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Mickey Rourke is an actor.  I don’t think he’s a particularly great actor.  Even in his prime, when he did that thing with Kim Basinger, or Sharon Stone, or one of those women who was, for a time, the hottest woman in the world, where he just kept getting progressively weirder and more controlling and  she was digging the shit out of it and I was watching, thinking ‘This is  totally unbelievable.  There’s no way he’s in her league.’

It’s Like the Movies, But Live

But, he  had his fans, and some of them were women, so there you have it.  Hollywood success does not depend on my opinion.

Mickey Rourke is getting a bit old now.  He’s just a couple of years older than me, but I  sure  as hell  hope  I  don’t look anywhere as old as he does.  The man is 62, going on 80.  He’s washed up.  A has been.

But, he’s still an actor.  So, nobody should be surprised when he puts on a show.

He put on an exhibition boxing match in Moscow a couple of days ago, and knocked out his opponent in the 2nd round.  Unbelievable? Yeah.  He did box for a while, professionally even, as I understand it, but he wasn’t exactly Rocky.  But, he’s 62.  There aren’t any 62 year old boxers out there, and there’s a reason for that.  Most boxers who are 62 have been retired for 30 years and their brains turned to mush long ago.

His opponent was a 27 year old homeless guy.  He boxes, sure, even professionally, with a 1-9 record.  Nobody in boxing has a 1-9 record.  If you go 1-3, it’s time to give up and try a different sport, or a different profession altogether.  1-9 is just masochism.

Unless, of course, it’s the job.  I can imagine his resume.  “Will get in the ring and lose against  aging men with boxing fantasies.  Willing to work for travel expenses plus room and board.”

But there’s nothing wrong with this.  I’m sure the  crowd was happy.  They got to see a big Hollywood star, they got to see a fight, and they probably were not terribly surprised that the  whole thing was staged.

Because Mickey Rourke is, after all, an actor.

I just can’t get enough of the Alien  encounter type programs, and The  Unexplained Files, and stuff like that.  But even on those programs, which  clearly want you  to believe in the existence of aliens, which is what  you were predisposed to believe anyway because that’s why you’re watching, you know it is, most of the cases are pretty bogus, and those ‘scientists’ who argue the alien case are the ones who argue every alien case, with complete credulity.

Greetings, Earth Peoples!

Still, I believe they’re out there, that is a statistical inevitability.  If they are not, it’s up to us to go out there and populate the universe, and by  that we would  prove that Pan-Galactic travel  is possible and the future aliens would all be us, so that’s pretty cool, too.  But, the idea that out of the  billions of stars out  there, there are 0 others  which have spawned life, seems very unlikely.

One argument against is simple:  If they’re out there, why haven’t they  made contact?  Why don’t they  just  get on all channels and say “People of Earth!  Yes, we’re out here.  We don’t really have much  reason to contact you, and you  seem to be an unstable, volatile, and self-destructive lot.  Get back to us in a couple thousand years  and we’ll talk.”?  Why don’t they just land in Central Park on a Sunday afternoon?  And why is it  all of the  UFO sightings seem to be since the 1950s?

Well, at the risk of sounding like Erich von Daniken, maybe there have been earlier sightings.  We have had sightings of angels  and  demons, leprechauns in Ireland, and various similar spirits and apparitions throughout the world.  Maybe the  sightings  were real, but people did not have the knowledge, imagination, or terminology  to see  them for the  aliens they were.

Pizza Hut has got a cool, new development.  No, they haven’t actually started making a better pizza.  They are Pizza Hut.  They don’t need to do that.  It’s like thinking McDonald’s is going to attract new customers by serving spaghetti.

Just Look At It

The reason these companies are in business is because people like their food pretty well, or at least they don’t hate it too much and they are affordable.  But, when in Pizza Hut, the question of what pizza to order is certainly a problem.  Everything looks  so good.  I love salami, pepperoni, extra cheese, hot peppers, corn, onions, sea food, and almost everything, really, but some things don’t go with  other things. Pineapple on a pizza is O.K., for instance, but it only goes with  ham.

Pizza Hut’s innovation is a smart menu, with eye tracking software.  They put all of their ingredients on the screen and the computer measures what items your eyes were most attracted to and picks out the combination that is just right for you.  In 2.5 seconds.

