Dumb Questions I’ve Had For Science

by John Wenz

• Do astronomers ever refuse to classify rocks in space as asteroids out of spite?

• If Jupiter’s radiation is so tough why don’t we just wear thick lead spacesuits?

• Why do we only send crazy-looking robots with wheels to other planets? Why don’t we send probes that can walk?

• I wonder how many people would be beheaded by their own invention if that invention were a poorly made hovercraft.

• If Venus is so hot, why hasn’t it melted itself?

• Which is more underrated, Uranus or Neptune?

• How many multiverse mes can there be anyway? I doubt the same sperm hit the same egg in that many universes.

• If it weren’t for Watergate, would we have a moonbase by now?

• If you could bring a cup of water back from Europa, would it be too radioactive from proximity to Jupiter to drink?

• If you drilled a hole nearly to the core of the earth, and did it in the ocean, what would happen? Would the ocean start draining into the hole, and could you go deep enough to rid the earth of the ocean once and for all?

• If smoke detectors are partially radioactive, do the people who work in the factories have to wear protective gear in assembling? Should there be a health warning for the guy at Ace Hardware who has to put them on the shelf?

• Say, we build an immeasurably fast, nigh impossible craft that takes us to the edge of the universe. What do scientists think would happen if we touched it?

• When will scientists engineer a cow that doesn’t fart? It would end global warming.

• So Saturn is pretty undense right? How deep does its lack of density go? Could you send a probe from one end to the other and just pass right through the planet?

• Have NASA interplanetary crafts been properly sterilized prior to launch to ensure that extremophile bacteria doesn’t potentially adapt to climates on other planets and moons and begin to thrive?

• What is the chemical composition of the odor of a banana, and how does it give off this odor?

• Would it radically alter the sun’s chemistry if we gathered up all our garbage and rocketed it into the sun?

• If you give the octopus a longer life span, how long will it take to organize a war against humanity?

• If I put my brain in a robot body, would my brain eventually start to decompose and screw up the robot?

• Could nanotechnology just gradually replace all my brain cells instead, but I’d still have sentient control over them?

• What would be the easiest way to give this robotic body immortality that doesn’t involve eating people?

• Could we just put a really big magnet in space to collect all the space junk?

• If I find a dinosaur in my backyard, can I legally keep it?

• Could a shark survive long enough inside a whale to bite its way out of the whale’s stomach?

• If our atoms are the same atoms as other things on Earth just sort of recollected and rearranged, how many atoms that used to be part of people have we eaten?

• If faster than light travel becomes possible, does it break through space-time distortion or does time go on the same outside the craft?

• So we’re in a craft going near the speed of light, and we send a message from our craft to Earth. Is the message sped up when it gets to Earth? That is to say, because time inside is different than time outside, do we sound like the Chipmunks?

• If I got in a car going 100 miles an hour around the Earth non-stop for the rest of my life, how much time distortion would I actually experience? Would it qualify me as a time traveller?

• How many cubic feet of water are in the ocean?

• If our universe hit another universe, which one would win?

John Wenz got a D in astronomy in college, but that doesn’t stop him from trying. 1984 NASA/Dennis M. Davidson concept drawing of a lunar base via Wikipedia.

Would you like to follow a music Tumblr devoted to the 80s, the “Minneapolis sound,” and Prince-adjacent pop-funk? If the answer is “yes,” then do enjoy. (If the answer is no, then look at your life choices.)

“Families were disgusted to see more than 2000 drunken Cambridge University students stripping off, vomiting and drinking themselves unconscious at a riotous summer term party in a public park. Mothers and fathers looked on in horror as the students downed excessive amounts of alcohol, then threw up just metres away from where their young children were playing. Other undergraduates were seen urinating in the flower beds, while one was even taken to hospital by ambulance after he drank himself unconscious at the park in Cambridge’s city centre yesterday (Sun) afternoon.”

Photo by shaggy359, via Flickr

Have you ordered flowers for your mom yet? Mother’s Day is this Sunday. Here’s what you need to know.

