Spontaneous Combustion

No, the body can't suddenly burst into flames for no reason, despite what your junior high Strange Stories and Amazing Facts books will tell you. However, your body can burst into flames if you aren't careful where you walk. A young boy from Colorado Springs found this out the hard way when we strolled over a patch of coal waste from a nearby mine. Coal continually oxidizes, but out in the open, the heat is usually carried away by wind. No such luck in this case. The patch of quicksand-like coal dust had reached 800 degrees and ignited when the boy's feet disturbed it, badly burning him. Thankfully, the kid survived. Now how long do you think it'll be before the spontaneous human combustion crowd claims this as a hit? More details here.

It's the End of the World and We Know It

by Christian Walters

I was talking politics with the guy at the security desk at my office. A stupid thing to do on my part, since he was armed. But it was going well, since we agreed the place had gone to Hell in a handbasket since Jennifer Connelly got married.

Then he said something that pretty much wrapped the conversation up: "I shouldn't be surprised, since we're living in the End Times. None of this will matter soon."

Dude. Harsh.

One off-putting thing about Christianity and some other religions is that it adds a silver lining to the end of the world. I tend to view the death of the entire human race, not to mention all the puppies, as a bad thing. I know it'll finally kill all the spiders, but I'd rather just stomp them than be martyred to the spider-killing cause. Still, if you think that Jesus' return trip heralds an endless trip to Six Flags Over Eternity, you can find the upside in your new lawn tractor becoming rapidly cooling particles. The grass doesn't get too long in Heaven anyway.

And, like my security guard friend implies, believing all this is happening soon doesn't encourage you to take the long view for things like dependency on foreign oil, global warming, the Israel-Palestine conflict, more Ben Affleck movies, etc. Sorry Dr. Gould, but there's nothing non-overlapping about those magisteria.

Typically, there are people who take it too far. In this case, those people coalesce into "doomsday cults." We're going to talk about one of them: Aum Shinrikyo. Aum Shinrikyo was part of the subset of doomsday cults that likes killing other people, as opposed to the pro-suicide cults like Heaven's Gate. Aum Shinrikyo is more Charles Mansony than Jim Jonesy.

Aum Shinrikyo is a Japanese group that cobbled together a hodgepodge of Christianity and Buddhism (to the dismay of Christians and Buddhists everywhere), smeared on a creamy yoga center. They are probably best known as the benevolent ministers of truth behind the Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways in 1995, the city of Matsumoto in 1994, and at least half a dozen others, giving a bunch of people the chance to not wait any longer for doomsday, and sending thousands more to the hospital.

Anyway, this group's leader was Shoko Asahara (or, as he was known to his followers, "Christ"). Shoko cribbed heavily from Revelations and, oddly, Nostradamus. He preached that the end of the world was pretty friggin' NIGH. The love for Sarin comes because Shoko claimed to have traveled forward in time to 2006 (this was in the late 80s) and spoke to survivors of World War III. Those survivors convinced him to go back and start attacking Japan's enemies, including the United States. How Shoko decided that Japan's enemies all hung out in the Tokyo subway is anyone's guess.

However, this story has a happy ending. After the subway debacle earned the group some international scrutiny, things went downhill fast for them.

* World War III hasn't broken out, except in the minds of the more colorful conspiracy theorists.

* The group's membership, once estimated to between 20-40k, has shrunk to the 1-2k range. That's not enough for a low-budget martial arts movie.

* The group re-branded itself with the Aleph label and spends about half of its website pointing out the apologies made to its victims. The other half is an exercise routine. (Notice that the Research Center section doesn't actually have a link. Interesting.)

* Shoko went to trial and lost, and was denied an appeal. He has since taken a sort of vow of silence and spends all his time meditating. I guess he could still be the Christ, but he's a Christ without a contingency plan. He was sentenced to death in 2006, but it hasn't happened yet. Things were more swift and certain with the first Christ.

The new Aleph is a more warm Hello Kitty sort of group, compared to its Fritz the Cat predecessor. Apparently, they still believe Shoko is Christ and that we're living in the End Times. But they've turned away from biological weapons, or at least run out of them. They are under constant surveillance, since they still revere a condemned murderer.

So, rest easy in the knowledge that, if you've made it this long, you aren't going to be killed by Aum Shinrikyo any more than you are going to be eviscerated by the Manson Family. Aum Shinrikyo put all their homicidal eggs into one lunatic basket and even the most ravening of them has seen that their basic premise was flawed. When the people who brought us Hentai porn and Pokémon have decided you're full of crap, you have to know your Christ-picking skills are substandard. Gamera is more likely to be Christ than Shoko.

One last note: among the revered writings of this group were Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Isaac would have been annoyed. In addition to his other faults, Shoko doesn't read dust jackets.

