Bookbyte Blog

Every Time NASA Gets Excited, We All Hope It’s Because of Aliens

November 26, 2012

Written by Chris Fannon

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A NASA photo of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars.

If you’re NASA, you should really be more careful about throwing around phrases like “one for the history books.” That’s the terminology John Grotzinger, head of the Curiosity rover mission to Mars, used in a recent interview. But he was light on other details, so, since wild speculation is human nature, people are trying to figure out what Curiosity could have dug out of the Martian dirt that can be called “historic.”

The specifics of this discovery are remaining secret until (most likely) a conference in early December, to give the scientists time to triple-check the results. But since one of the primary objectives of Curiosity is to see if the Red Planet has ever been capable of supporting simple organisms, it stands to reason that a discovery along those lines would be the sort of thing NASA was looking for.

So what could they have found in the analyzed soil samples? Large amounts of methane, an organic compound that’s usually produced by lifeforms?

Sure, that’s a reasonable assumption, but who wants to hear that? I prefer the unreasonable, thank you very much:

  • a human skeleton
  • the Holy Grail
  • the Ark of the Covenant
  • whatever those magic stones were in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
  • Amelia Earhart
  • a dinosaur in a space suit (proving they didn’t  go extinct, they just got tired of Earth)
  • this photo:

Marvin the Martian looks at the Earth through his telescope.

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Science, Science/Technology

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Lone For the Holidays

November 20, 2012

Written by Chris Fannon

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There’s three kinds of college students during Thanksgiving break. There’s the people who travel home, gorge themselves on food, and return in the  worst possible mentality going into finals.

Group two are the people who see a break coming and decide to get as much out of it as possible.

Lazy College Senior meme: "Thanksgiving break/ Leaves the Friday Before"

And group three doesn’t go anywhere, because plane tickets are expensive, they have a lot of work to do, or they don’t have a lot of close family.

If you find yourself in group three, you’ve got to make a plan to keep your sanity. Because if 7 pm rolls around and you find yourself sitting in bed, eating day-old Domino’s breadsticks, and watching re-runs of House, you might start to feel down. So here’s a few ways to stave off the lonesome Thanksgiving blues.

  • Makeshift family. You might not have your family around, but the odds are pretty good that there’s somebody else on campus. Scrounge up a group of stragglers who’re in the same boat as you and have everyone chip in a dish or two. You might not have those sweet potatoes your grandma makes that you love so much, but you’ll still capture the spirit of the holiday.
  • Hold off for the weekend. Don’t care much for the other people left on campus? Then wait a few days before throwing together your makeshift family meal. Not too many of your friends will object to another awesome meal on the Sunday when they get back. A few of them might be able to smuggle back leftovers of their family’s finest cooking to boot.
  • Volunteer. There’s no better way to gain perspective and appreciate what you have than helping out people in need. (Check with your nearby shelters first. A lot of places get more volunteers than they need this time of year… and not nearly enough at other times. You might want to hold on to this thought until later.)

Photo of a young woman handing a bag of groceries to an older man.

  • Spoil yourself. Money might be too tight to get a plane ticket back home, but you don’t need to spend too much for budget decadence. Get yourself a pint of your favorite ice cream flavor. Go see a movie that none of your friends are interested in. Never change out of pajamas. Have a thanksgiving dinner of scrambled eggs and take-out curry… or whatever crazy mismatched dishes people don’t normally serve together.
  • Something completely different. Sometimes a day can feel like a holiday just by doing something unique. Go on a hike, visit a museum, take the train or bus to a nearby town. If you do something you’ve never done before, the holiday won’t feel like a waste, just a brand new experience.

Category:

College Life, People

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Barrel Decorating For Charity

November 15, 2012

Written by Chris Fannon

1 Comment

Every November, the staff at Bookbyte breaks into groups to compete in a food drive. Each team gets a giant metal barrel and gets a short amount of time to decorate it according to a theme. Then we stuff the decorated barrels with as much food as we can scrounge up and donate it to the Marion-Polk Food Share, a charity that feeds the needy in our community of central Oregon.

The theme this year was the 1980s. As you can see from the pics below,  the first thing most of us thought about was 8-bit video games. (Click on any of the pictures for a larger image.)

A mock arcade cabinet for Donkey Kong made with cardboard and a metal barrel.

1. An impressive Donkey Kong arcade machine using cardboard, paint, and LED lights, complete with buttons and a joystick.

A Pac=Man themed barrel, with added references to Ferris Bueller and other distinctly '80s pop culture references.

2. This Pac-Man themed barrel packed in as many ’80s references as it could. You’ll notice Ferris Bueller, Ghostbusters, MTV, ALF, and other stuff that people born after 1990 might not recognize.

3. If we’re talking classic 80′s videogames, you can’t overlook Super Mario Bros., the elephant in whichever room you’ve setup your NES.

4. This entry was most tightly tied into actual purpose of the contest: fighting hunger. Most of our younger readers probably don’t remember “We Are the World.” It was a song written for charity by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and featuring something like 8,000 other musicians. It was a huge deal at the time.
Feed the World barrel.