You’re dead to me, Talking Points Memo. I mean, I understand that all the action is in slideshows these days, but I cannot abide your celebration of the latest lunar idiocy. Good day.

Ten Songs To Listen To While You’re Sitting In Your Wheeled, Attended Massage Chair At Marina Abramovic’s Upstate Performance Art Center

“There will be a room for drinking water and drinking water in slow motion.”
 — Tear-jerking performance artist Marina Abramovic talks about the 20,000-square foot, $15 million art and education center that Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaus are designing for her in Hudson, New York. (Where Tommy Stinson recently settled, and where Awl pal and Fatty ‘Cue chef Zac Pellacio is opening a new restaurant in the fall.) The space will be devoted to “long durational” experience, and Abramovic plans to ask visitors to sign a contract upon entrance promising that they will stay for at least six hours. (No one will be penalized for leaving early, unfortunately.) The architects are designing special chairs, “a hybrid between a wheelchair and a massage chair,” each one with its own attendant, for audience members to relax and maybe sleep in. I can’t wait to go. (I think I will probably never actually go.) I’m already making a playlist to bring on my iPod.

If you want to quit smoking maybe you should try stabbing yourself with tiny needles.

New York City was beset by art fairs this weekend. There was the New Art Dealers Association fair in Chelsea, and the Frieze fair on Randall’s Island. Both were their first ventures in New York City. The Randall’s Island thing was an ordeal, particularly if you are coming from Brooklyn, God forbid, though it’s nice to spend the weekend on the East River and then also nice to have something to complain about. The location actually worked, but… Holland Cotter, writing in the Times, summed up the prevailing mode: “Now artists, whether they know it or not, are worker bees in an art-industrial hive. Directed by dealers and collectors who dress like stylish accountants, they turn out predictable product for high-profile, high-volume fairs like Frieze.” The problem with these fairs is that the art was almost invisible. You had your process-conceptual: was I going to ask why those big drawings of concentric circles were circles, and what they might possibly represent? No. Your object fails to make me interested in its obscure backstory! What else? You had your big ticket items, though not in overwhelming numbers, like at an Armory or Basel fair; that’s fine, your secondary market is good for business.

You had your ephemeral whatnots, which failed to hold down a booth. You had your paintings struggling with the history of painting, which are usually boring and pointless. Sure, there were highlights and surprises! But this slideshow does a pretty good job of capturing the Frieze fair’s overall inability to capture interest.

What you didn’t have much of, in the massive tent at Frieze or in the three crowded floors of NADA, was the real deal. (This is particularly disturbing, as NADA does a really good job of this in Miami.) The real deal was occupying elsewhere. The grand, the emotional, the harsh, the crude, the bold, the visionary, the psychotic, the gestural, the queer, the elaborate; almost all of that was almost completely missing. Maybe it’s just a current vogue for reduction in art work. Maybe it’s a question of commerce, of what can travel, of artists committing their better work to actual shows, or having sold it already. (Even the German galleries, after their long run, have given up on good painting!) In the course of two days, I was introduced to the work of exactly one artist that I wanted to know more about. That’s a new low.

One of the real deals, Sarah Sze, is profiled in the New Yorker today (subscription-only). You’re better off going to look again at her birdhouse sculpture on the High Line than wandering around today on the last day of these fairs. At least someone’s having a good time.

I suppose it’s possible that somebody once might have said, “Jesus Christ, George W. Bush, you’re no Winston Churchill,” but other than that I have a hard time ever imagining those three names in the same sentence, let alone as ideal dining companions.

“Last July, 28th Street sold 8,000 Slurpees for an average price of $2 each. On its best day, it sold 291. (Slurpees, Natapraya tells me, have ‘unbelievable’ sales numbers in Manhattan.) But back then Jemal’s gross profit on the drinks was a paltry 62 percent — he was losing too many bins of syrup to expiration because of overordering.”
 — The rise of the New York 7-Eleven: “134 stores by 2017 is the target for Manhattan.” The future’s up to you! You buy a Slurpee, you seal the deal.