“Sorry, time travelers, you’re still just fiction”

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Oh, come on, guys. You’re obviously not real science fiction fans, if you think that this really proves that both time travel and intergalactic travel are impossible. I can name half a dozen possible ways other than faster-than-light travel for one or both of those: wormholes, temporal rifts, cold sleep, dimensional portals, tachyon communications, and temporal natural disasters.

And that’s not even including soft SF and fantasy story methods: hypnosis (weird, but it’s been used for time travel in at least three stories I know of), drugs, heart attacks (no kidding), alternate realities, supernatural creatures, mysterious lights, storms, magic spells, magical devices or places (including clocks, watches, gates, caves, crystal bracelets, mirrors, standing stones, stagecoaches, and hourglasses), and your generic “unexplained phenomena.”

So don’t try to tell us science fiction buffs that it can’t be done just because one way has been proven not to work. 🙂

“Mild brain shocks may improve learning and cognition”

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Electric shocks help people learn. Well, duh! If I were a neuron getting shocked all the time, I’d certainly be looking for the fastest way to turn it off too! 😉

Seriously, it’s an interesting read for science geeks. And one of several bits of science suggesting that a real “thinking cap” might not be too far in the future. Oddly enough, that’s one that I’ve never seen in science fiction, though I suspect I’ve just missed it.

“Reprogrammable Chips Could Enable Instant Gadget Upgrades”

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In a science fiction story I once read — I can’t for the life of me recall which one — a spaceship’s electronics were overloaded and massively damaged by some kind of energy weapon. The ship got away, but it was crippled. Fortunately, the crew managed to repair enough of systems to limp to an inhabited planet by reprogramming some less important components to replace the vital ones.

That wouldn’t be possible with today’s electronics, but with something like this, it might be possible soon.

“8 Scenes That Prove Hollywood Doesn’t Get Technology”

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It’s a good thing that I’ve had a lot of practice at suspending my disbelief, or today’s shows would often be ruined for me. These (link NSFW due to language) are just some of the many, many reasons. At least with real science fiction shows, the writers generally goes out of their way to make sure the science is at least vaguely plausible.

Political Conservatism and Personality

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A few days ago, I was catching up on my reading when I discovered a paper on political conservatism and personality traits. I haven’t been able to wade through the paper myself yet, but according to the article where I discovered it, it reports “that overall, political conservatism was associated with things like death anxiety, fear of threat and loss, intolerance of uncertainty, a lack of openness to experience, and a need for order, structure, and closure.”

I already knew that it was related to fear and anxiety, but that’s more specific and possibly useful information.

I’d been feeling somewhat sorry for conservative people already, but this makes them even more pitiable. A person who can’t stand uncertainty is doomed to go through life in a near-constant state of panic, because no matter how careful you are, life is full of uncertainty.

Of course, feeling sorry for conservatives doesn’t mean that I’ll tolerate them governing me. 🙂 I’m neither Democrat nor Republican, but I’m certainly a lot closer to liberal than conservative.

Fun With Wildlife, Again

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A couple weeks ago, we discovered several holes dug into the ground around our garden shed. It looked like something had decided that under the shed was a good place to make a den. The family grapevine said that GoddessJ’s uncle G had a neighbor with a live-capture trap he could borrow, so we gave him a call.

He came over and took a look, and said authoritatively that it was a groundhog (a.k.a. a woodchuck — GoddessJ and I started calling him Charlton, after the minor character from Animaniacs). I thought the holes looked pretty small for a groundhog to get through, but I’d never seen one up close and he had, so I assumed I was wrong. We set up the trap over the largest hole and blocked all the others. And we waited. Every morning I checked the trap only to find it untouched. Several times we went out and discovered that more exit holes had been dug in different places, so we blocked them too, but to no avail. It was too canny to be tricked that way.

I checked around town, trying to find some smoke bombs left over from the recent holiday, on the theory that I could smoke it out, but no one had any. Nor did they have any other commercial method of creating smoke, or driving or luring a groundhog out. Several stores had something that would kill groundhogs, but I didn’t want to kill it, I just didn’t want it burrowing under our shed.

On Friday, GoddessJ’s father and I tried smoking it out with a fire with wet leaves on it, but we couldn’t convince enough of the smoke to go under the shed instead of out into the air to make a difference. Finally we tried flooding the den, on the theory that if we made the creature uncomfortable enough, it would leave. No dice.

Yesterday evening, I went out into the yard for an unrelated reason, and out of habit I glanced at the trap. The door was shut.

I looked closer. There was something in the trap!

I started walking toward it, and a small head raised up to look at me through the bars of the trap-slash-cage. A small, triangular, black head, with two white stripes.

It seems Uncle G wasn’t quite the expert he thought he was. The creature in the trap was no Charlton Woodchuck: we’d caught a relative of Pepé Le Pew!

For reasons that aren’t mine to discuss, GoddessJ dislikes skunks even more than most people. I don’t particularly dislike them (I’ve heard they can be adorable pets, if de-scented), but I do dislike the smell and have no experience with them, so I wasn’t about to get near it either. So we called Uncle G. He apparently suspected that his diagnosis might not be right, because when he heard my voice he immediately asked what we’d caught. 🙂

To make a short story even shorter, he knew some tricks, and managed to get cage and creature into his truck without getting sprayed. He said he’d release Pepé on the farm of a friend who lives outside of town, with a few acres of wooded land that he’d likely find very comfortable.

You know, I was born in the country, and I spent many of my younger years there as well, but I’ve had more run-ins with wildlife since moving to this city than I ever did living out in the boonies.