Do I Look Like A Movie Star To You?

Sure, that celebrity recognition thing told me I looked like Jackie Chan, the Quantum Leap guy and the creepy rock star with a pig fixation* all in one outrageously sexy package, but I don't believe any of that. They only keep 4,000 pictures in their database and none of them are ugly. What really fries my synapses is when people confuse me for someone incredibly offensive to anyone over the age of eight. Imagine being at a Halloween party, obviously dressed as a totally sweet Ninja, and having people continually ask if I am that kid in Star Wars - Not the annoying little one from Episode 1 but the pouty, whiny adult from Episodes 2 and 3. You know, the one you actually enjoyed seeing get chopped in half because he was such a putz. I don't get it. It just makes no sense. Happy Halloween.  And just for fun, go here and read yourself a scary story. *He was raised just northwest of where I lived in PA and, apparently, even in high school Reznor had that creepy pig fixation. To hear them talk about it, it was a lot creepier then. No kidding. But remind me to thank him for "Closer To God" some day. Enigma may make the best make-out music but for plain ole "let's wreck some furniture" good times, there's just nothing better than than Nine-Inch-Nails classic.

New York City Declares War On Good Food

It looks like the bibs are coming off in New York City. The thing that advocates of good food have long feared is about to happen; New York City will be the first to ban trans fatty acids. Know why McDonald's fries tasted better when you were a kid? Trans fatty acids - and a lot of salt. Do they taste as good today? Of course not. The only people who think they taste just as good today hated them all along. It's like people who eat veggie burgers telling you they're just as good as beef. Or that Rocio Guario Diaz is just as good as Adriana Lima: Well, maybe they have something there. Now this isn't a done deal yet. They're going to hold a public hearing, blah, blah, blah. This is just a formality. People who want to eat trans fatty acids are going to be at a Burger King gorging themselves on Big Mac's or whatever the hell they serve there so the only ones showing up for this hearing are crazy activists who pretty much exist to make the rest of us miserable. That means the ban is going through. I believe in keeping power with the people so I walked outside and stopped some pedestrians and asked what they thought of the idea: "I am against it," said the man on the left. "I believe in freedom, not government oppression." "I am all for it," said this woman. "KFC is icky. Give me half a grape and a GNC vitamin supplement any day. It tastes just as good." Clearly these kinds of social issues are too big for scientists to decide. When it comes to optimizing antennas or banning Emo haircuts, we are okay making the call ... but for the big issues like this, you'll have to decide.

How To Be A Real Man

I respect people who do the Iron Man thing. It's not easy to spend a day swimming 2.4 miles, then biking 112 miles and finishing off with a 26.2 mile marathon run. I read about Dick Hoyt and probably wouldn't have noticed the Iron Man part except I saw he is 65. That's not trivial at any age, much less 65. Then I saw that he is 65 and does this whole thing carrying his 44-year-old disabled son with him. Feel like you're having a tough day? Watch this video. If you're a man and you don't break into tears then ... well, that's just not possible.

Science Has Bad News For Goth Chicks - Vampires May Not Be Real

Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist. His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires. Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this: So we can't just let someone claim they have wiped out a millenium of folklore by doing simple ( very simple ) math. First, let's deal with the premise behind his numbers. Professor Efthimiou's research assumes that each vampire bite results in another vampire being created. People, if there's one thing I know, it's vampires ( and Thai transvestites, but hey, that is a post for another time ) and I need only point you to the definitive work on the matter, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, to state unequivocally that vampires don't always create more vampires. They only create vampires out of people they really like, or who have waistlines like Vampira: Yes, she looks as all women should look; like a sexy, zombie skeleton. Additionally, back in 2000, in the British series Ultraviolet, it was clarified that vampires wouldn't feed themselves to extinction any more than we would keep on killing buffalo until they were almost gone. This was on TV, people. If you can't believe what you see on TV, I can't reason with you. Professor Efthimiou's simple and surprisingly jingoistic math and logic errors mean that there is still at least some statistical chance that vampires could exist. However, there is also some statistical chance I am a Chinese jet pilot. Yet, since the chance exists that vampires are roaming the earth, it can't hurt to have a vampire slayer handy. Everyone goes for Buffy. I'd rather have a little Faith.