Christian Walters lives, loves, and drives in the Atlanta area. He's a technical writer by training, and a Rock Band Adonis by nature. He has honed his reviewing skills on bad movies, which are as rare as pollen grains these days. He has always been a fan of science, and has studied it as much as he could by flinging a Frisbee around campus while getting a liberal arts degree.

Transformer Terror

Speaking of Europe's hilariously madcap relationship with free speech, a London man was recently threatened with arrest for wearing a Transformers t-shirt in Heathrow airport. The shirt, which depicts a giant robot and object of emotionally stunted power fantasies called Megatron, who has a gun for an arm. Or maybe he's just holding a gun. You never can tell with these damn robots in disguise. Regardless, the police and other passengers at the airport considered the shirt offensive, though no one can really explain why anyone should give a shit. If the guy had been hassled by the fashion police, it would have been one thing, but do the British really have to pander to their countrymen's fears about giant robots? Those things never set foot in Europe. They've only been known to strike Tokyo, New York City, and 14-year-old boys' Trapper Keepers. More details here.

Bardot Convicted

A while back, I wrote about French actress Brigitte Bardot's current hate speech trial under the heading "Bardot in Bondage." I also included a shot from one of her sexier photo shoots as a young head-turner. Since then, it's probably been the most popular post in the history of this site. As such, I won't link back to it or include another sexy pic this time, since I don't want this blog to become some kind of SFW spank file. But I will inform you that Bardot has been convicted on charges of inciting hatred toward Muslims and will be facing a $23,000 fine plus $1,300 in damages to French anti-racism group MRAP. She's been repeatedly charged under these draconian laws before, but this most recent infraction had to do with a letter she sent to President Nicolas Sarkozy decrying the Muslim feast of Aid el-Kebir for its ritual slaughter of sheep. Seems like there are several more important issues to raise about fundamentalist Muslim culture, though I'm assuming Bardot still owns her clitoris and is, therefore, unconcerned. Still, we Americans have one more reason to cherish our First Amendment. More details here.

Disappearing Delyagin

Vladimir Putin isn't just a shady, house elf-looking dictator in the making. He's also, apparently, a magician. How else to explain the mysterious disappearance of one of his critics, Mikhail Delyagin, from a Russian talk show? Unless, of course, you believe the Kremlin digitally erased him from the broadcast. Which would actually go a long way toward explaining why Delyagin's disembodied legs still appear in one shot. Turns out Putin's government is keeping a "stop list" of people it doesn't like and, therefore, bans from appearing on all state-run television, which, in Russia, is just called "television." I'm sure nothing bad will come of this. Nothing bad at all. More details here.

Obama Snatches Victory from Clinton's Jaws

How the hell did this happen? Hillary Clinton seemed to have everything going for her: racist rednecks, unchecked narcissism, an adulterous husband with shady financial dealings. And now she's nothing. A nobody. But at least Obama's going to give her the VP slot. I mean, he has to, right? How else is he going to win over the ill-informed, hate-fueled Democratic base in important states like West Virginia? Hold on, are you telling me he doesn't have to give her a goddamn thing? Are you saying that her shameless attacks and race-baiting innuendos from the primary trail are going to come back to bite her in the ass? What's the matter with you? Where are you going? Fine, walk away. Enjoy your "hope" and your "level-headed campaign." Did you hear Obama's wife eats white people? She eats them right up! Asshole! More details here.

Multi-Limericks

by Richard Peacock

Greetings Multiverse lovers (i.e., people who accidentally noticed this post)! Who doesn't love a dirty, filthy, bathroom-stall quality limerick? Okay, now how many of those people also love nerdy, vague, and hard-to-rhyme computer science themed limericks? If you fall into this narrow subset, then read on!

My first limerick is about Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science. Among is many contributions, he devised the "Turing Test," which tests whether or not a computer A.I. can fool a person into thinking he is chatting with a human being through a remote terminal.

"Alan Turing"

A mathematician named Turing professed:
"We should put computer AI to the test!
We'll have it converse
In diction (quite terse),
And ask, 'Was computer or human the best?'"

My second limerick remembers everyone's favorite ancient computer, the ENIAC (pronounced In-EE-Ack). It filled several rooms, used thousands of vacuum tubes, and took over 150,000 watts of electricity to run.

"ENIAC"

There once was a computer named ENIAC,
With stats that would give you a heart attack.
It took up 600 square feet,
But was Turing-Complete,
And programming required a brainiac.

Finally, a limerick about our little friend, the transistor. It's a super-cheap, super-fast, and super-small electronic component that replaced vacuum tubes in the 1950's. Your average modern computer has about 230 million of the little buggers on the CPU alone.

"The Transistor"

Vacuum tubes were all well and good,
But didn't switch as fast as they should,
So Bell Labs designed the transistor
(Vacuum tube's solid-state sister)
And made them as cheap as they could.

The Multiverse is written by Richard Peacock, who generally doesn't know what he's talking about, and will gladly sacrifice scientific accuracy for the sake of a rhyme. Send rhyming complaints to richard@amateurscientist.org