Nerd Word of the Week: Vatvegan

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Vatvegan (adj.) - A term coined just days ago on Twitter by William Gibson, referring to a vegan who is nonetheless willing to consume artificially grown meat. Specifically, someone who has moral objections to eating conventional meat, but is willing to consume vat-grown pseudo-animal products so long as the substance consumed was not capable of experiencing pain. Artifical and/or moral meats have a long tradition in spec-fic, from the vat-meats mentioned offhand in Robert Heinlein's Door Into Summer to the sentient self-slaughtering cows found in Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe to replicated meat found througthout the Star Trek mythos, vatvegans have been waiting for the goods for a long, long time.

I bring it up because: Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, a day of feasting gleefully without much concern to potential (if overhyped) frankenfood farmageddon or the lessons of The Omnivore's Dilemma. More specifically, Time named the nascent possibility of vat-grown meat one of the top technologies of 2009. Thus, we may be on the verge of sidestepping many of the moral concerns which have stirred many to vegetarianism (and into the ranks of PETA), leaving us only with the health risks associated with vat-meat. One wonders whether the next foodie counterculture movement won't be a rejection of "establishment" vat-meat in favor of natural farm-fresh animal flesh, with the next generation of suburban hippie defined as avowed carnivores, rather than prosetylizing meat-abstainers. Now that would be ironic.

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Truly Trivial: What US President tried to reschedule Thanksgiving, and why?

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A short work week at NotebookReview -- including preparations for Black Friday -- means we're going back to the Geek Trivia well in lieu of a fresh Truly Trivial column, but it's a timely and popular retread. The key excerpt below explains.

Sales volume typically spikes on Black Friday, then plummets back down the following Monday. The sales trend then ramps back up as Christmas approaches, with the two Saturdays and two Sundays nearest to but before Christmas eventually overtaking Black Friday in sales volume. (December 23 is always a good bet to be near the top as well.) The last-minute shopper is a statistical -- and economically powerful -- reality.

Despite Black Friday's somewhat overstated reputation, one U.S. president so respected the economic power wielded by the Christmas shopping season that he tried to extend it a week -- by rescheduling Thanksgiving.

WHICH U.S. PRESIDENT WANTED TO RESCHEDULE THANKSGIVING TO ACCOMMODATE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING?

The full Q&A is here.

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Nerd Word of the Week: Whuffie

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Whuffie (n.) - A form of currency based on social status, rather than tangible wealth. The Whuffie originated in Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Whuffie has since become an insider term for online reputation, with such non-fiction works as The Whuffie Factor taking the word mainstream. In Doctorow's original novel, Whuffie (which is the plural and singular form) replaced money as the means of acquiring wealth, though "wealth" in that setting meant something very different. Down and Out is set in a post-scarcity economy, where necessities and luxuries are so easily and cheaply produced they have no practical cost. Thus, the economy was based on status rather than property, and complex systems were set up to upvote and downvote your every action, such that every activity becomes a public political performance. If you think that's an unlikely future, please say so in the syndicated comments below this posts, and/or downvote (using the controversial new dislike button) the Facebook note version of this blog. Possibly using your always-on Internet phone. Which is itself a status symbol. The point (and the sarcasm) should be evident by now.

I bring it up because: The Oxford English Dictionary declared the verb unfriend 2009's Word of the Year. When removing someone from your virtual social circle is so commonplace and mainstream as to get pub from the OED, you know that virtual, pervasive reputation management is here to stay. Combine that with the relatively ballyhooed debut of LoveMachine, a real-life antecedent to the Whuffie, a virtual reputation-management system created by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale. Granted, The Whuffie Bank already got there and already has the Whuffie name. Also, the PenguinCon science fiction-slash-Linux convention has recently experimented with an in-con virtual reputation currency called a Whuffie, though in practice it worked a bit more like Slashdot's karma system. That may be a distinction without a difference, but I'll leave it to my Whuffie score to sort it out.

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Truly Trivial: How many planets are known to have liquid surface water?

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Last Friday, NASA announced that its LCROSS mission -- also known as "let's slam a probe into the lunar surface while another probe films the action, Jackass-style" -- found significant amounts of water on the moon. This revved up interest in lunar colonization again, despite the fact that there isn't any pure, drinkable, liquid water on the moon.

Now, water is very useful for space exploration even if you can't directly drink it, as simple electrolysis lets you crack water into breathable oxygen and hydrogen rocket fuel. The moon just became much more interesting as a weigh station for spacecraft, as robot factories could be sent ahead to stockpile hydrogen, oxygen, and possibly even purified drinkable water for manned craft heading further out into the solar system. Moreover, water is a very effective radiation shield, provided you can encircle a crew cabin in a two-meters-deep tank of H2O on all sides. The "significant amounts" of lunar water means moonbases might just be able to extract the Olympic swimming pools' worth of water necessary to ward off the cosmic fry-daddy rays awaiting space travelers.

As Karl Schroeder points out, the main barrier to manned spaceflight isn't technology but the expense of hauling the necessary materials into orbit. Launching these materials off the moon requires climbing out of one-sixth the gravity well that exists on Earth, which means there's an economic argument to be made for gathering spaceflight materials from a lunar base rather than launching them from Earth with the astronauts. Besides, if we can perfect the robot factories on the moon, we can get serious about mining comets, which have a lot more water-ice mass per capita and a lot less gravity. Robot comet iceminers mean that manned spacecraft could have a plethora of automated air, fuel, and shielding depots scattered throughout the Interplanetary Transport Network.

Thus, the lunar water discovery is very exciting, but it's unlikely to lead directly to the holy grail of space exploration -- the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Virtually all life as we know it requires water to exist, particularly liquid water that appears on the surface of the world, where it can be exposed to nurturing (and mutating) solar radiation. We've found hundreds of extrasolar planets and thousands of extraterrestrial non-stellar bodies, but liquid surface water remains stubbornly rare.

How many planets besides Earth are known to possess liquid surface water?

Nerd Word of the Week: Cryptid

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Cryptid (n.) - A creature that is rumored to exist but no one has managed to prove is real. Bigfoot, chupacabras, the Moth Man, and the Jersey Devil are among the more famous examples of cryptids. Cryptozoology is the "scientific" study of cryptids, though (much like ufology) the field is often dominated by fringe scientists and conspiracy theorists who seem ill-acquainted with the actual scientific method. (There's also a subfield called cryptobotany, which seems mostly obsessed with finding giant man-eating plants. Little Shop of Horrors apparently was inspired by true events.)

Cryptids, to no one's surprise, make excellent fodder for speculative fiction A Lee Martinez's novel Monster is a recent example, though the trend is hardly limited to books. The animated series The Secret Saturdays chronicles the adventures of a family of cryptid hunters, depicted in a Jack Kirby pulp-hero style. Moreover, giant cryptids seem to have a rolling contract with Syfy, as the channel has become infamous for cheeseball original cryptid-kaiju movies like Megashark vs. Giant Octopus and Dinocroc vs. Supergator.

I bring it up because: A mere 76 years ago today, the first known photographs of the world's most famous cryptid, the Loch Ness Monster, were taken. On Nov. 12, 1933 Scotsman Hugh Gray snapped the first purported pics of Nessie, though to most eyes it looks like a blurry image of a dog swimming with a stick in its mouth. 1933 was when the Nessie phenomenon gained media attention, with multiple sighting reports published in papers that year. It was only a year later that the world-famous but since-discredited Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster was taken, proving that hoaxsters trying to horn in on the cryptid action are a time-honored tradition, even if cryptozoology itself isn't.

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