AstroGlide - The Video Game

If there's one thing I hate it's rumors about me and women I am not actually nailing. And, frankly, this thing about me and Kate Beckinsale has gotten out of hand. I am not responsible for the collapse of her marriage, no matter how bad it looks. Okay, because your opinion of me is important, here is what happened: I happened to be in an internet cafe in Japan and Kate is noodling away on a computer. Now, this is Japan and it ain't like any of these people watched Pearl Harbor at the multi-plex, if you catch my political humor, so they don't recognize her. And all Americans look alike. Especially the English ones. And danged if I don't look over her shoulder and she is at the Astro-Glide website playing a video game. Now, I don't know about you, but it isn't every day a girl is at a sexual lubricant website playing something called Astro-Blasto, which seems to involve nothing but some blobby thing spitting at some other blobby things. Kinda hot now that I think back on it. Anyway, she is getting clobbered at this so I say, "Hey Spongebob, howzabout I show you how this is done?" and I scoot her over with my hip and she looks over at me in some sort of shock, like I am supposed to be in awe of her because she was in Uncovered and whatever other crap littered her career. So she kinda laughs at my audacity and, well, I am the only other American within 5 miles, so I tell her, "Nice teeth. Bugs Bunny wants his smile back." Which is what every beautiful women wants to hear. The Bugs Bunny comparison, I mean. Not the 'nice teeth' part. So we had a great time and a nice talk but that was the extent of our Astro-Glide shared experience. I even forgot to ask why she was at their website, but I did learn all about the product and that they have free samples you can request too. For those lonely nights when you need to 'mimic' strawberry-flavored female lubricants. I'll be a tongue-tied mackerel if I can tell you how strawberries and women are related, but I am willing to learn. So now you're asking yourself; why did the pimpiest guy in science not hit on Kate Beckinsale when he had the chance? She was surprised too. But when Alessandra Ambrosio is on the trip with you, you tend not to look at other women.

When Good Girls Go Bad

I guess the NY Times is just discovering that Halloween is the perfect time for women to let out their inner tramp. Men knew this. Hell, we invented Halloween many years ago for no other reason than to get Celtic women out of those ill-fitting robes and into some cool outfits. Even seeing that picture makes me feel all piratey. If she were here I'd totally make her surrender her booty. “It’s a night when even a nice girl can dress like a dominatrix and still hold her head up the next morning,” said Linda M. Scott, the author of Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism and a professor of marketing at the University of Oxford in England. Here's some news for Linda. Every day is a good day to dress up like a dominatrix, whether you can hold up your head the next morning or not. Should any of you happen to have good pictures of you dressed up like a dominatrix for Halloween, be sure to send them over and I will do a special "Hottest Halloween Girls Of Science" post and make you famous. Don't bother to send me fake ones. I have them all. And should any of you happen to own one of these outfits, I will marry you right now*: *Marriage offer not available to residents of planet earth or the ethereal plane.

Invisibility For Dummies

The proof of concept demonstration of a 'cloaking' device has a lot of people interested in how this technology works and what it means for the military, industry and, most likely, peeping Toms. I am here to help. First, there are a few concepts. These are always the most difficult things to get people to agree on but if I don't make this simple enough that at least some wiseacre tells me I oversimplified, I did not do my job. The important concept is that light, as physicists define it, is at multiple frequencies across a spectrum. That's why we have colors. In the picture below, there are frequencies and wavelengths for common items such as TVs, radios, microwaves, and the Gamma-Bomb that created The Incredible Hulk. So far, the 'cloak' they have constructed only works in the microwave spectrum. You can see by the chart that this is outside the visiblity range for humans. Light that we can see has a higher frequency and a much smaller wavelength. The next issue is the material. To make this work, they had to create "metamaterials" ... and those aren't found in nature. The New Scientist Tech article didn't go into detail about the material properties that made this work so I will. Metamaterials have electrical and magnetic properties that have a different index of refraction than normal materials. In other words, you see them differently because their electromagnetic properties are different. How does that affect light? Maxwell discovered the complex relationship between electricity and magnetism and how they propagate at the speed of light. Snell's Law, or the "right-hand rule," tells us that magnetism curls around a wire in the direction of your fingers when you point your thumb in the direction of the current flow. According to the right-hand rule, light will always bend that way because of positive electrical permeability and magnetic permittivity. Metamaterials, with their exotic properties, have negative permeability or permittivity, so they bend light away from what you normally expect. If you position them correctly, you can use this negative refraction to make light focus to a point. If I can prevent that electromagnetic energy from entering a region, light will "flow" around an object in the region, undistorted. Since the object won't reflect light, you won't see it and it will cast no shadow. This all sounds great, so why aren't we out there zapping Klingons with it? 1) So far it only works in the microwave region. The optical region has much smaller wavelengths so for this to work the metamaterials have to be in the nano-size range. We have no way to make them that small yet. 2) It's still single frequency. This is a much more difficult problem. Looking at the chart above  you can see the visible spectrum covers a lot of ground. We need variable-index-of-refraction materials that can accommodate all frequencies and wavelengths and that will take a lot more work. Those don't exist yet. This is going to happen in our lifetimes. We haven't quite gotten a handle on light yet because it's both a particle and a wave and that's a pesky issue to resolve in lots of other ways. But we're making progress. Most likely, the answers will come by not treating light as the source of the problem but as the by-product.

