Heward’s Handy Haversack: Tractor Beams, God’s sex change, and Health Care success epic fail stories.

Since I’ll be unable to post anything for the coming week due to a variety of commitments I figured I’d throw out a Haversack full of the cool stuff I’ve stumbled upon on the web that I really intended to blog about but never got around to.

#1: Tractor Beams for Realsies, as tested by scientists at the Australian National University. According to the article, the beam can move small particles 1.5 meters, and possibly as far as 10 meters, using nothing but light. While the ability to move minuscule objects with light has existed for years, this new method can move objects a hundred times larger a hundred times farther. Nifty.

#2: Holy Trinity, now in a miniskirt! Feeling that millennia of Divinely Inspired masculine references just weren’t good enough, the Scottish Episcopal Church have “approved the introduction of more ‘inclusive’ language, which deliberately removes references suggesting that God is of male gender”. Now, instead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.

Slightly more offensive is the new uniform of the Bishop.



#3: English 333: ZOMBIES! Displaying levels of w00t that can only be described as epicly awesome, the University of Baltimore professor Arnold Blumberg has introduced a new class to the University’s repertoire. “Eng 333, Media Genres: Zombies” will deal with the most important questions of our time:

”Is "Night of the Living Dead" a simple zombie film or a subtle antiwar statement? Precisely when did viral pandemic supplant nuclear radiation as the lead cause of zombification? And which sort of animated dead has the greater potential to frighten: shambler or sprinter?

Next step: Practical Lab course, featuring training on weapon selection and use in combat. These are life skills, people. It’s important to feed your mind now, so your mind doesn’t feed the dead later.

#4: The dice odds of the game Risk. No gimmick here. Straight up, Kennedy Lemke used a computer “brute force” program to find out what the odds were, precisely. Bottom line: 3 dice have an advantage over two, but only a slight one. 7 wins out of 13.

#5: Public Healthcare in Sweden: Self serve! A Swedish man by the name of Jonas, 32, demonstrated his elation with the new self serve policy of their public healthcare system by being forced to sew up his own wounded leg after waiting an hour to be seen. Of course, while this story has a bit of badass, there is no redeeming quality to a Canadian woman who had a miscarriage while waiting more than three hours in the waiting room to be treated. Government run healthcare: What could possibly go wrong?