearing the facts about how the aliens have had a hand in every major event since the beginning of time (including the extinction of the dinosaurs, global warming, and the career of Ryan Secrest), the second explanation seems far more plausible.

Will I stop eating Patties, just because I've had to deal with gooey fingers for the last few weeks? No, probably not. Even a flawed and slimed-out Patty is preferable to most other desserts. And until my friends stage an intervention and hire hypnosis-trained deprogrammers to kidnap me and force-feed me Snickers bars instead, I suspect my addiction will remain intact.

I'm curious, though -- what is YOUR favorite ancient alien artifact? Stonehenge? Easter Island? Orson Welles? Let me know and I'll share the survey results. Thanks.

So, what about these guys? Well, I have to confess that it was probably a bit deceptive for me to challenge you to "figure out which photo from the right column goes with which scientist" -- because they are all lined up correctly as it is.

The key to the puzzle is that name of the photo item is embedded within the name of the associated scientist. Our first brainiac is Sir Isaac Newton, who is paired with Newt Gingrich. Get it?

Next we have the famous cat-killer, Erwin Schrödinger. Below him is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who discovered that there is a limit to the mass of a stable white dwarf star, which as we all know, is 2.864 × 10³⁰ kg.

For some reason, a bunch of folks seem to think that the next dude is named "Hawkins", and are under the impression that his most enduring contribution to society is the wheelchair-mounted boxing glove. But the fellow's name is actually Stephen Hawking, and his cosmological research has provided humanity with a greater understanding of light, black holes, and the nature of the space-time continuum.

The guy with the flamethrower is Albert Einstein, a name that is also associated with multiple significant breakthroughs in cosomolgical knowledge. But it actually takes a slight bit of Kevin Bacon-ish logic to get to the fluffy-haired scientist from the cartoon. The character shown here is actually called Hank Scorpio, and is trying to take over the world in Bond-villain fashion. But his voice was provided by the same guy who played the father fish in "Finding Nemo", Mr. Albert Brooks. What you may not know is that "Brooks" is a stage name -- he was actually born with the surname "Einstein", but felt that having the same name as the E-MC² guy could be a detriment to his comedy career. His brother Robert, though, kept the family name as he pursued a slightly different path in humor. Even though Albert's brother appears in credits as "Bob Einstein", most people know him as "Super Dave Osborne", the world's greatest stuntman (shown in the small photo in yesterday's blog.) So that's our connection between physicists and stuntmen, which is quite appropriate considering that you really have to know your formulas to calculate how fast you need to go to jump a motorcycle over a row of buses, or waterski over a shark.

That's all for today. If I learn anything new about how ancient Gungans and Hutts influenced the development of humankind, I'll be sure to share it with you. In the meantime, have a great day, and always watch the skies!