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.

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.