Month: April 2026

FedEx Boldly Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before

photog Current Events, Science , ,

When Scotty needs a shipment of anti-matter does he expect to see an Amazon truck or maybe FedEx?  Well, maybe not yet but who knows about tomorrow?

Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck

“On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, taking a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site.”

Alright, to be realistic, the Starship Enterprise couldn’t reach Warp Factor 8 on 92 antiprotons.  In fact, you probably couldn’t lift your pinky off the table with the energy produced by that amount of matter/anti-matter annihilation.

https://youtu.be/0xD9qEdHFIE?si=zCKTeF3RTXgm51yZ&t=52

But if we can send anti-matter by delivery truck today who knows what next week will bring?  Someday I may be able to order up a bushel basket of Higgs bosons or a peck of top quarks.  The sky’s the limit.

I read somewhere that the folks dreaming about interstellar travel were hypothesizing that anti-matter could be more easily stored if it was cooled down to just above absolute zero.  I remember thinking, “Does this sound like we’re making it easier or harder by requiring it to reach such a difficult state.  But maybe I’m wrong.  My whole experience with cryogenics had to do with trying to build a cooling jacket for a chemical reactor that used liquid nitrogen to run some organic synthesis steps at ridiculously low temperatures.  And to be totally honest, I wasn’t convinced that the chemists really had any specific reactions that needed these conditions.  They just wanted to make sure that the system they built couldn’t possibly be unable to produce the temperatures, pressures and chemical corrosion resistance parameters that they had promised to their boss.  But anyway, if you can imagine anti-matter travelling in a truck then you can further reckon with anti-matter at 0.01 K sitting in the hold of a star ship waiting to be combined with normal matter to produce impulse to accelerate the ship toward Proxima Centauri.  I just know I won’t be volunteering for that first trip, thank you very much.

So, since we’re discussing anti-matter, I’m still waiting to hear where all the anti-matter in the universe is hiding.  After all, I seem to remember that according to all the theories out there, the universe should have exactly equal quantities of matter and anti-matter.  Well, where is it?

Somewhere out there shouldn’t there be an anti-photog, out there running an anti-OFC website and publishing his novel “The Anti-Sniper”?  Maybe all the missing antimatter is also, all the missing dark matter they’re always looking for.  But whatever the reality, if we’re starting to ship anti-protons around it’s only a matter of time before the commodities exchanges start listing anti-matter on the big board and before you know it, I’ll be able to trade puts and calls for anti-matter.  What would a butterfly spread on anti-neutrons cost on expiration Friday.  Hmmm.

Practical Applications of Riemannian-Bishopian Dimensional Translations – Part 1

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,
Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Dunwich is a very odd place.  First of all, you’ll notice that it does not appear on any map of New England.  And this is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  On the plus side it limits the amount of traffic that traverses its roads.  On the minus side it’s darn hard to enter and leave it.  For instance, there are no gas stations in Dunwich so whenever I need to fill up the old gas tank, I have to find a way out of town and find my way back in again afterward.  And it’s not a matter of just heading down any road until you reach the town limits.  Strictly speaking there are no limits.  If you travel on Aylesbury Pike past Sentinel Hill for about three hours you’ll come back to Sentinel Hill again.  And if you turn off at Whateley Lane and go for about two hours, you’ll notice a singularity in the middle of the road.  And if you get too close to it, you’ll be pulled in and find yourself in the alimentary canal of Yog Sothoth.  And that’s not a good place to be.  So, you can see that commuting is somewhat problematic.  But for all of the locals it’s really just an acquired skill that is taught from father to son.  It’s all a matter of geometry.  Einstein believed that our space time was a variety of non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian.  And it is.  However, Dunwich has a different geometry called Bishopian after the famous Dunwichian mathematician (or wizard) Septimus Bishop who measured the curvature of Dunwichian space and codified the equations for translating back and forth between the two universes.

The mathematics is too complex for most people without advanced training to follow.  On a practical level if you close your right eye and squint your left and slam down the accelerator just at the right location on the Dunwich side, you’ll reach normal space.  And from normal space if you close your left eye and squint with your right eye while slamming on the breaks you can return to Dunwichian space from some well-known anomalies.

For the most part this kind of travel is a routine.  But every once in a while, something seems to go wrong.  I was driving at night in a snow storm in Dunwich a few years back and I sneezed too hard and must have activated an anomaly.  When I blinked my eyes open again, it was broad daylight and obviously a summer day in some warm climate.  I found out I was in Tallahassee Florida and it was six months in the past.  And this caused all kinds of problems when I got back to Dunwich and ran into my earlier self, watching tv in my living room.  I had a devil of a time murdering my doppelganger and sinking him in the swamp.  He seemed to know all of my fighting tricks and just refused to die like a good sport.  Some people are like that.

Moving on to Something Better

photog Current Events ,

With millennial women writing articles called; “The Death of Millennial Feminism” and; “Millennial Feminism Is Undead” I guess the patriarchy and I really did win!  Does this mean all the girl bosses and Karens are going to put on their Handmaiden outfits and start making sandwiches for all of us?  Well, not exactly.

These people will always be the most annoying insufferable weirdos they’ve always been.  What it does mean is that they’re reaching their forties and they’ve realized that they’ve run out of time to have normal lives.  They’ve traded in the chance at love and family for lower middle management careers and mean tweets.  And, as it turns out, for women that’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.

Reading through the first article is pretty awful.  All the “body positivity” and “polyamory” nonsense that this crazy woman spouted did nothing to save her from ending up enormously fat and saddled with a husband who she had to allow to bring a normal weight woman into her bed as her way of sticking it to the patriarchy.  The just plain craziness of all the “everything is just a social construct so we can’t invent our own rules” is on exhibit here.  They talked themselves into believing that the differences between men and women were just tools of patriarchal oppression and now that those differences are becoming impossible to ignore, they are panicking.

And so, these articles are the admission of what has been going on for the last few years with the endless YouTube and TikTok videos of thirty something and forty something women shrieking their shocked anger that their thirty something and forty something male equivalents aren’t interested in marrying them or even dating them.  Some of these women do break down and cry.  And I find that sad.  But most of them are just angrily indignant that these men don’t know what they’re missing.  Now, those I find hilarious.  I’m guessing the sad ones are just the angry ones after a few more years of loneliness.  As it turns out the female biological clock isn’t a “social construct.”  It’s a ticking time bomb that every woman ignores at her peril.

So, here’s hoping that the millennial feminism actually is dead.  All it ever brought was anger, confusion and dysfunction into the world.  Let’s hope that the women of Gen Z learn something from their older female relatives that fought the patriarchy and lost their happiness doing it.  Maybe they can find a way to embrace the full reality of being a female human (a woman!) and learn to enjoy the rich heritage that our species has inherited from the biological world we were created within.  The war between men and women is a real thing.  It’s always existed and it always will.  But it’s also just the dance that goes along with sexual reproduction and the rules of our species.  Men are what they are because of their role in the family and so are women.  Sexuality and family are the most rewarding parts of being human.  Let’s hope feminism stays buried and we can move onto something better.