I’m a bit skeptical about that, because your eyes might be lingering on a particular ingredient because you are thinking “ew, gross, who would put that on their pizza?” or just because you are wondering “what is that?”  However, Pizza Hut claims that it works 98% of the time.

Of course, that might mean it’s working like a Ouija Board works, or Tarot, or the  Horoscope.  Nobody wants to come right out and say, “Nope, that was a complete miss.  You totally blew it.”  Even though it’s a computer, most people will be afraid of offending it and will go ahead and eat the damned pizza.

Still, even if it’s imperfect now, it will be refined in the future.  Now, it guesses strictly based on duration of eye contact.  Future models will measure pupil dilation, heart rate, breathing, and the sweat on your fingertips.  Then you’ll get a perfect pizza, by golly.

This is good news.  This is perhaps what’s been missing.  NASA is going to launch a spacecraft called Orion in December.  It’s kind of like the Space Shuttle, but bigger, faster, stronger, and the idea is it will be able to stay in space for long periods and travel to multiple destinations, and make it out to “the outer Solar System” they said in the article but I wish they could  be a bit more specific than that.

If it could do that, it could ferry people and supplies back and forth  to Mars,  to aid in the colonization.  It could explore the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter and establish mining colonies.  It could provide tours of the solar system, for a billion dollars a pop.  It could open up the Star Trek era, at least on the one Solar System scale, but it’s a start.  You have to walk before you can run, you have to run before you can fly, and you have to leave your planet before you leave your solar system, boldly going where no men have gone before.  It will be a stagecoach to the stars.

With this following hot on the success of Rosetta on comet Churyamov-Gerasimenko (sp?), it does seem the Space Race is on again.  Who will get to Mars first?  NASA? The ESA? The Dutch reality show team?  Richard Branson?  Some unknown contender?

I’m excited about it, it feels like the 60s again, except now we have way superior technology.

We won’t have really reached the Star Trek mentality, however, until all human missions into Space are international missions.

Normally I avoid articles with titles like “Ten Things That…” but, it’s a slow day, io9 is a science site, and ‘Ten Words that Scientists say Everybody Uses Incorrectly’ kind of intrigued me because everybody includes me, and if there are words I am using incorrectly, I want to know, and if I wasn’t using any of the words on the list incorrectly, I would get to feel really smart.

Well, I agree that too many people use ‘proof’ when they really mean evidence, and it’s a darned shame that people haven’t really mastered the  concept of ‘geological  time.’  I was  pleased to learn the  difference between a scientist’s definition of ‘statistically significant’ (which is statistically noticeable) and the way everybody uses it, which refers to something that is actually statistically significant.  On ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ I think they just need to realize that people are not really talking about science when they use those terms, they are talking about food.  You don’t need to be quite as intellectually rigorous when you’re talking about  food.  ‘Quantum Weirdness’ is not a phrase  I’m likely to use incorrectly because I’m not likely to use it at all.  The concept is either way over my head, or it’s nonsense, and since serious scientists take it seriously, I have to assume it’s not nonsense.

But, where they really nailed me was on the use of the word ‘theory.’  The article says something like ‘most people, when they say ‘theory’ mean ‘an idea’ or ‘a supposition.’  I’m probably even  worse than that.  When I say “I’ve got a theory…” it means I’ve got a guess.  Pure speculation.   Based on real data, of course, I’m not a flake,  but seasoned to taste with a bit of wishful thinking or paranoia.

For instance, when I say “I’ve got a theory about 9/11…” I don’t mean I have proof, in the scientific sense, although there’s lots of evidence.  I mean I’ve considered the events, and the facts, and, based on knowledge of the characters of certain people who would have had motive and means to pull it off, knowledge based on their previous and subsequent actions, and some circumstances surrounding the events, I have arrived at the supposition, or the idea, which I call a theory, that Dick Cheney, some members of the Bush family although not the President, because why tell the stupid guy, Larry Silverstein, and maybe Donald Rumsfeld and Rupert Murdoch, along with maybe 30 or 40 young, fit, hyper-nationalistic CIA guys, conspired to create  a great show, which would rally the American  people around a completely useless war in the Middle East, which they did.

So, while it doesn’t amount to the level of a theory, it’s more than just a crazy  guess.  Maybe hypothesis would be a better word.