New Superhero!

DELIGHTEDMAN! HIS SUPERPOWERS ARE HIS 100% Infectious Enthusiasm! the Smile of Impenetrability! and the deadly Triple Exclamation Point!!!

From “Ol’ Thinkypants Speaks”

“I’M NEVER HAPPY WITHOUT JUGGLING three or four levels of meaning at once, no matter what the subject,” said Ol’ Thinkypants, and scratched meditatively. “Maybe two before coffee. But three or four is where it’s at. And if you can kick it up to eight or nine, you can have yourself a time.”

Accented Enlightenment

SO MANY OF OUR VERBAL surroundings are invisible to us; we live like blind fish in a sea of words. Two experiments to make the background pop out:

1. Try shifting the accent on multiword phrases; e.g., “Vanity Fair” turns from a magazine into a wry comment on mores (Vanity Fair instead of Vanity Fair). That may actually have been the original intent, FAIK.

2. From where you’re sitting now, how many words can you see (e.g., ID tags, slogans, ads)? Of these, how many are necessary for the worded thing’s function (e.g., the colorful packaging on a soda can)? If not, then why do they exist?

By paying attention to our attention, we become open to universes-next-door … right in front of our faces.

Whence Snark?

SERIOUSLY — CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL me the advantage or otherwise positive aspect to snark? Because something can’t have so infested every aspect of our culture without it being good for something. Does it help make us more patient? Wise? Smarter? Or just delude us into so thinking, by allowing us to take out on others our impotence and frustration at all the Big Stuff (planetary death/rude salesclerks/insane cost of living/grindhouse politics/endless war)? I can only think it’s the latter, because the alternative — that a significant percentage of the human mind really enjoys such vicious petty self-important voyeurism — is much too horrible to contemplate.

Arm’s Reach To The Stars

PERHAPS “ARM’S REACH TO AN asteroid” would be more accurate, but: For the first time ever, humanity has reached out with metal fingers and grabbed a hunk of asteroid to hold before its face.

To put it less poetically, Japanese scientists announced today that the space probe Hayabusa, battered and crippled but still greatly game, did indeed scoop up a bit of asteroid Itokawa and return it to Earth. As John Matson writes on Scientific American‘s blog today:

Material scooped out … with a special spatula and examined with scanning electron microscopy revealed “about 1,500 grains…and most of them were judged to be of extraterrestrial origin, and definitely from Asteroid Itokawa,” according to a JAXA press release. Most of the rocky particles are less than 10 microns in length. (A micron is one millionth of a meter.)

For the rest of the story, click http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=hayabusa-probe-succeeded-in-returni-2010-11-16. Meanwhile, could we please have a standing ovation?