ChrisKnight – Page 20 – The Wacky World of Chris Knight

2009/07/232009/07/23

The coolness that is Smith & Wesson customer support:

For my birthday, Mel bought me a Smith & Wesson SW99 9mm. I’m writing up a full review, but I’m not done breaking it in and the review has a few things that need flushed out. One thing I can say is that I am very impressed by Smith & Wesson customer support. On my first day at the range with my SW99 I was fiddling with the rear sights, and I put too much pressure on the adjustment screw and the rear site popped free and fell off. When the sight came off, the spring loaded plunger assembly that the adjustment screw meshes with sprang out. I found the spring, but the plunger was lost in a pile of brass casings in the grass. I called Smith & Wesson to ask how much a replacement would cost. I was asked what happened, and when I explained how I lost the piece they sent me a replacement for free. Not only do they stand by their product, they comped me free parts when I broke my own gun. I thought that was cool.

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2009/07/232009/07/24

You really do have an aura!

I’ve seen a lot of things in my life that I can’t explain, and yet absolutely happened. Because of that I’ve had the occasional frustrating discussion with otherwise intelligent friends who call bullshit on me because they don’t believe in ‘ESP’. The problem is that the acronym ESP often gets misused in the same way that UFO gets abused. UFO != alien ship. UFO == Unidentified Flying Object. Just because you don’t know what it is does not make it alien. ESP does not mean magical psychic powers; it means ‘Extra-Sensory Perception’ which translates to perceiving something outside of the standard cataloged five senses.

Japanese researchers have demonstrated that human beings emit visible light. Sounds pretty much like an ‘aura’ to me. Now, admittedly, this ‘aura’ is 1000th the light level the human eye normally perceives; but that is the part that makes it ESP; because the light level the human eye ‘normally’ perceives is not universal. Some people hear better, some people see better, and some people just might be able to detect the visible light emitted by the human body under the right circumstances.

This is a perfect case of ‘just because you couldn’t detect it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there’. Two hundred fifty years ago the idea of a cell phone would have got you burned at the stake. When I was a kid everyone thought I was cheating when I could be blindfolded, spun around, and could always point north; and now we know that humans really do have an internal compass. In the near future some people I know will be laughed at for thinking auras didn’t exist.

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.

Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.
People Emit Visible Light (PIC)

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2009/07/022009/07/02

Stu-Fi – Impact (or How I Learned to Hate the Stupid)

I’ve been a Science Fiction & Fantasy junkie since I learned how to read. The two earliest books I remember reading that didn’t involve Dick and Jane were “Around the World in Eighty Days” and “The Magician’s Nephew”. I don’t agree with Harlan Ellison that the shortened “Sci-Fi” is an anathema that ruins the genre; and as such I wish to now coin the counter-term Stu-Fi as a shorted version of Stupid-Science-Fiction.

I want to coin this term because I’ve been watching a mini-series called Impact. It is supposedly a science fiction piece, but the science is so frelling bad that it is damn near Fantasy. Since there are no Unicorns, I can only conclude that it is Stupid-Science-Fiction, or Stu-Fi for short; which is basically the science fiction genre written for the inhabitants of the movie Idiocracy. To put it bluntly, if you have a sixth grade understanding of science this mini-series will make your head explode.

It’s one thing for Star Trek to show warp drives, and Star Wars to have super-light drives; because these are theoretical technologies that we may still develop even though we don’t currently know how to accomplish it. It is an altogether different thing to show a scene where the counter balance of a massive orbital object effectively neutralizes the Earth’s gravity causing an ocean freighter to rise out of the water, which then closes up the hole where the ship had been. Hey, you fraking boneheads, water closes up and forms a smooth surface because of gravity! If you neutralize that gravity, even if it is by means of a completely wrong understanding of mass and orbital mechanics, the water would rise up with the ship! What kind of moron wrote the CGI scripting to show a ship float out of the water because of ‘gravity fluctuations’ and yet coded the ship to be dripping water back down to the ocean? Did anyone consider that without gravity water doesn’t drip downwards? Please, don’t bother trying to explain that the ship is metal and is somehow affected differently, because the next scene showed bales of hay floating in the air. If you are inconsistently stupid you are still stupid!

Einstein was right: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

I wanted to credit Mike Rohl with inspiring me to coin the term “Stu-Fi” but a little bit of IMBD searching reveals the disturbing fact that he has been involved in a lot of shows that I have enjoyed. The thing is, Supernatural and Smallville are more Fantasy than Sci-Fi, and so I can cut them a lot more slack. Impact takes itself much more seriously, and so my condemnation is more serious. As much as I want to shield someone whose work I have liked, I still can’t blame just the writers; Mr Rohl, as the director, surely had some ability to quell the stupidity that this show not only displays but damn well flaunts.

I have googled it. “Stu-Fi” doesn’t exist anywhere else as of 2009-07-02. This is where you heard it first. I blame Michael Vickerman,Mike Rohl and Impact.

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