Agassi Couldn't Clone a Sheep, Could Probably Still Beat Us Up

What is it about science and coolness that just can't seem to coagulate? Like oil and water, the two have been diametrically opposed seemingly since the beginning of time. Historically speaking, I think the rift developed somewhere around the time the church shunned scientists and general "thinkers" for positing that the universe wasn't earth centric. As we evolve and change, the same battle remains, albeit with less pyrotechnic penalties for losing. Where it once manifested as the Ionian philosophers challenging the clergy, it now takes a fresh form, as a new girl at tennis camp struggling to fit in with the hip, hard-edged, rough-ridin' American tennis players.

NOVA recently introduced us to Yoky Matsuoka, a girl who once labeled herself an airhead to fit in but went on to become one of the world's most preeminent neurobiologists. The story centers on Yoky, her incredible achievements, and especially her plight to become culturally accepted.

I found this to be a struggle I can identify with in many respects. I'm a former tennis zealot and once-closeted science geek who shunned an engineering major in favor of a much more swanky art studio title. Sure, I got the look down. My DIY shirts are one of a kind [possibly because you did them yourself —ed] and I'm quite sure my pants have faded to reflect a perfect shade of trendy indifference. But as the sun sets and I lay my vinyl to rest, I don the glasses of ridicule to watch Cosmos and drift into dreams of the Library of Athens.

I have a profound respect for science, scientists, logic and experimentation, but I can't help but wonder why, in all this battle to uncover the secrets of the universe and the harmony of the spheres, the hard sciences have failed to attempt to alter the harmony of the social spheres. Yoky is making great advances building the perfect robotic hand, and other scientists are planting electrodes into the brains of monkeys so robotic limbs can be controlled purely by monkey thought (I can see the headlines now: "Amputee Monkeys Able to Fling Poop Once Again" and "Indefatigable Monkey Arms Work Typewriter but End Up Writing MacBeth"). Aren't we coming one step closer to controlling someone else's thoughts? And if so, will we use it to our advantage?

It's my understanding scientists are a generally passive breed. Eddie Izzard does a nice bit about an evil giraffe, and the concept of an evil herbivore in general and I find the same sense of absurdity attached to the term "evil scientist". Other than the mad scientists of lore, buried deep in a basement bedazzling that the final rhinestone on their robots brow of hatred I get the sense that science is a pretty friendly community. But is it a unity created only by a mutual lack of belonging to the "other," or rather a mutual understanding about the eventual domination of the scientist breed? Perhaps it's more sinister than I ever imagined. Sure, common folk currently know Angelina Jolie's babies' names without ever having seen the Phoenix spacecraft photos, but when scientists are the puppet masters, will happenings in Second Life make headline news, and Spore consistently outsell Grand Theft Auto?

Perhaps this is all hulaballoo and we're all much too smart to go about changing a social order, and (almost) everyone knows that. At this point, it'd probably be easier to create a race than to alter the existing one anyway so let's say fuck it and assimilate, knowing that we've got a winning hand. [Get it? 'Cause Matsuoka does prosthetic limbs? It works on two levels! —ed] And let's elect a scientist to office while we're at it. There a stretch for ya. A campaign based entirely on algorithms, and all the Bionic Fundraising Monkeys you could dream of.

{from NOVA, like it ain't no thang}

The Week in Sharks: ...and Other Things that Like the Taste of Seal

"In fashion, you're either in or you're oh god oh god my leg." Heidi Klum—supermodel, erstwhile fashion svengali, and all-around German person—considers scuba-diving in shark infested waters to be her bravest moment ever.

Even braver, the New York Daily News gushes, than "showing off her pregnant belly in tight outfits on Bravo's 'Project Runway,'" because fat people suck and are from space.

In her Parade Magazine interview, Klum explains how the shark schmooze helped her conquer her fears. "I'm not saying that everyone should swim with sharks," she says, "but sometimes you have to jump over your own shadow in order to learn something that you will never forget for the rest of your life." Such as, say... optics?

Klum made the dive as part of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week in 2003, which further goes to prove Lunar Weight's point.

Bollywood icon Zayed Khan also got fabulous with the cartilaginous. On a recent underwater shoot, he basically bro'd out with his toothy would-be antagonists. "They came and flapped their bodies next to us and slapped our shoulders like buddies," Khan told the Times of India. Little did he know they then turned around and put most of the contents of his trailer on eBay, since no one likes to work for scale. Or for denticle.

