Here’s some far out news for you while you’re getting ready for your 4th of July weekend picnic. There is a species of ant that forms gigantic colonies, one of which is global in scale. Ants who are members of this global colony communicate peacefully with each other, even when they are from different continents.

From Japan to California to Europe, they’re gathering bread crumbs, getting into sugar bowls, and waiting… waiting… for what? Well, to get some more bread crumbs and get into more sugar bowls. Though these ants have a society that’s global, they don’t have a global communication system, nor do they have any culture to pass down a larger agenda.

Woe unto us if they ever should develop these skills. They would disable our television sets while we sleep, leaving us unable to follow the celebrity dancing contests that hold us together.

Last year, I made brief and horrible fun of the foil wrappers they put on bottles of bubble solution. I snarkily asked whether there was a terrorist plot to inject bubble bottles with cyanide. In a comment, the ever-thoughtful John Stracke suggested that “it probably improves the shelf life, by keeping air out better than just a lid would.”

Yes, that would make sense. But is it true? To find out, last May I bought two bottles of Imperial Super Miracle Bubbles. I immediately tore off the foil seal of one of the bottles, then replaced the cap. The other bottle I left alone. For a year and a month, the two bottles remained side-by-side on my kitchen shelf, waiting, waiting…

… for yesterday. After I had left the room, my ever-loving wife marked one bottle with an “X,” wrote down on a slip of paper whether the “X” referred to the bottle that had kept its foil or the bottle that had lost its foil a year ago, hid the slip of paper at the bottom of a drawer, then took the other foil off and gave both bottles to me. This is called “blinding” and ensures that any observers’ biases won’t influence the count, since we wouldn’t know which bottle was which until we consulted my wife’s secret key after the experiment. I guess you could say the experiment was “double blinded” because the bottles didn’t have any eyes.

I took the bottles over to our front stoop where my two kids sat, their breath at the ready. And breathe they did, oh yes. We took turns, with one of us blowing bubbles and the other two of us counting the bubbles as they came out of the wand and floated about. When the counters counted different numbers of bubbles, we took the average of the two counts. With three blowers and two bottles, we had six different results to report:

Kid 1:
Average number of bubbles per blow for Bottle “X” (8 blows): 16.4
Average number of bubbles per blow for the Other Bottle (10 blows): 14.3

Kid 2:
Average number of bubbles per blow for Bottle “X” (10 blows): 8.1
Average number of bubbles per blow for the Other Bottle (14 blows): 6.7

Dad:
Average number of bubbles per blow for Bottle “X” (7 blows): 17.1
Average number of bubbles per blow for the Other Bottle (7 blows): 21.3

Without knowing which bottle — Bottle “X” or the Other Bottle — had the foil taken off a year and a month ago, you should already be able to spot a problem: for the two kids, Bottle X gave out more bubbles on average than the Other Bottle, but for Dad (me), Bottle X gave out fewer bubbles per blow than the Other Bottle. That’s an inconsistent result across the three bubble-blowers.

Once we unwrap the slip of paper, the results get more dismal for the foil-as-quality-protectant hypothesis: Bottle X is the bottle that had the foil taken off a year and a month ago, and the Other Bottle is the one that kept its foil until just before we started blowing bubbles. For two out of three bubble-blowers, the bottle that kept its foil produced fewer bubbles, not more bubbles as you’d predict.

In conclusion, our experiment provides no support for the hypothesis that the foil on the top of bottles of bubble solution acts to protect the quality of bubble solution over long shelf periods (at least as long as a year and a month). Since common sense tells us that bubble solution is not for human ingestion, the foil can’t be there to protect against terrorist cyanide injections either.

So why do they put foil on the top of bubble solution bottles? What is the foil there for? We’ve eliminated one possibility, but the mystery remains unsolved! Cue music.

