Space-age Ringtones for All Mankind

Talk about space-age technology.

You can now get historic space audio bits and bytes on your phone, in the form of a ringtone. NASA had made available a number of famous audio clips, including Neil Armstrong's famous first words from the Moon.

You know the people around you who have annoying ringtones. This wouldn't be the case for you if you could make your phone say "The Eagle has landed" every time someone rung you.

You could even set up your phone to say "Houston, we've had a problem" when you ring a number that's no longer in service. (Not sure about you, but now every time I hear that, I think of Tom Hanks.)

As portable phones get more and more cellular and more and more "smart," they get more and more back to the future of space travel anyway. (I'm thinking Star Trek here.) So it's only fitting that you can have words from space emanating from your phone.

You can find them all here.

Star Wars Planet Based on Reality

Some of our more esoterically minded folk might describe it as life imitating art. Other, more down-to-earth people might term it science fiction becoming science fact. Neither description is apt in this case.

Here's one that is: The Truth is out there, and we now have proof!

See, George Lucas knew exactly what he was talking about when he "placed" Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, a planet that had two suns. Lucas didn't make this up: He knew it to be true! And it's taken us this long to uncover what he has known all along.

It's not often that such a landmark image seared into the memory patterns of a few generations of people is so stunningly revisited in the realms of reality, yet here comes news of Kepler-16B, a "wanderer" 200 light-years away from Earth — a "wanderer" that is orbiting a binary pairing of stars.

This planet is closer to the stars than we are to our Sun, by about a quarter of the distance. The planet's orbit is 229 days. The planet is larger than Earth — about the size of Saturn, actually, but much more dense. The stars are smaller than the Sun: One is 20 percent as big, and the other is 69 percent as big.

Astronomers have trotted out the word circumbinary to describe this planet, but I prefer to refer to it as Lucasian.

Now, the scientists are saying that the planet is uninhabitable — at least in terms of life as we know it. But that doesn't rule out entities like R2D2 or Chewbacca or Yoda. We're still waiting for confirmation of the existence of those three, but one of them is a bit closer to reality than the other two are.

Speaking of reality and what else George Lucas knows, I think we're all right on balance if every one of his creations turns out to be science fact, since both Darth Vader and the Emperor ultimately met their fates (in similar ways, it turns out). I wouldn't mind at all if Ewoks were discovered to be real creatures, either. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that finding out that Jar-Jar Binks was a real creature would be OK with me, provided that I didn't have to spend too much time with him.

I do hope, however, that we don't discover that the Terminator films were based on reality.

The Perils of In-flight Cell Phone Use

The people in Texas certainly know how to arrest people. A rule's a rule, though, right?

A guy on a flight from Phoenix to El Paso did nothing more than disobey orders to get himself arrested. What did he do? Did he relieve himself, as Gerard Depardieu did recently? Did he try to open the exit door and jump out? Did he assault someone else onboard?

No, this guy just turned on his cell phone before it was time. Oh, and he got a tiny bit bent out of shape out of it.

But see, this is a serious offense. If everybody did this while the plane was flying, they'd create all kinds of havoc with the plane's navigational systems. That's why we have those fancy in-flight phones that charge you $900 a minute to use — they're specifically designed not to interfere with flight systems.

This guy wasn't using that in-flight phone. No, he had his phone and he was going to use it. And he wasn't going to let flight staff get in his way.

Now, most people would understand the need to keep their GPS-beaconing cell phone turned off during flight, whether they know the science or not, simply because they've been told to about a hundred times before and during the flight. But this guy wasn't having any of that. No, he was going to check his email or make a call or whatever (presumably he had forgotten about the Flight Mode setting) and the hell with anyone getting in his way.

When flight attendants' attempts to convince him to turn off his cell phone failed, they ended up having to restrain him, which probably made his case a bit worse with the El Paso law enforcement authorities who met him at the gate. Hope he chose wisely when asking whether he could make a phone call.