{from Parade and the Times of India, respectively; Lunar Weight hereby humbly threatens to bite Zooey Deschanel if it'll get her to consider hanging out with us an honor}




Or maybe Zooey'd dig us if we "sharked ourselves". As part of the Shark Week promotional run up, Discovery.com offers you the chance to morph yourself into that manic, sodden, Dunst-mouthed freak on their billboards.

Discovery's own flacks describe the e-mutilator as "totally viral." By which they presumably mean "akin to having smallpox." Since what those earnest nerdlings who haven't grown to embrace their own inherent attractiveness really need is a way to obliterate said attractiveness entirely.

Oh well. It beats blatant, unrepentant racism.

{from Discovery.com, who, to be fair, probably hate themselves as much as they hate their audience}




LW appreciates a good chomping in the name of class warfare, but it ain't gonna happen this time. A Great White sighting off the coast of Martha's Vineyard was reported, but an airborne search by what Bloomberg referred as "a fish spotter" failed to find confirmation.

The search failure may, in part, be due to the fact that people were making that shit up.

Because everyone's kinda bored right now.

Fortunately, some good came out of the silliness. The press managed to cite Jaws at every fucking opportunity, because, epistemologically speaking, nothing can be considered to possess material or temporal form unless Steven Spielberg has made an ass-ton of dough off of it.

{from the Boston Globe, and every bored hack stuck at a science desk bitterly driving staples into a Malcolm Gladwell voodoo doll}




Biologist-poet describes a whale shark on the move as "a bird as large as a bus". Though humans only ever encounter whale sharks placid and (prosaically) tail-propelled near the surface, when at depth, these largest-of-all-fish use gravity, fins, and the always-good-for-party-conversation laws of fluid dynamics to glide through the water column.

This unique method of swimming could be a means to conserve energy, or it could be an attempt to get Gerard Manley Hopkins to take that stupid windhover and shove it.

{courtesy FOX News, which claims to also have a whale shark video, but when LW clicks on the imbed, it plays lots of footage of Heath Ledger gallivanting about looking like a cross between Steven Tyler and a White Stripes groupie, then freezes}

June 27th: Shark Week to Begin, All Chance of Sex to End

The Discovery Channel just released the lineup for this year's Shark Week. Shark Week runs June 27th through August 2nd, putting the "yes!" in "chondrichthyes!"

We'll quickly editorialize here regarding a persistent flaw in the week-long celebration of all things aquabitey: documentaries about shark attacks are not shark documentaries. They are documentaries about people stupid enough/delicious enough to get bitten by sharks. If we wanted to watch Eating Stupid/Delicious Person Week, we'd release barracudas into Heidi Montag's swimming pool.

Still, we're anticipating a week of denticles and Dewar's. We may even try to liveblog it, though the majority of our speech will consist of "Dude! See that? Awesome!"

Though to be fair, it's never not fun to watch Les Stroud find new and innovative ways of getting himself killed.

{from TV Squad; show descriptions in the lede link, if you have no faith in sharks to be unconditionally awesome (though that makes you a dirty dirty sea lion lover, ork ork)}

Fossil Flatfish One-Up God, Look Both Down and Up on His Creation

Fossilized fish with fucked-up faces delight Darwinists, further malign Ben Stein.

In one more indication that the world is going to halibut in a handbasket, Matt Friedman, a University of Chicago grad student, identified three related fossils that may be the missing links between the suave, symmetrical fish we know and love and the flounderish, filet-able freaks known as flatfish, which have both eyes on one side of their body.

These cock-eyed beasties still have eyes on opposite sides of their head, but one has migrated towards the top of the skull, making them look like, well, idiots—but idiots that evidently gained some sort of survival advantage (Not Exactly Rocket Science speculates that the fish may have used the "normal" eye to scan the underwater environment while "its head was lifted just high enough above the surface to give [the other eye] a view").

Aside from helping better trace the tree of life, Friedman's finds help undermine the distinctly American brand of anti-intellectual sophistry known as "Intelligent Design," or I.D. In brief, this school of thought holds that the natural world is too "perfect" to have evolved by the gradual selective pressures called for by evolutionary theory, therefore must have been cut from whole cloth by a sentient being.

The crux of this argument is what's known as irreducible complexity, as promulgated by Michael Behe. The idea is that certain biological structures (Behe's baby is a certain bacterial flagellum) have no benefit to survival and reproduction unless their many parts are all interlocked. Therefore, there's no way each piece could've come about separately through natural selection and differential reproductive success.