Word has leaked out that President Barack Obama plans to announce today that he will authorize the extension of benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees… except for health benefits… and of course, members of the military couldn’t get the benefits, because they would have to admit that they’re homosexual, and then would kicked out of the military, under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which despite his campaign promises, President Obama has failed to overturn. Then there’s the problem that the Defense of Marriage Act, which Barack Obama just sent his lawyers to court to defend, makes it illegal for same-sex domestic partners to get federal benefits… and the restricted benefits for those few who qualify, could be revoked at any time.

This announcement today was supposed to help Barack Obama repair relations with non-heterosexual Americans, but it just ends up being another insult. Obama is acting as if he can treat GLBT Americans like dirt, and then throw them a tiny little scrap and everything will be forgiven.

This move by Obama shows that he just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that the issue is one of equality under the law. It’s a matter of legal rights guaranteed in the Constitution.

Obama thinks he’s doing GLBT Americans a big favor by giving a small number of them a limited number of benefits. What he doesn’t understand is that equality is not a favor that the President can choose to grant if he feels in the mood to do so. Equality under the law is required by the Constitution, and if it isn’t given in full, it isn’t given at all. Obama doesn’t have the right to grant separate and unequal, second-class benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees.

Barack Obama is an idiot if he thinks that gay and lesbian federal employees are going to love and respect him for suggesting that they ought to be grateful for getting a fraction of the legal status that heterosexual Americans take for granted. He’s only going to anger them more.

A curious little bone was dropped in our laps last night by a reader, James B. DiGriz (of DragonsWeb Labs or a science fiction character, the Stainless Steel Rat?). Over at Space.com, Leonard David is reporting that the Obama Administration is cutting off scientists’ access to military satellites. The satellites are said to be designed primarily to watch for evidence of nuclear tests. They had also been used by scientists who were studying the impact of meteorites in the Earth’s atmosphere. The military had provided the scientists with data from the satellites, which the scientists had then used to understand what kind of objects from space are striking the Earth.

Barack Obama had promised to end the Bush Administration practice of overclassification and excessive government secrecy. Obama had also promised to improve government relations with science. This decision to cut off scientists’ access to satellites runs counter to both promises. Why is Obama backtracking in this particular instance?

A scientist involved in the research calls the Obama Administration’s decision “baffling”. Let’s think through the baffle. Four possibilities I can think of:

1. There is something about nuclear weapons tests that the government doesn’t want scientists to find out about.
2. There is something hitting the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space, and the government doesn’t want scientists to find out about that.
3. There’s something else visible to the satellites that the government doesn’t want scientists to find out about.
4. The satellites are being retrained to a new mission, to watch something in a way that makes them useless for asteroid impact research. This is a particularly interesting possibility, given the way that Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security has resisted efforts by Congress to exercise oversight on the National Applications Office, an agency that coordinates data from military spy satellites now used to spy on Americans private affairs.

In spite of all the promises we heard last year about how the Democrats in Congress about how they would inaugurate a new generation of sustainable energy in order to fight the global climate change caused by the 20th Century’s fossil fuel economy, we’re getting new energy legislation that looks an awful lot like what Bush and Cheney were hoping for, with expanded offshore drilling and other dirty energy sources such as Canada’s tar sands.

There are real consequences to the Democrats’ assistance with the Republicans’ backwards energy policy. We’re seeing those consequences in places like Greenland. A study just published finds that the glaciers of Greenland are now melting at a rate even faster than previously believed.

The news was easy to miss, but it really was bigger than any other news this week (yes, even bigger than the actor who was found hanging dead in his hotel room). An experiment in physics was able to show the weirdness characteristic of the quantum world at work in the world as we know it.

The quantum world is the world of sub-sub-atomic particles, the stuff that makes up protons, electrons, and neutrons. It’s the world in which string theory folks say that existence is made up of nothing more than vibrating tones of energy (though others point out that string theorists have never proven that’s the case).

