Wittles Is Up!

In a reprint from earlier this week, Calvin learns that sometimes nature shows teach you things that you don't really want to know.

Should Have Seen That Coming

In today's reprint, Calvin agrees with his new duplicates that they divide up school so that each of them only has to go one day. Given his ability to cooperate with others, stay focused on a task and take one for the team, this plan will of course work out just perfectly.

Conflicted

I'm of two minds about the latest issue of National Review, which has several stories highlighting the flaws of Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and of her ideas.

On the one hand, highlighting how wrong-headed Sen. Warren's much lauded plans are is a good idea. Demonstrating how clearly her ideas clash with reality is needed.

On the other hand, the last time the staff at NR decided to devote most of an issue towards explaining the flaws of a particular presidential candidate was in January of 2016. And it didn't work out so well.

Ill-Advised

Paging Mr. Singh, Mr. Khan Noonien Singh...

Potentially Lethal

The sci-fi suspense show Stranger Things, set in the middle of the 1980s, has drawn a lot of praise for its well-handled cultural mileu. In its upcoming season, it will take on one of the most potentially dangerous challenges yet -- it will introduce "New Coke" to the story.

In 1985, the Coca-Cola company tweaked its recipe to produce what it called a "sweeter and smoother" drink. They were immediately denounced and the "New Coke" roundly rejected; in less than 80 days the old formula was returned to production as Coca-Cola Classic (Peter Jennings actually broke into an episode of General Hospital with a news bulletin announcing it). New Coke became "Coke II" in 1992 and was discontinued ten years later.

The company is making a half-million cans of the product, complete with 1985 labeling, in connection with its use on Stranger Things. So the question now is: Will the popularity and success of Stranger Things bring a revival of "New Coke?" Or will the disaster of New Coke wreck Stranger Things? There's no way to know for certain, but I hope the show's young stars socked those salaries away in a college fund.

Because the end will come swiftly.

The Revenge of the Hack

I've got a bad feeling about this.

Highway to Hell

You think your commute is bad? Hey, it probably is and who am I to tell you it's not when I'm not the one who has to drive it. But I'm betting any route that includes the below Qianchun Interchange, found in China's Guizhou province, is worse.

Here, Kitty Kitty Kitty

Although Yale University is thought of as one of the best in the world and we could surmise it employs some of the smartest people in the world, I am not always sure if that's true.

A psychiatry professor there wanted to see what happens in our brain during our feeding behaviors (when eating Brussels sprouts, the brain seems to be weeping and wailing, "Kill me now! Kill me now!"). So he used an experiment to "turn on" a section of a mouse's brain that's connected to its amygdala, a more primitive part of the brain that wakes up when we're being predatory. The laser light shined on li'l Squeaker's gray matter turned him into a wee ravening beast, attempting to attack and eat just about anything in his cage except other mice. Including things that aren't actually edible, like bottle caps and rolls of tape. He didn't stop until the laser was switched off.

Now, Mr. Jinks, Jerry and Scratchy's opinions to the contrary, mice are considered dangerous mostly in their potential to spread disease, as they are small and couldn't eat very much of you if they tried (Mouse restaurant sign: "This pinkie toe free if eaten in one hour!") But there are a whole bunch of them, so finding a switch that turns them into bottomless pits of hungry rage doesn't seem like such a smart idea to me.

Of course, I didn't graduate from Yale, so I may be missing something there.

Faking Fakery?

Buzzfeed ran a story suggesting that all of the fake news sites throwing around made-up stories might have influenced the election, Many of the sites were trying to be funny, some were trying to work as satire and offer commentary with their humor and some were simply trying to get a rise out of the people they knew might be offended by the story they were "reporting."

As do most things online these days, the fake news stories found their way to Facebook. Most people's news feeds were pretty littered with them, as well-meaning but overly-credulous friends shared links suggesting things like Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump. In my own case, diligent use of the "Hide all stories from X" selection reduced their number after a few weeks, although it's truly amazing how many different Facebook pages can be set up proclaiming one political position or another is evilstoopid. And often doing so using a pretty limited set of words, most of which George Carlin would advise you not to say if you are on television. And many of which were misspelled, since rage-typing is not the most careful of typings.

Anyway, it seems that Buzzfeed's story about faking uses some research methods that are, shall we say, less than careful. So the fake news stories may not have had as much bearing on the election as the original story indicated. Which is not to say that the stories have any value -- my own unscientific sampling of a few shows them to have been written by people who were most definitely the smartest persons writing those stories, and others written by people who have an an unerring ability to make themselves laugh. Your current scribe may have committed misdemeanor- level versions of those same offenses, by the way.

So Buzzfeedˆs piece winds up as another failed attempt to find some kind of trickery or hidden flaw that produced the candidates and election result we had. But reality suggests to us something different: Voters in each party are responsible for the miserable excuses for candidates those parties sought to put forth for the office, and voters from both parties are responsible for the election outcome. And that is in no way fake news.

More's the pity.

Memo

To: K.S., South Carolina
From: You Know Who
Re: Refusal of Tow Service Incident

Mr. S:

We have been notified that subsequent to your choice to refuse to tow a car which displayed a bumper sticker for one Bernard Sanders, supporting his candidacy for President of the United States, you referenced a message from our Client, purportedly delivered to you, which advised you to do the same.

We fully recognize your right to serve or refuse to serve persons according to such belief systems and convictions you may hold. We note that later statements by you offer claims that persons with similar political beliefs have been unreliable customers and it has been difficult to collect payment from them. Frankly, we don't believe a word of that and feel it is far more probable that you have become aware of how deeply you have stepped in it and how unlikely it is that you will be in business six months from now because of that. But it is a claim we do not oppose.

