Commentary
Dark MatterI was considering for my first installment in this section, an examination of the presidential candidates. As anxious as everyone is to hear my comments on the matter I am going to hold off for a while.A more pressing issue has come to light. I simply must push all other articles to the back burner so that further meaningful dialog on this subject can begin. Last night while watching Voyageur a thought struck me that I still can’t shake out of my head. It began right at the beginning of the show. You know that part where the ship goes through the dust cloud and leaves the swirls behind it. Well, every week I see that and wonder if in space the swirls would really happen like that. You know, with space being a vacuum and all. That’s not my issue to discuss this morning but it did lead me to some troubling thoughts. I continued to dwell on them last night and further wondered why the particles don’t just cling to the ship. In a vacuum the ship would certainly be a magnet to all sorts of space dust. After all the ship is composed of matter that results in gravity not to mention any charge on the particles. But after a while thinking about how they would clean the ship out in space both in port and out in deep space the real issue began to emerge. Follow along with me on this one. Large objects in space tend to accumulate smaller particles and as a result get larger.If you had millions of years worth of buildup you may end up with a fairly large moon or planet whizzing through space. With enough of these things flying around I would imagine that eventually one of these objects could find itself in orbit around a star. With that possibility is the potential that a planet could find itself at the right distance with the right elements that could support life. OK, now lets go back to Voyageur.They never mention it on the show but the crew has to have the same needs as other humans in that they need to go to the bathroom every once and a while. Technology has advanced quite a bit for our space faring friends but I bet that periodically they need to dump all the waste. It would be nice to think that some how it is recycled and maybe that’s what’s really in Nelix’s dishes but I don’t think so. I bet they just jettison that stuff out into space and let it float away. Now imagine we have a bowel movement floating out in space. A brown mass gently tumbling in the frozen darkness. This bowel movement having mass and gravity begins to attract space dust and millions of years later becomes a planet. You may think this is silly but even our planet could have been formed by some alien incontinence. That is my issue. We could be living on a planet that exists simply because some alien somewhere ate too many prunes a million years ago.I believe that some people will feel much smaller when they realize their planetary origins but I say no. Lets build a fleet of space ships capable of navigating the stars. I say lets go on a five year mission to spread our own dark matter in space.Think about it. Fleets of ships dedicated to spreading waste throughout the galaxy. Last nights pizza could be the beginning of a whole new world for some future people in some part of space. We will have the opportunity to return the favor that some travelling alien gave to us. Now I realize that we can’t be certain so I think that a project should be funded to core to the center of the planet and see what we find. You may laugh now but if they pull up some stinky lump with a piece of corn stuck in it you remember you heard it here first. The 3 R'sEveryone knows what the 3 Rs are - Reading, wRiting, and aRithmatic. I would like to propose a change. I think the 3Rs should be Ruffles have Ridges for a Reason. Let us take this moment to celebrate the unknown person who came up with the idea to put ridges on potato chips. I realize that this break through isn't nearly as important as say spray cheese but its way up there. Our hero had a dream. A dream that one day we would be able to dip our chips without breakage. That one day we would be free from fishing the carnage out of the dip bowl. The concept of stiffening panels by placing darts on the surface has been with us for a long time. It's a technique that sheet metal engineers use to keep your door panels from fluttering as well as raising the resonant frequency of your Fog Lamps. It's used in virtually all fields of engineering and of course now in snack food. No team could have come up with the idea. Somewhere out there the single person with the vision lives. You know who you are. You are the visionary that revolutionized the chip business by creating a whole new untapped marketing segment. You spent the time in the lab when every one else went home. You tested chip after chip, evaluating all the possibilities. The width, spacing, and depth of the ridges were critical to it's tensile and shear strength. The possible combinations were infinite. Some days when you were close to an answer it fell apart at the end just like the broken chip sticking out of the dip vat. The others laughed and went home but you persisted. I wish I could have been there for the break though. The excitement that you must have felt as that first chip plunged into the dip and emerged unbroken on the other side. There were no reporters there that day, no cheering crowds. There was only you. It was fitting because only you believed. Only you deserved to see that moment. It must have been like Edison seeing the light come on. It was a victory of man vs. chip. You knew in that solitary moment that the world would never be the same. The Pringles guy was good with the whole "chip in a can" thing but you gave us value. In the spirit of Edison and Bell, you gave us a chip that Americans can be proud of. I raise an unbroken dip covered chip to you and say "Good Job my man, Good Job! |