Anyway, the quantum world is certifiably weird. At this supersmall level, things appear to just pop in and out of existence. Also, separate bits of quantum stuff seem to be able to get entangled, meaning that even when separated, they interact across what are, at their scale, immense distances. What’s more, that interaction seems to be instantaneous. This is referred to as entanglement.

This kind of thing seemed to be a characteristic purely of the quantum world of weird vibrations - until this week. Yesterday, a team led by John Jost, a graduate student at the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, published a paper in the journal Nature that shows “quantum entanglement in a degree of freedom that pervades the classical world”. Translation: The weird stuff of the quantum world has now been observed taking place in our big world of physical particles.

Jost and team took two pairs of ions (one beryllium and one magnesium) in patterns of vibrating movement, the ions moving back and forth, toward each other and away from each other. Think of these as an atomic-scale machine, or a little repository of information of the sort that could be used in a nanocomputer, with different states of movement representing either a 0 or a 1.

Anyway, after the team of researchers set up the pattern of vibration, they separated the ion pairs by a large distance. With one beryllium-magnesium pair over here, and another beryllium-magnesium pair over there, 240 micrometers away. Then, they changed the pattern of vibration of one of these beryllium-magnesium pairs, and although they had not acted upon the other, far away beryllium-magnesium pair, the far away pair changed its pattern of vibration - right away.

This is akin to setting two pendulums swinging at a certain rate, then shipping one to China and the other to Nebraska, then changing the rate of the Chinese pendulum’s swing, and seeing the Nebraskan pendulum change its rate of swinging at exactly the same time. See the potential for instant communication, and even instant mechanics, over huge distances? See the apparent absurdity?

Actually, it’s not absurd. Science just discovered something new about reality that we thought wasn’t possible. What we once thought was absurd actually isn’t. This experiment gives new meaning to Gertrude Stein’s comment that there is no there there. There is here there, and there here.

Quantum entanglement isn’t just for the quantum world any more. It’s been shown to work in the realm of particles, which means that it could be affecting the way that molecules work, which means that it could affect the world as we see it. Entanglement hasn’t been scientifically observed at our macroscopic scale of perception, of course, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be, some day. Perhaps entanglement is going on, but just in ways that are obscured, or in ways that we haven’t been able to interpret correctly.

Of course, experiments to prove that’s possible have yet to be done. Coming from the work just published from Boulder, Colorado, perhaps some experiments leading in that direction can now be imagined. Maybe not. Maybe entanglement can’t go beyond the atomic level that John Jost and his team were able to create.

We don’t know, but the beautiful thing about science is that it gives us a reliable way of finding out things that we don’t yet know. We don’t have to await divine revelations, or merely rely on what has already been written in old books. We can do amazing things and achieve mind-blowing insights through the application of disciplined thought.

(By the way, I am not a physicist, so I apologize if there are some details of the research I haven’t gotten quite right. I invite anyone more knowledgeable to comment in order to offer corrections to help me, and Irregular Times readers, understand. In the meanwhile, readers can take a look at a summary of this research at LiveScience.)

Let’s talk about fertilized eggs. Read up on the stages of human embryological development and you’ll see what a tiny, tiny thing a fertilized egg is. Read some more and you’ll figure out that many stages of development, over many days, must occur before an embryonic disc develops so much as a neural groove. You’ll learn that individual neurons don’t even begin to connect until the 10th week of gestation. You’ll learn that those embryonic neurons haven’t moved to their proper positions for cortical brain function until 20-24 weeks of gestation. Even then the structures of the brain aren’t set.

Read about the actuality of human embryonic development (in the brain and elsewhere) and you’ll begin to comprehend how very distant from cognizant babyhood a first-trimester embryo or even second-trimester fetus is. Read more and you’ll discover how far a fertilized egg is from either of those. Read about the “human rights from conception” policy ideas of even the so-called “moderate” Republicans like John McCain and you’ll realize that there isn’t a “moderate” gap between the image Republicans maintain of fertilized eggs as “babies” and scientific observations. The gap is huge.