NOVA already demonstrated that Behe is full of shit, and used pretty pretty computer graphics to do so. (LW will link to the "Judgment Day" episode whenever possible, as I.D. is the genital herpes of the scientific establishment—impossible to get rid of and prone to ruining everyone's fun)

Nonetheless, flatfish have often been held up as another indication of irreducible complexity, since, until now, there was no series of fossils showing an eye slowly and steadily making its way across animal after animal to join up with its counterpart on the other side. Friedman's find shows that—and for the love of finches, this should be obvious already—just because we haven't found something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Indeed, these protobut not only existed, they'd already been examined and blown off. Friedman found the benchmark fossils in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and that fact is, in itself, indicative of a subtler but in some ways more important philosophical victory by the epistemological traditions of science over I.D.

I.D. is, in itself, uncurious. It forms an end to inquiry, an end to searching. It provides little motivation to rifle through stacks of dusty rocks in Austria, because what's your journal article going to be, "Fossil finds confirm the continued non-deadness of God"? For all its inherent undertones of Eternity (a perk of the whole God job), it ends up being the nontheistic traditions of science that sketch out a neverending road of inquiry, an edifice constantly being built. It affirms the idea that pleasure can be found in process of drawing the world, one rock at the time.

Whereas the supposed superiority of I.D. comes from its ability to answer everything, in total, right now, so everyone can go about the more important things like inheriting various winds or some shit like that.

{from Nature (the magazine) News, and dramatized in Lunar Weight's debut production, "Inherit the Wino," showing every third Tuesday afternoon at the New Jersey Turnpike's very own Vince Lombardi Rest Area}

If Alan Turing Were Alive Today, He'd Probably Still Be Dead

Lunar Weight celebrates Alan Turing's 96th birthday.

Why 96th, you may ask? Well, because for those familiar with non-decimal number systems, 96 translates as 1100000 in binary, and 60 in hex. 1100000 ÷ 60 = 18333 1/3, which according to Kabbalistic tradition, prognostically indicates that Lunar Weight totally forgot Turing's 95th birthday last June 24th, and will undoubtedly forget his 97th next June 24th.

Turing's legacy largely involves being the father of the digital computer (this honor is, in some ways, misappropriated, but the people being robbed of the title are Polish, and they're used to that kind of shit), without which Emily Gould wouldn't be inexplicably famous and the rest of us would be forced to date, write novels, or otherwise exist in real life. But there's another, darker (as opposed to dorker) side to his legacy—Turing was one of the great martyrs to Western homophobia.

Yes, Alan Turing was openly blind, err, gay, possibly out of an activist instinct—the same activist instinct that led him to stand up so tenaciously for the idea of machine cognition as being potentially equivalent to human—or possibly from the same affable cluelessness that makes scientists the Beanie Babies of the ivory tower. Regardless, despite his tireless efforts to break Nazi codes during WWII, and the resultant reduction in British sauerkraut consumption and Jew-killing in the ensuing decade, Turing was tried for indecency and chemically castrated with estrogen. Eventually, disgraced and unlaid and possessing of boobies, he killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

Now, however, as the United States slowly, grudgingly swings towards the idea that gays are people too (or at least California and New York are swinging that way, which are the bits that count; Massachusetts, too, but no one's given a shit what they did since they got bored with burning witches), it's worth noting that what's at stake is not something as cosmetic as the right for Martha Stewart and Modern Bride to exploit a further 15% of the population. What's at stake is a concerted, legal-system-sanctioned effort to reject one of the most persistent and ascientific interpersonal prejudices in Western history.

Let's leave aside the inevitable gay-brain-difference studies, which are a classic instance of a neuropsychological "finding" completely devoid of practical significance beyond "look! See?" dickery. If the idea of rational thought has one end, it's that immaterial conclusions—such as ones indicating that homosexuality is somehow harmful, in need of "fixing," or, for that matter, inevitably synonymous with sweeping (former LW roomies, you know who you are)—can be debunked, cast aside. If any one facet of the classic '50s ideal of progress is worth carrying, it's that things that make no sense can eventually be revealed to make no sense. Homophobia is one of these; as Turing's story suggest, in at least some small realms, rationality might possibly save a life.