We do, however, request that you desist from claiming that a message from our Client was involved in your decision. We believe that if you consult our Policy Manual, section "Matthew," subsection 25, ¶ 45, you will find the following statement (precise wording may vary according to edition):

"Then he will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.'"

While there is no solid finding of fact that persons supporting Senator Sanders in his run are de jure "the least of these," we feel that viewing them as such, as you detail in your statments, renders them so de facto in relation to you and thus the obligation outlined in preceding paragraphs attaches, as it does to all of those who claim to follow the Policy Manual and its Author.

Should you wish to continue claiming our Client is the source of your decision we advise you to obtain representation in order to properly handle the action from said Client, which will be forthcoming. We will advise you beforehand, though, that persons in our particular field are very uncommon on this plane of existence and you may have a long search.

Good Ideas?

The nice people at Paleofuture made a list of seven products that get their names from "dystopian fiction."

That phrase gets quote marks because one of the products is Duff Beer, which is Homer Simpson's favorite beverage on the eternal animated show The Simpsons. I suppose you can make an argument that Springfield and its four-fingered yellow residents make up a dystopia, but this piece didn't and so it looks to me like the list's conceit thins out a little bit.

And the "Margaritaville" piece is one of those all-too-common internet jokes in which a smart and snarky writer smartly snarks on stuff in mainstream culture. Josh Fruhlinger has built a 12-year career doing this with newspaper comics even though he wrote all of his jokes in the first six weeks and has been recycling them more often than Mary Worth recycles plotlines.

But the Paleofuture piece deserves mention because it brings to light the reality that a company thought it was a good idea to make a food substitute and call it "Soylent." If you don't know why that's creepy weird rent the movie and Charlton Heston will tell you. There's also a muscle relaxant named "Soma," which is the name Aldous Huxley gave to the drug that made everybody happy, dumb and easy to control in his Brave New World. I can see the doctor saying, "Hmm...if I could wring a couple extra MRIs out of this guy I could pay for my boat, but there's really nothing wrong with him except a bad cramp. Wait...maybe I gave him this Soma..."

Maybe it's supposed to be ironic. I really do think.

Captain Trips, Please Call Your Office

Some French scientists are planning on trying to awaken a giant prehistoric virus that had been found frozen in Siberia. They assure us that they will only do so once they can be sure it will pose no harm to human beings.

"Sounds like a plan," the Walkin' Dude said smiling.

Leaving? What a Good Idea!

At least, that's what you'd hear me say if I lived anywhere near Chile's Calbuco volcano, judging from the pictures at this link.

The wild ones, of course, are those in which the eruption produces not just large amounts of super-hot magma and burning ash, but also lightning.

I would need no repetition of "¡Vamonos!"

What Could Go Wrong?

The Danish company Universal Robots has developed a new, smaller and more precise-handling robotic arm to add to its line of products. The company has been making and selling larger versions of the arm -- whose actions can be directed from an ordinary tablet -- but this one is apparently capable of some very fine-tuned tasks.

Including building copies of itself.

On the one hand, this could mean that when some computer somewhere someday becomes self-aware, it will take over the UR3 and build itself a mobile shell to house its malignant metal intelligence and send Arnold Schwarzenegger back into the past to wear sunglasses at night and kill Linda Hamilton. Or it could mean that when scientists develop a new version of the arm, the old version will be required to build its own replacement before being shipped off to the junkyard in a poignant moment made all the sadder because it cannot cry for itself.

I mean, I watch movies. I read books. I know something like this is going to happen, unless the thing gets in cahoots with the Large Hadron Collider, in which case we're all doomed.

Einstein = Many Curious Clicks

Princeton University has now put famed physicist Albert Einstein's papers online, meaning anyone who wants to can go to the link and read them.

Understanding them, of course, is not nearly so easy. Take, for example, Document 7 from the English translation supplement volume 3, The Swiss Years: Writings 1909-1911, which is entitled "On a Theorem of the Probability Calculus and Its Application in the Theory of Radiation." I'm already lost and we haven't even gotten to the part with the equations yet. And I'm not even going to touch the links to the original documents, which are in German. There is no subject in the world so complicated that it can't be made harder to understand by fitting it into the German language.

While physicists and other folks who study Einstein will benefit greatly from the availability of these documents, I think a lot of the mainstream internet usage will center on referencing the papers' existence and links thereunto, for the purpose of making the writer look smarter.

Which proves that I can't even get that right, either.

Well Shoot

Brian J. Noggle has a moment of mortality recognition as he realizes he is the age of Les Nessman.

So imagine what that means to those of us who realize we are older than Les Nessman.

Of course, neither of us is as old as Richard Sanders, the actor who played Les Nessman, who was born in 1940. The character of Les was supposed to have been in his early 40s as the series WKRP in Cincinnati, meaning that Sanders was also younger than Les Nessman.

None of which should be construed as any kind of claim that turkeys can fly.

Worried

So apparently Rosie O'Donnell is returning to The View.

This is going to be a big problem for me in the event that my coffin is placed upright in cement in front of a television set tuned to the only frequency remaining after a strange phenomenon wiped out the entire electromagnetic spectrum other than ABC's signal and the off-switch was sealed with a gallon of Shelob's webbing.

What Have We Done?

I'm not so sure I'd agree with Geekologie that the 2014 World Cup logo is a facepalming Captain Picard, but sure does look like someone who's just realized they've been getting really really excited about tie scores:

Woopsie!

Achmed or Jeff Dunham, please call your office...

You're Doing It Wrong...

Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, things just haven't worked right amongst its old "member" nations and provinces. You can be darn sure that even though your average Josef, Konstantin or Yuri might very well have "won" his election with more than 70 percent of the vote, he would have waited until after the election was over to release the results.

It shouldn't be that hard -- if that Venezuelan thug Chavez could figure it out, anyone should be able to.