The gap is consequential, and not only for fertilized eggs. The gap is consequential for young girls, who Republicans in their confusion would mandate carry their fertilized eggs to term. The gap is consequential for schools in America, some of which make contraception available to students. The gap is consequential for local communities that decide to set school policy in that fashion. In their confusion between a baby and a fertilized egg, Republicans are trying to take away the ability of communities and schools to decide how they will approach the issue of contraception, are trying to take away to the ability of communities and schools to offer young pregnant girls a choice.

H.R. 2458 is a bill introduced by Republican Representative Doug Lamborn and cosponsored by 43 House Republicans. It would punish schools choosing to make “post-coital contraception” (also known as the “Morning After Pill”) available by revoking all federal funding for those schools…

… because for Republicans, their desire to squelch the decisions of communities, schools and young girls regarding fertilized eggs is paramount.

Ask Wolfram Alpha for the answer to “life, the universe, everything,” and you’ll get the answer. After 4.6 Billion years, the Earth has finally fulfilled its purpose, all thanks to this computational knowledge engine.

Unfortunately, Wolfram Alpha is not yet aware that no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, and it is utterly unable to answer the question, “If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long will it take for a monkey with a peg leg to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle?”

Today’s headline: Astronauts inspect Atlantis while chasing Hubble

I knew it! I just knew it! What secret powers does the Lost Continent possess to reanimate long-dead scientists? What ancient wisdom awaits if only we will explore?

And yet, even with these staggering findings, the Obama administration has indicated its intention to cut the NASA budget for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate through 2013… just when the division makes its most astonishing discovery yet! What doesn’t Barack Obama want us to find? What information does President Obama insist, behind the scenes, must remain hidden? His original Atlantean birth certificate?

Now, I don’t know about the Obama-Atlantis connection for sure… but the timing of all this and the connection to Atlantis is rather suspicious, you have to admit. Obama could quell these suspicions if he would only release the transcripts of discussions with his Atlantean overlords. Until then, you can’t prove me wrong!

“It’s not yet proof…” - if only we would hear such phrases from Creationists. One more missing link may have been found in the fossil record - a pattern in 850 million year-old Canadian limestones that matches the patterns created by the decomposition of collagen in sponges growing on reefs. If these are the fossils of 850 million year-old sponges, they are the oldest-found fossils of any animal.

The age of the suspected fossils is significant, because molecular analysis of rates of genetic evolution suggest that the earliest multicellular animal would have come into existence at about 850 million years ago. These fossils could be the first evidence of that very early link between the worlds of microbes and megafauna…

… or they could be not any kind of fossils at all. Science has the courage to admit to this uncertainty. If only Creationists could acknowledge such doubts.

Boy, that last winter was cold. Cold, cold, cold, huh? I mean, it was so cold it just blasted a hole in that whole global warming theory, didn’t it?

Never mind that one year does not make a trend. This past winter, like all winters for nearly two decades, was warmer than average.

Look to the NCDC for regular updates, month to month and season to season. Yes, if you’re wondering, March of 2009 was warmer than average as well. Data for April will be available soon.

On his New York Times blog, Stanley Fish loves to create wild complaint by inflating, no, inverting the factual basis for them. Example #1: using the case of an academic who was fired by his university and hauled off campus for his behavior to bemoan the lack of standards and punishments by universities. Example #2: using the existence of social problems to bemoan the idea of social progress. Blogging yesterday for the Times online:

And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”

That’s Stanley Fish’s position: if any social problems exist at all, then the idea of progress itself is a crock! That’s like getting on a Greyhound in New York City, waiting a half hour, then declaring that buses obviously don’t work because you’re only in Hackensack. It’s like wanting to break all the rulers in a school after you’ve measured the difference in height between Julie and Jonas because Jonas isn’t infinitely tall. It takes liberalism and progress to be destinations, which is a huge misunderstanding, because liberalism is a procedural idea and progress is a claim about change.

