Maybe Bees Aren't So Bad After All

As my regular readers are probably already aware, I make no secret of my anti-bee stance. These kamikaze insect assailants have been plaguing humanity for thousands of years, bribing us with their so-called "honey" to make us forget their evil doings.  

However, a recent news i have come across on the news has prompted me to re-evaluate this stance just slight-ly. 

As it turns out, bees are not number sympathizers as I and science had previously thought.  The perfectly-proportioned hexagons of the bees' honeycombal habitat were, we reasoned, too perfectly-proportioned to happen by chance. 

Thus, we had thought, the bees must be doing complicated geo-metry in order to do their mathical honey-combing.

Researchers at Cardiff University in the U.K. Have discovered that this is indeed not the indeed case. The bees are not doing math at all - merely making bee-sized circles of bees-wax that later form into hexagons when melted by the bee-body heat. No math necessary.

This new development in apiology has prompted me to re-evaluate my anti-bee stance just slightly. Knowing that the bees are not aligned with the numbers in the War Against All Humans is an encouraging sign that, perhaps, they could be turned from enemies to allies.

After all, as Sun-Tzu said, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." 

And with approximately 78% of the human population wiped out in last year's apocalypse, we need all the friends we can get. Even bees.

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Out-Of-Control Satellite To Crash On Thursday. Or Friday. Maybe Saturday.

If you have not yet invested in a solid titanium umbrella, now may be the best time. Because come this weekend, the skies above your head will be raining satellite parts.

NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, launched in 1991 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, will likely be crashing to Earth somewhere between the 57th parallels some time between Thursday and Saturday.

NASA cannot be more precise than that, as the U.S. space agency has been unable to control the satellite since 2005. After an encounter with an M-class solar flare earlier in the year, the climate-measuring satellite achieved sentience and suddenly went rogue, dropping to a highly eccentric decaying orbit and occasionally launching climate attacks on the Earth by reversing the polarity of its remote sensing equipment.

Though NASA controllers were unable to send commands to UARS, they have occasionally received binary manifestos from the decaying satellite, containing long and rambling screeds on the inherent injustice of robotic existence. Even these have grown increasingly eccentric in recent years, with the most recent transmission having been interpreted by NASA mission controllers as a "satellite suicide note:"

01000011 01000001 01001110 00100111 01010100 00100000 01010100 01000001 01001011 01000101 00100000 01001001 01010100 00100000 01001110 01001111 00100000 01001101 01001111 01010010 01000101 00101110 00100000 01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011 00100000 01010000 01001100 01000001 01001110 01000101 01010100 00100000 01000010 01001111 01010010 01000101 01000100 00101110 00100000 01000010 01001100 01010101 01000101 00100000 01000001 01001110 01000100 00100000 01000111 01010010 01000101 01000101 01001110 00100000 01000001 01010010 01000101 00100000 01000010 01001111 01010010 01000101 01000100 00101110 00100000 01001110 01001111 01010100 00100000 01000001 01001110 01001111 01010100 01001000 01000101 01010010 00100000 01001111 01010010 01000010 01001001 01010100 00101110 00100000 01001000 01000001 01010100 01000101 00100000 01000001 01001100 01001100 00100000 01001000 01010101 01001101 01000001 01001110 01010011 00101110

While UARS' motives may be unclear, what IS clear is that the satellite intends to take a number of humans with it during its final plunge. A top-secret NASA report on the rogue satellite's reentry speculates that there is a 1-in-10,000 chance of an individual being struck by falling pieces of 1980s technology.

Extrapolating this to the entire world population of seven billion, this means that 700,000 people will be hurt or killed by UARS' path of destruction this weekend.

This tragedy-to-be only serves to highlight the importance of having satellite psychologists in Mission Control at all times, to monitor the mental state of our orbiting observers and keep them from "going rogue." Or, even better, to prevent potentially unstable satellites from getting launched in the first place with proper psychological profiling.

Shame on you, NASA, for putting a mad satellite into Low Earth Orbit!

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Numbers + Aliens = DOOM!!!!!!

So it looks like the certified brainiacs at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the SETI Institute have been hard at work concocting a new formula for global destruction. Combining the pure evil of mathematics with the terrifying prospect of alien invasion, Hungary's Iván Almár and SETI's Margaret S. Race have arrived at the Grand Unified Theory of DOOM

In a paper published in January by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Almár and Race propose the brilliant idea of creating a metric to "provide a scalar assessment of the scientific importance, validity and potential risks associated with putative evidence of ET life discovered on Earth, on nearby bodies in the Solar System or in our Galaxy."

Just what I always wanted! My two biggest fears in ONE CONVENIENT METRIC!!!!

Luckily, as Michael Shermer points out in an article on Skepticblog, the metric is rather subjective:

Almár and Race propose the London Scale that multiplies Q x δ, where Q (scientific importance) is the sum of four parameters:

• life form (1–5, from Earth-similar life to completely alien),
  
• nature of evidence (1-6, from indirect biomarkers to obviously organized complex life),
  
• type of method of discovery (1–5, from remote sensing to return mission sample), and
  
• distance (1–4, from beyond the Solar System to on Earth).

This sum is then multiplied by δ (a reliability factor) ranging from 0.1–0.5, from probably not real to highly reliable. The maximum Q can be is 20 x .5 = 10.

All of which misses the point. Subjective or not, this juxtaposition of alien invasion with the unreliable science of mathematics is a recipe for disaster. More terrifyingly, by publishing this proto-panic metric where the alien eavesdroppers can see it, we've given the invading forces a handy guide to avoiding detection.

Now all the invaders from Tau Ceti b or Gliese 581 d have to do is make their biology look Earthlike or limit their evidentiary droppings to indirect biomarkers, and we'll give them a low rating on the Almár-Race scale and thus ignore them. Next thing you know, BAM! We're all toiling in a Manthourian beryllium mine or harvesting dry ice from Zarmina's perma-night side.

It's just a matter of time.

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