Diamond Planet: a Rich Goal

OK, so here's a mission that NASA could sink its teeth into — one that should recoup every last dollar spent, and also pay a boatload more.

We've discovered a planet made of diamond! OK, so I wasn't part of that we, but you get the idea. We as a species have found evidence of this heavenly body the composition of which is a heavenly substance: diamond.

Why? Well, it has to do with the star that the planet orbits. That star is a super-fast pulsar, a neutron star that, every so often, sends out cosmically gigantic blasts of energy that have, over time, worn down the poor planet's defense to the point where the carbon within has been ground down into diamond.

Weirdly, the planet is larger than the star it orbits. The planet's diameter is 37,300 miles, which is roughly five times that of our planet (so that's a lot of diamond). The pulsar, on the other hand, is 3,000 times smaller than the diamond planet. The planet is itself the remains of a star, which partly explains the size discrepancy.

And now, all that's left is diamond. So, fire up the rocket engines and let's get going! An entire planet made of diamond is worth, according to the best estimates available, a trillion trillion dollars. (And no, that's not a typo.)

All we need to do is to go there, scoop up a whole lot of the planet, and bring it back. No problem, right? Then we have diamonds galore for people to buy, sell, appreciate, and … fight over. Oh, wait, maybe it's not such a good idea after all. We'd need to sort the distribution schedule well beforehand.

Actually, we probably have time to do that, even to the extent of going through all the proper channels — the U.N. and consulting representatives of every country on the planet and such — because the star is 4,000 light-years away and it will take a hell of a long time to get there and get back. By the time the load of diamonds returns, we surely would have sorted out our differences, one way or the other.

Twitter Commandment: Think Before You Tweet

These days, it's not only what you say, it's what you tweet — and who's following or lurking.

Case in point: A woman left a restaurant after being berated by the manager, who wasn't even there. Her crime? Posting a derogatory comment on Twitter.

Seems the woman was commenting not on the service but on what a bartender said about someone else. She turned to what to many people is a natural outlet, Twitter, and posted a comment calling the bartender a "twerp." What she also did, of course, is mention the name of the restaurant and, for good measure, included a hashtag that wasn't all that … delicate.

Turns out also that the manager of the restaurant was monitoring Twitter at the time and happened to see the woman's tweet. His response was to call the restaurant and demand that the phone be handed to the woman in question. The manager then proceeded to berate the woman, the barrage ending in a demand for either a public apology or a departure from the premises.

The woman chose the latter and followed it up with another tweet (which probably wasn't a rave review for the food or the service). No word yet on any response from the restaurant manager.

What's the lesson here? First of all, it certainly wasn't the woman's fault that she complained about a comment by a bartender. Secondly, it certainly wasn't the woman's role to be on the wrong end of a verbal torrent delivered over the phone. The one thing that did precipitate all of what followed, though, was the woman's putting too much information into a tweet while she was still there. This is not to argue that she got what she deserved — quite the opposite, actually — she was mistreated and can probably get some sort of just desserts by telling everyone she knows about the incident, asking them to tell everyone they know, etc. In these days of 24/7 news and wall-to-wall, up-to-the-minute social media, sometimes it's best to put both time and distance between … observations.

Fan Snags Home Run Ball 3 Nights Running

You have to love the odds. In this case, they don't matter so, so much.

Some statistician or probability expert somewhere can come up with the odds of one baseball fan catching a home run in the same park three nights in a row, but I'm not that person so I won't even try. I can say with a high degree of certainty, however, that the odds of a baseball player hitting a home run on each of three consecutive nights are better.

The scene: Camden Yards, this season the setting for so many home runs leaving the park off the bats of not the Orioles.

The dude: Tim Anderson, a 17-year-old high school senior, who had nothing better to do for three nights in a row in August than to go to Oriole Park and see the O's play the Chicago White Sox.

The common denominator: a plaid pattern on the dude's shorts.

So the first home run Anderson managed to snag came off the bat of Chicago's Carlos Quentin. It's not every night that a fan can get his or her hands on a home run ball, but Tim Anderson did. He was sitting in the left-field bleachers, and he undoubtedly had some sort of expectation that he had a better opportunity to catch a home run than some other fans in his part of the bleachers, simply because he had a baseball glove with him. And he didn't keep it under the bleacher seat; no, this guy was wearing the glove and up and ready each time a batted ball came his way. (As San Francisco Giants announcer Mike Krukow is fond of saying, "Bring a glove, you get ball."

So Anderson stuck up his glove up and snagged the ball after it "left the park." And the next night, he did again, although he might have been a bit happier to have caught that home run, since it was hit by Baltimore's own J.J. Hardy. So presumably, Anderson did a bit of a happy dance that night, not only because he had caught another home run but also because his team had knocked one out of the park and won the game.