5. Our grand prize winners painted trash bags and boxes and made them into a homage to the greatest ’80s action star, the former Governor of California. (As somebody point out, it mostly looks like a Minecraft version of the Terminator.)

Those glasses aren’t painted on either, they’re hanging off his face. When you take them off, you get to see the T-800′s red robo-eye.

Category:

Bookbyte Stuff, Social Missions

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Seltzer Company Offers Coupon For Terrible College Application

November 13, 2012

Written by Chris Fannon

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It’s gotta be tough coming up with new things to talk about when you’re basically just selling bubbles with water in it. That’s why the people at Polar Seltzer were kind of brilliant for jumping into the comments of this USA Today article on bad college essays, just because it offhandedly mentioned seltzer.

#2 in USA Today‘s list of horrible ideas for college essays is ”I am a can of seltzer.” That’s obviously not a whole category; it’s a generalization of the kind of crazy, surreal, high-concept ideas that some students hope will be eye-catching in the admission process. (The “seltzer” example comes from the article writer’s experience in college admissions.)

So Polar Seltzer comes along, reads the article and thinks, “Oh hi, marketing opportunity.” Here’s what they wrote:

"If you didn't get into college because of your "I am a can of seltzer" essay please send it to us and we'll send you a coupon. #Genius #Sparkling #NotSoda.

Okay, trying to turn #Sparkling into a trending term is a bit annoying, but otherwise it’s pretty funny and pretty clever.

Category:

College Life

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Could Facebook Affect How You Vote?

November 8, 2012

Written by Chris Fannon

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Message saying "I voted... did you?"

Anybody who logged onto Facebook on election day got hit with a crazy number of “go vote!” messages. Most were from your friends, many were from the companies you’ve Liked. (We tried to make ours go down easier by pairing it with a picture of an adorable puppy.) But there were also some messages from Facebook itself. They were either just general messages to go vote or a list of your friends who’ve already voted (who then told Facebook that they voted, of course).

But here’s where it gets interesting. Not everybody saw these messages. Four percent of Facebook users got no message. Why?

Facebook button saying "Remind Friends to Vote"
Because they were all being subjected to a big social experiment.

The Atlantic explains:

By splitting up the population into these experimental and control groups, researchers will be able to see if the messages had any effect on voting behavior when they begin matching the Facebook users to the voter rolls (whom a person voted for is private information, but whether they voted is public).

Researchers want to know if social pressure from Facebook affects people’s decisions about voting. So, with Facebook’s cooperation, they’re seeing if the “your friends are voting” messages gave people the final push to perform their civic duty.

For most people, Facebook and politics are like potato chips and cupcakes — addictive on their own, but pretty revolting when paired together. The number of posts for (or more likely, against) a candidate before the election was topped only by the number of posts by people complaining about their Facebook feeds being hijacked by friends talking politics.

(Somebody could make a killing on a Facebook app that blocks all references to specific candidates. Get on that, innovators.)

But maybe the constant politi-chatter is reinforcing your political beliefs as it annoys you. You might roll your eyes when one of your friends posts “NOBAMA!”, but maybe that post is a reminder for liberal voters to cancel out that guy’s vote and a reminder for conservative voters to back that guy’s vote up. Maybe individual political messages all blur together after awhile, but the combined effect of seeing them again and again every day helps you develop your opinion.

Think about it this way: Ask the next person you see which presidential candidate they voted for. Most people will answer quickly. Now ask someone how they voted for a specific local ballot measure. Many people won’t even be able to remember.

And which are you more likely to see as a Facebook post — “NOBAMA” or “MEASURE 82, I CHOOSE YOU!”?

(Note to self: Make Pokémon themed bumper sticks supporting ballot measures that end in 2′s.)

Category:

College Life, Politics, Science

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Epcot Death Star

October 30, 2012

Written by Chris Fannon

1 Comment

Epcot Death Star

Disney just bought Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. This was our first thought.

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College Life

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Hurricanes Were Kinda Sexist Until 1979

October 29, 2012

Written by Chris Fannon

1 Comment

With Hurricane Sandy, which you might know better as the Frankenstorm, pounding the East Coast, it got us thinking about the weird practice of naming hurricanes after people. It was odder still in the not-too-distant past, since from 1954 to 1979, hurricanes only received ladies’ names.

The practice started with the advent of the National Weather Service (which was then called the National Weather Bureau). The service was started by military meteorologists (yes, that’s a thing) after the end of World War II. They named them after the military phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.). Needless to say, that was a bit boring and repetitive, so the NWS adopted an older, informal practice among meteorologists to name storms the same way people name their cars, boats, guitars, and guns — after women.

It took years of complaining by influential feminists to get the National Weather Service to play fair, since, as it turns out, a lot of women didn’t really like being compared to devastating natural disasters.

But weirder still than the whole idea of giving a unique identity to a giant pocket of low air pressure with high winds whirling around it is the fact that the most devastating hurricanes get their names “retired.” Yes, just as you’ll never see another Chicago Bulls player don the number 23, we’ll never get hit by another hurricane named Katrina or Isabel.

And that’s really weird, right? It’s like we want to honor certain storms as “all-time greats.” I’ve got this weird mental image of jerseys hung in the rafters of the National Weather Service offices.

Category:

Science

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