{yet there's a footnote here, a counterargument that is still self-aggrandizing in the way that tickles LW's smugbones: note that the British government kindly tried to "fix" Turing. This, too, was somehow informed by an idea of rationality and progress—albeit based on a model that was already well on its way to being debunked, gratzi Signore Kinsey. If only there had been some outside observers around back then to say, "Well, now, that's fucking stupid..." and then link to BoingBoing}

Roadrunner Renders Humans Petty-Flops

The Roadrunner Supercomputer: a 133 million dollar fuck you to all dumb-as-coyote humans? We who spend our menial lives devoted to computing human dilemmas, only to pick up a few spare tires in the process? It's one thing to perform an ungodly amount of operations per second, predict weather patterns and nuclear whatnot, but does it really have to rub it in that we're slowly writing
ourselves (as a species, not as a blog collective) out of the picture?



I like to imagine the machine operating with a very Betty Boop sensibility. It bounces up and down and while computing, conveyer belts traveling from each hub transfiguring puppy to light bulb, light bulb to Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln to flan. Then it hits the last hub, steam pours out of every opening, and one very stubby, stressed man stokes a fire as another, similarly stressed man rides a bicycle, and a long white sheet of paper comes out reading, "Yep—We're Fucked."

But I fear there's a decided lack of bicycles involved; forgive me for sounding cliché sci-fi/Colbert, but is this the beginning of the robot race? Sure, it's all for the benefit of humanity, but can't we just make 'em a little slower, buy ourselves some time? I can see Machiavellian CompuPower [TM, motherfuckers] escalating just as fast as the battle at Fort Sumpter did. It's only going to take one engineer to program a robot in his likeness and then the robo-cat's out of the kevlar and we're all itching for our own. Soon we'll be our own tamagotchis. How is it that we can have a self-loathing society that eats anti-depressants like candy, yet we're chomping at the bit to replicate ourselves?

So, for those interesting in marketing or making a buck, I invite you to take part in my business venture—The International Robot Registry (NYSE: IROR). We'll give you a little personality test, and write your name in a book (with archival ink, of course), and in 10 million years you'll be happy to know that a robot will be made to look just like you. And—if we finally get a handle on cryogenics—you can even hang out with it!

I feel that I've fallen victim to my own version of the aforementioned Betty Boop sensibility. Taking a nice tale of a Roadrunner supercomputer and flipping it into a Life 2.0 marketing scheme. Your move, Roadrunner. I got ACME on my side.

{from the Los Alamos National Laboratories website, because, gee, a fucking nuclear bomb wasn't scary enough}

Are You There, Carl? It's Me, Laura

You're still half-drunk the morning after watching Cosmos; you snooze again, and wake to the startling realization that you are madly in love with Carl Sagan. By you, I mean me, and by in love, I mean doe-eyed and prone to using words like "shucks".

There really is something simplistic and pure about a man who wonders, no, a man who ponders the cosmos. There's an inherent duality of character; to be into stars and space is very boyish, yet to make a living out of pondering—indeed, to become one of the foremost ponderers—is oh so attractive.

More Yoo-man than Hue-man.
The roots of this love lie purely in the Sagan speech. He talks very distinctively. [At what point do we tell Laura he's dead? Ah, fuck it, she's in her happy place. —Ed.] It often changes in pitch, interspersed with moments of bated breath. There's an awkward cadence to it, an innocence, slightly stressed (i.e. most people say the word human, "HUE-man" where Sagan prefers the ever so unique "YOO-man"), and he has a way of using the term "star-stuff" in ways I never thought possible. Star-stuff, my God I love star-stuff. Dude likes stars, and he so dearly wants you to love the stars as much as he that he makes sure that every single word he says isn't scary but is entirely logical, reasonable and awe-inspiring.

Good Sport
Carl is understanding, patient and kind. He travels in this brilliant "sci-fi" looking space craft that shows up in the universe as a rotating beam of light and seems to be composed of no more than a control panel of arbitrarily blinking lights and a big screen TV. But
Carl, that doll, goes along with it. He takes it so seriously. He sits down at this arbitrary control panel with a look of such stern concentration that you'd think he was performing open heart surgery. He's so into it, it seems like he's partaking of some sort of fantasy in which he really does have a spacecraft and really is finding the answers to all the questions that have been plaguing him, questions that are beyond most of the world but so real and so important to him... and because of him, to me.

There's just something about a guy with a spaceship.
Let this be more than a formal internet announcement of my love for Carl (the internet is a cosmos in itself). I find that there are themes to my love affair that transcend space time [though possibly obviate the possibility of nookie. Just sayin'. —Ed.], just as he does in the space ship. Across all relationships I believe it important to marvel at the other person for one reason or another, and if a space ship and the ability to transcend space-time isn't something to marvel at then I don't know what is.

{illustration by Austin Cho, with help from dinosaurs and maybe beer}