But the real happy feet routine would have come the third night running, when Anderson — clad once again in plaid shorts — caught another home run, this one off the bat of Chicago's Alexei Ramirez. Anderson had to work for that one, jumping high in the air and contesting the catch with a few other fans in the left field bleachers; but catch it he did.

Given the Orioles' propensity to hang around the American League East cellar this season, Anderson might have found himself wishing, along with many other fans, that the Orioles had won the three games — and a few score more. As it was, the White Sox managed to win the games in which their homers landed in Anderson's glove, as did the Orioles.

For the record, even though the photo montage doesn't show it, Anderson was wearing three different kinds of plaid shorts — not exactly rally cap stuff, but there you go.

Alaska's Loch Ness Monster? Who Knows?

So Alaska is far away from the rest of the United States. I get that. And it's far up north as well, with a climate more like Canada and Minnesota than Alabama or Mississippi. So far away and up north, in the wilds of the frozen tundra (so to speak). Anything could happen up there, or anything could live up there.

Turns out that anything might be living up there, if a certain recent video is to be believed.

(Just a note here: We are in the age of easy access to YouTube and iMovie and a host of other video editing and presentation mechanisms, so we need to treat stories like the one that follows with at least one grain of salty skepticism.)

A series of black-and-white video images shows what some people think is a large sea creature, 20 to 30 feet in length, in the water off the coast of Alaska. The footage is as murky as the water up there, so we don't have anything more definitive to go on. And the footage is a bit old, having been shot way back in 2009. That's not exactly yesterday's news, but it isn't tomorrow's news, either. And black-and-white? All the more reason to see shades of gray.

But no matter. So the creature has a name as well. It is called Cadborosaurus willsi. Now part of that name, the first word, is location-based. See, the good folks over at Cadboro Bay, British Columbia, have had this sort of story on their books for ages now. Their story of a waterborne creature having a "long neck, a horse-like head, large eyes, and back bumps that stick out of the water" is so old that they've given the creature a nickname: They call it "Caddy," for short.

Faced with so much evidence, who are we to deny the existence of such a creature? We don't live up there (well, at least, I don't); how can we possibly say for certain that the creature isn't at this very moment cruising the murky depths looking for a morsel or two of plankton, seal, or deep-sea diver? (Must maintain a varied diet, after all.)

I have to wonder, however, whether the whole thing is a publicity stunt, to drive up ratings of a television show. Now, that certainly wouldn't be the first time in the history of the "vast wasteland" that such an effort has washed over the sensibilities of a bevy of viewers. But the fact remains that a certain reality TV show called Deadliest Catch is about to air an episode on "Caddy," complete with eyewitness testimony by Captain Andy Hillstrand of a strange encounter indeed with a strange creature behaving strangely in a strange place.

If you're keen to try to get a head-start on getting to the bottom of this one, tune in to Deadliest Catch and hear Hillstrand describe his sighting of "a big, long white thing moving in the water."

Whatever you think of his testimony, don't call him Ishmael.

On the Plus Side, There's a Pool, or Four

It's typically bold and big-thinking, typically New York. A concept endorsed by several designers is for a "Plus Pool," a pool in the shape of a plus that would have four arms of water fed by New York river water.

Each of the four arms would be for a specific kind of swimmer. Planned are the Children's Pool, the Lap Pool, the Lounge Pool, and the Sports Pool. Of course, the owners could open up all four arms so that everyone could swim everywhere. Some marketing materials are touting the four-pool "long lap" option. But no word yet on whether pool owners are expecting giant, four-pool versions of Marco Polo.

In the vein of the rooftop pools that have appeared in the past couple of years, the Plus Pool is a novelty that just might find enough paying customers to keep it afloat. The novelty is surely enough of a draw for many of the city's annual millions of tourists.

Fundraising is driving the revenue streams, since the price tag is expected to touch $5 million. The money won't be water-logged, that's for sure: it will be put right to work.

3D Chocolate: It's a Reality

How real do you like your chocolate? Should you need to wear special glasses to eat it?

These are questions that stem from a careful reading of the latest news out of one quarter of the United Kingdom, where scientists now say that they can use a 3D printer — that newfangled device that might be the first step on the road to a Star Trek replicator — to make chocolate.

The whole idea of 3D printing is a relatively new one, with machines scarce and people having enough money to buy them even scarcer. The most common uses of the existing 3D printers are the creation (actually recreation) of machine parts and all things plastic.

Onto this template come some researchers from the University of Essex. Instead of printing using ink or plastic or tiny bits of metal or something practical, the 3D printer these researchers are using prints in chocolate. Yep, you can smell it and taste it and everything. (Check out that non-PhotoShopped photo at right, in which you can clearly see the various "layers" of the letters that spell the name of that most glorious of dessert-item foods.)

