No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

terapsina

✨🚀✨SENTIENT SPACESHIP💖🚀✨ FINAL REMATCH!

You might have seen and voted in THE FIRST POLL and/or THE SECOND ONE. But here are the winners of both polls (taken by the percentages), so for one last time...

Vote for your favorite SENTIENT SPACESHIP!

TARDIS (Doctor Who) - 42%

Hera (Wolf 359) - 14%

ART/Asshole Research Transport/Perihelion (The Murderbot Diaries) - 11%

Moya (Farscape) - 7%

The Magic School Bus (The Magic School Bus) - 27%

Aurora (The Mechanisms) - 23%

The Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) - 15%

EDI (Mass Effect) - 11%

HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey) - 10%

Rocket (Little Einsteins) - 6%

See Results

catasters

morrak

literallymechanical

I wish I could see in radio waves.

AM radio broadcast antennas blaze as bright as the sun with a deep, low-frequency hue, and cell towers are shimmering little bonfires tucked discreetly on top of buildings. The endless rows of Boston brownstones glow with wifi, through windows and walls — I get a sort of x-ray vision of routers and laptops through muted brick. Everybody has a scintillating jewel in their pocket that pops and flickers with text messages and snapchats. The airport looks like a distant rave.

My weird neighbor who never seems to eat or sleep has a bunch of internal components that broadcast on some sparsely-populated frequency bands that the FCC doesn’t keep a close eye on. She catches me staring through our apartments’ adjoining wall, and her eyes glow with millimeter wave radar as they lock onto mine. I turn around. My shitty microwave is a treasure chest with light seeping around the lid. A magical bounty of sesame chicken.

The timer beeps and the magnetron cools down. I’m suddenly casting a 52 GHz shadow on the kitchen linoleum, like somebody in the hallway is sweeping a flashlight through layers of drywall. There’s a knock on the door. A melodious voice is asking to borrow a cup of sugar. K-band space-com frequencies pulse in time to the words. This is probably fine.

literallymechanical

True in theory, not so much in practice. A sufficiently beat-up microwave that’s survived a few apartments will have tiny gaps in the gasket around the door. It doesn’t take much for something with such a short wavelength as a microwave to slip through a slit, no matter how thin.

Even when your brand new oven works as designed, it still glows faintly around 2.5 GHz. The grille attenuates microwaves to a safe level, but it isn’t intended to block them completely. When I designed waveguides for channeling RF at slightly higher frequencies, it was just as much of a challenge to keep the joints RF tight as vacuum tight. Microwaves get mischievous. They’re escape artists.

Incidentally, microwave oven frequencies are very close to WiFi frequencies. This means that a sufficiently noisy microwave oven is indistinguishable from a signal jammer. This was enough of a problem in my old college dorm that if you tried to microwave something after 10 PM, gremlins would emerge from mysterious depths to grumble at you for lagging them out of their WoW raid.

catasters

elodieunderglass

earhartsease

staff

Hello, esteemed Important Internet People. You will by now have noticed the change in your Important Internet Checkmarks. That’s right, they’re now important in every color of the rainbow.

Just popping in here to let you know that you can now also gift Important Internet Checkmarks to all your Important Internet Friends. It is important to us that you know this. Hence this missive. Have a good day. (And give the gift of Internet Importance. You probably won’t regret it.)

english-history-trip

museum-of-artifacts

A nearly complete 1st century BCE carnyx found in 2004 at Tintignac, France (the one in the left picture, with a reconstruction in the right). Fashioned as a snarling boar, the carnyx was a war horn used by the Iron Age Celts between c. 200 BCE and c. 200 CE

mortalityplays

fun fact, the first reconstruction of the carnyx was built in Scotland in the early 90s, and John Kenny brought it to my dad's photographic studio (our house) to have publicity pictures taken. I was very very young, but I had a precocious interest in history, and Kenny showed me the detailed boar's head, which had an articulated tongue that would give the effect of a subtle ululation when it was played. He played it for us in our garden, and I can still remember the sound. It sounded like a trumpet, if a trumpet was a wild prehistoric animal capable of throwing back its head and howling. It sounded like something great and tusked and angry and brass that knew what blood was and wanted it.

I don't know how old I was when I heard it, I think it must have been after its debut at the museum, but I do remember Kenny telling us we were among a very small handful of people who had heard the carnyx in 2,000 years. I remember my nextdoor neighbour's pigeons all taking off from his loft, and the wide silence that rang out afterwards, that more often came in the wake of foghorns from the harbour. I wonder, in retrospect, what all those people packed around us in their tenements in the poor part of Leith thought they'd heard. what does an ancient celtic war horn sounds like, floating through the window while you're doing the dishes?