In all the areas mentioned by Fish, is our society making progress? Yes. No, racism and sexism are not gone, but they are on the wane in measurable ways. Colonialism and imperialism are not gone, but they are nowhere near as present as they were in the 19th and 20th centuries. The standard by which poverty is measured has been raised, and across the world and in our nation hunger is on the decline. The intensity of these social problems is waning, and it has been for some time. Stanley Fish chose these indicators to “bust” the myth of progress, but by those indicators things are getting better. That’s the definition of progress.

I expect some of you are rolling out your protests right about now, coming up with examples of matters that are getting worse: the environment, civil liberties, warfare. I’d agree with you on that count. Progress is not an inevitability like Fish’s alternative, the invisible, supernatural Kingdom of Heaven. It is a variable that responds to our observable behavior here on Earth. My point is that yet again, Fish’s own examples are contrary to his conclusion.

… if it is like the regular old garden variety flu. Over a thousand people die every day from the flu under normal conditions. Keep this in mind as news organizations obsess over swine flu death tolls in the dozens and state health officials tell us that people need to stop touching each other.

What is the swine flu?

Swine flu (also called swine influenza, pig flu, pig influenza, porcine flu, porcine influenza, red candy or Mexico City Gold) is a virus causing fever, chills, body aches, numbness, fatigue and sleeplessness. Until its most recent outbreak, this virus has not been spread from person to person.

Why is this flu virus called “swine flu”?

The origin of the term “swine flu” for this current influenza epidemic is not necessarily descriptive but linguistic. In the traditional dialect of Spanish spoken near Mexico City, the pigs say “H1N1.”

Where did this strain of swine flu come from?

“Patient Zero,” the first known person to contract swine flu, has been identified as Edgar Hernandez, an individual also known to suffer from non-chronic infantile dwarfism. Mr. Hernandez resides next door to an industrial pig farm owned by the American corporate agricultural giant Smithfield Foods, and one in six of Hernandez’s neighbors living downwind from the pig farm have complained of flu-like symptoms within the past month. Lawyers for Smithfield Foods insist this is just an “unfortunate coincidence,” snort, cough, wheeze.

Why has the swine flu been more deadly in Mexico than in the United States?

Because we’re Number One. We’re Number One. We’re Number One. Hoooo. Hoooo.

Is the swine flu coming to where I live?

Thanks to the intervention of Michele Bachmann, the swine flu will avoid Minnesota. If you do not live in Minnesota, the answer is an unfortunate yes.

Can my dog catch swine flu?

If you sneeze without covering your mouth, and if your dog has quick reflexes, then yes, with training.

Is it safe to eat pork?

According to Elizabeth M. Ward, MS, RD, EZ, MT, as long as cuts of pork are uniformly heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, and any knives put on the table face away from the plate and toward the napkin, and not too much hot sauce is put on top, and everyone cuts their food into bite-sized pieces, and nobody brings up religion or sex or politics during the meal, then pork should be perfectly safe to eat.

Is it just a coincidence that the swine flu epidemic broke out in April, the 4th month of the year, and that Barack Obama is our 44th President, serving for 4 years with his family of 4 after being elected on November 4?

The Illuminati tell us the answer is yes.

Yesterday, I noticed that I have this funny little rash, over by my left elbow, and I was wondering…

Yes, it’s swine flu.

Because, you see, I also have an itchy scalp, and I thought…

That’s swine flu, too.

Really? Am I going to die?

Yes. You are definitely going to die.

Oh. Oh, oh, oh. Oh. Well, you didn’t have to be so blunt about it!

Was that a question?

What?

A question. You’re supposed to be asking questions.

Right. Well, did you have to be so blunt about it?

Not at all. I enjoy it.