The researchers swear that the chocolate tastes good. Well, that's all well and good because they are making food, and so it should taste good, especially if they plan to sell it restaurants.

The result will inevitably be a website, at which online shoppers can get some chocolate DIY mojo going and design their own creation, which can be printed out and consumed. In the meantime, you can start thinking about all the great uses for 3D chocolate.

The Truth Will Out

The truth is a funny thing. Truth has a variable definition. It can be skewed by perspective, ignorance, or a willful disregard for the facts. It can also be distorted by PhotoShop.

(A note here: Adobe PhotoShop is certainly a name well recognized among users of photo-editing software; other such software exists.)

Such is the case with a photo out of a rural area of China, courtesy of the user-friendly World Wide Web, on which was published recently a poorly doctored photo of three men inspecting a road construction project. The photo was actually two photos, clearly different, that the photographer decided needed to be put together and presented as one. Trouble was, the two photos were sufficiently different as to be instantly recognizable as being different and so looked decidedly amateurish. It didn't help, either, that the men appeared to be levitating several inches off the ground.

What's the harm here? Surely most people who look at the photo can tell it has been altered. The photo certainly made the rounds on the Internet, spawning screeds of commentary and a plethora of parodies. But whether people are convinced by the sincerity of what the photo is allegedly showing isn't the point; rather, the point is that a photograph, like a news story, is a representation of what actually happened. This was not a marketing exercise, in which an advertisement was created with the intent of convincing potential buyers to become actual buyers. This was a simple depiction of a simple event, yet the photographer for some reason felt the need to alter what he had created and present a new creation, one of a slightly altered reality.

It's certainly all too easy these days to do the same, taking photos of real life, slapping on fancy graphics or captions and sending the resulting concoction off to friends and family alike, for the purpose of amusement. (And this is all too easy to do in the age of social media and cool new technology tools — in some cases, you can go through the whole process using the one tool that you normally carry around with you, the smartphone.) Again, that is something that is, more or less, instantly recognizable as not the real thing.

A similar instance occurred in the same country, China, a few years ealier. A photographer submitted for newspaper publication a shot of a couple dozen antelope meandering underneath a railway overpass, seemingly oblivious to the industrial evolution that had occurred to produce the structure overhead. Now, the newspaper editor should have taken as the first clue the fact that the photo also showed a train speeding along the very overpass underneath which the antelope were meandering along. Surely such noise and otherwise pollution would have been enough to have scared the poor beasties into a trot back into their natural habitat. But the photo was published, and only later did it emerge that the photo was, in fact, two shots spliced together. (Seems that an alert reader noticed a fault line in the photo, in addition to the seemingly obliviousness of the antelope.)

In that case, the editor resigned and the photographer undoubtedly struggled to find other work. The consequences, other than those suffered by the two newspaper employees, were relatively small, unless you count the loss of face suffered by the newspaper, which must have been a bit much. Still, the harm done was relatively small.

The same cannot be said to be true for Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian president eventually lost control of his kingdom in a popular uprising that booted him from the presidential palace after 30 years in fiercely autocratic power. The power of social media was cited repeatedly in the success of the Egyptian protesters to mobilize and circumvent the government's Internet blackout, firing into crowds in Tahrir Square, and other attempts to maintain Mubarak's hold on power.

Several months before the beginning of Mubarak's end, the state-run newspaper Al-Ahram ran a photograph of a group of world leaders attending Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. In the photo, Mubarak was leading U.S. President Barack Obama, Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas down a red carpet at the White House. Further bolstering Mubarak's clout, the headline on the photo and accompany story was The Way to Sharm el-Sheikh. That would be Egypt's grand port city, home to one of Mubarak's palaces and where the former president is still holed up, awaiting release from hospital so the interim government can try him on charges that could result in the death penalty.

Trouble was, Mubarak wasn't in the lead in that photo. No, that photo was taken in the White House and, naturally, the American president was leading the procession. Not content with the facts, Al-Ahram doctored the photo, moving Mubarak to the head of the procession. Not sure what the editor was thinking in publishing the photo in that way in such wide release because the alteration was soon outed among the Twitterati and other world media outlets. Still, said publication of said doctored photo probably had everything to do with a presidential order and nothing much to do with portraying the truth as it happened.

Those last three words, as it happened, are the key in all of this. We trust our news sources to present us with an unfiltered presentation of the events that occurred as they occurred, so news stories contain facts and news photographs contain snapshots in real time. If we cannot trust in such portrayals of truth, then we should really fear for our own education because we can't possibly be everywhere at once and witness all of the world events about which we want to keep informed. Perhaps we need to adopt the mantra of "Trust but Verify" and seek out multiple sources in our search for the truth. Today's social media certainly make such a task easier than it used to be. Ever vigilant, we must be on the lookout for subtle (or obvious) "crafting" of the truth, however.