Science Wants To Give You Better Orgasms

There was a time when the vagina was not in vogue. It was all 'clitoris' this and 'clitoris' that for female orgasms. Scientists have a healthy distrust of politicians and activists so we were afraid to stand up against the clitoral orthodoxy but in a secret enclave ( known as "New Jersey" ) a group of neuroscientists have been reverse engineering the female orgasm for the last two and a half years. And they think they have discovered that the vagina has underrated by clitoral zealots. Obviously you can't just make that claim. Tests have to be done. Orgasms have to be studied. While scientists have caused plenty of orgasms most of us haven't studied them. How do you study them? I wanted to know. Apparently the first step was to create a Calibrated Vaginal Stimulator, basically something you could attach to a transducer to measure the force that women apply to the vaginal wall. Then you could know what is really happening. "A Transducer?" I ask. "Are we at Bose?" "Women self-stimulate," explains Rutgers neuropsychologist Barry Komisaruk, "and we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at which parts of their brains respond." Ummmm ... "Basically," Komisaruk concludes, "it's a magnetic dildo." "Now you need a test subject, right?" I ask. "How about Claudia Black? I kinda miss Farscape and you'll never see a scene like this on Stargate." Komisaruk nods his head. "That's my secret fantasy too, except she's also wearing a Pocahontas outfit. But this isn't about us. We're just in it for what the magnet can tell us." He's not kidding. I can barely say the word 'vagina' without giggling like a schoolboy and he spends his days with college-age girls jacking off while he examines their brains. "This is Vicky," says Komisaruk, "We got excellent data from her." Vicky is important because she can "think off." That's right, she can climax just thinking about it. This is important, it seems, because even the slightest movement will mess up the fMRI results. A woman in the throes of passion - for example, any woman in bed with a scientist - will scream and move far too much and they will miss important data. "Vicky solves that problem. First, she lies on the bed and we strap down her head ..." "Wait," I interrupt, "this is not supposed to be sexy, right?" "... then she stimulates herself by contracting her vaginal muscles rhythmically and controlling her breathing for 26 minutes." "Basically, my head is strapped to a board in an extremely loud machine, and I have to let them know when I am about to come, so they can mark it on the computer," Vicky laughs. "Whoo - so sexy!" I guess it depends on perspective. It doesn't sound like a bad way to spend a weekend. The end goal of all this is to figure out how to make a female Viagra. Focusing on the male vascular system worked for men but for women you need to concentrate on brain flow rather than blood flow. Because, as they will tell you, they are on a higher plane of existence than we are. Most men know this is true. To get a man aroused, a woman pretty much just needs to get naked, whereas to get a woman aroused you have to appeal to something deeper. I have found renting Under A Tuscan Sky does the trick with Lady Scientist. Everyone knows that's porn for yuppie chicks.

Science Shows You How To Determine If Your Girlfriend Is A Tramp

Trust is an important element in any relationship. How do you establish trust? Naturally, you have her followed and break into her email. But what if the paranoid wench drives like Steve McQueen and doesn't use her cat's name as her password? What then? Science would rather light a candle than curse your darkness so I have devised a handy Tramp Calibration Meter. All you have to do is feed in some of the things she says about you and the Tramp Calibration Meter will tell you whether or not she is going to be faithful. Let's test it out. I picked Scarlett Johansson because I just read an interview with her and we can go step-by-step and see how the Tramp Calibration Meter works. For each statement of hers I will tell you what it registered. "Josh is very sweet." Tramp. "Contrary to popular belief, I'm not promiscuous." Not a tramp. "Yet I wouldn't say I'm a serial monogamist, either." Tramp. "I mean, I went through periods of time when I was, ah, single." Tramp. "But when I'm in a relationship, I'm in a relationship." Not a tramp. "I do think on some basic level we are animals, and by instinct we kind of breed accordingly." Tramp. "I work really hard when I'm in a relationship to make it work in a monogamous way." Not a tramp. "I get tested for HIV twice a year." Tramp. Actually, there should be a triple-point alarm for that one. I'll fix it in version 2.0. And the final determination of the Tramp Calibration Meter for Scarlett Johannson is: Tramp wins 5-3!! Want to find out if your girlfriend is a tramp? Send her over this weekend. Have her wear something slinky.

Science Helps You Plan Your Weekend

Here Are Your Options: 1. Die In A Cocaine-Fueled Orgy Of Gayness Just hang out with German nobility. A gay guy in Germany jumping from a balcony while hopped up on drugs during an orgy barely made the news in the U.S., because it is so unsurprising. Cocaine and gay orgies in a party thrown by a German Count? Next we'll hear they pissed on each other. Yeah. Big shock. 2. Work For World Peace Use trial and error to act out your favorite scenarios for making the world a happy place. Since you don't want to spend money on real dictators, use puppets. No one's afraid of puppets ... even puppets with nuclear bombs. 3. Learn About World Cultures Iranian Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khameini has his own website ( better brush up on your Farsi if you don't like the fuzzy-wuzzy 'religion of peace' English version ) and he answers your most pressing questions about Ramadan. Example: "If somebody masturbates during the month of Ramadan but without any discharge, is his fasting invalidated?" The helpful Ayatollah responds: "If he do not intend masturbation and discharging semen and nothing is discharged, his fasting is correct even though he has done a haram (forbidden) act. But, if he intends masturbation or he knows that he usually discharges semen by this process and semen really comes out, it is a haram intentional breaking fasting." Okay, I am an infidel and I probably deserve to be put to the sword for asking this, but how in the name of Allah is it masturbation if I don't intend it? In fact, how is it masturbation unless, you know, you actually masturbate? Read more helpful Ramadan insights here. 4. Laugh At Aging Hippies Oliver Stone blasted President Bush Thursday, saying he has "set America back 10 years." I assume he means because of things in Iraq. But 10 years ago Clinton was President and Oliver Stone still had some chance of making a decent movie. Does Olive Stone mean that's a bad thing? Nothing makes me giggle more than brain-addled hipsters who stop inhaling long enough to say really funny things. Well, maybe Emo haircuts make me giggle more. Those are pretty funny. 5. Save The Environment By Killing An Animal. Half of the bacteria in the wild comes from animals. In the Potomac and Anacostia rivers only 16% and 24% respectively comes from humans. Look for environmentalists to start protesting against animals real soon. 6. Watch The New Season Of Battlestar Galactica Because it has not one but two Blonde chicks. Just as God intended.

Science Advice For Wednesday

Making Yourself More Appealling To The Opposite Sex Ms. Magazine is publishing a "We Had Abortions" petition. I guess it's supposed to be some stand for female empowerment - you know, since after only 35 million abortions Ms. Magazine still thinks they're illegal. They should just save scientists some time and call it the "We Like To Screw And Won't Hold You Hostage If The Condom Breaks" list. These women would get a lot more dates that way. Sometimes it's all about presentation. How To Embarrass The French Iran is asking that France be the country to oversee its nuclear enrichment program. I am sure Iranians feel that is a real accolade for the French but the French probably wish they had been consulted first. Don't get me wrong, France is totally capable of invading countries that are no threat to anyone outside their borders without UN approval. I like that about the French. It's just that Ivory Coast is the only country small enough that they can get away with it. Next up, "Wife-Beating Husbands Request That Abused Women Oversee Their Rehabilitation." How To Win An Argument On Global Warming CNN Anchor Miles O'Brien knows how - use a Hollywood movie as your information source. Senator James Inhofe, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, thinks the media is a little biased on the global warming thing and are trying to create hysteria. Not so, responded CNN. “This is "The Day After Tomorrow" scenario that we're talking about,” O’Brien said after being confronted by Senator Inhofe on his climate reporting. He must think Martin Sheen's character on "The West Wing" is actually the President. Next up, I explain the magic of flight using science from the movie "WaterWorld." How To Make Sure You Raise A Nation Of Pussies Norway is going to prohibit boys from standing and peeing. Weren't these people friggin' VIKINGS once? Now their women are making them pee sitting down. I sense a real decline in the Nordic porn industry once Nordic men forget how to pee standing up. Luckily for them Germany is nearby. Okay, I can't leave you with thoughts of nothing except Nordic men and Gloria Steinem, which pretty much means the same thing these days. So here is some good news: Americans swept the Nobel Prizes again. And this picture has absolutely nothing to do with it: