So.... we've been attacking the enemy with souped up ... golf carts? Fear me! I have laser ... golf balls!!Today's Wired News profiles Raydiance, a company specializing in ultrashort pulse (USP) lasers -- light flashes that last less than a ten-trillionth of a second. The pulses go so quick, they can be used to carve conductive channels of ionized oxygen in the air. And down those channels, you can shoot man-made lightning bolts to a given spot, zapping whatever (or whoever) happens to be there.
In 2005 and 2006, Raydiance's fellow USPers at Ionatron built for the Defense Department about a dozen golf cart-esque vehicles, equipped with lightning guns, and seemingly ready for rapid deployment to Iraq -- only to have the things sent back.
Last year, Raydiance got a $4 million contract from the Navy to build a "brass board" blaster. Meanwhile, Ionatraon got another $10 million in military money to keep working on their version of the lightning gun.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Now we will win the Eternal War on Terror!
With our (/loud organ chord!!) LIGHTNING LASER GUN!!! (Wait a minute, needs more work. Screwdriver, please)
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5 comments:
Who will write the Tom Swift story for this device? I'm not good enough with adverbs...
This sounds GREAT! I wish I were a rock n roll promoter. Think of the shows.
Wikipedia on Tom Swift:
Tom Swift is the young protagonist in several series of juvenile adventure novels which began in the early twentieth century and continue to the present. Each such series stars a hero named Tom Swift who is a genius inventor and whose breakthroughs in technology (especially transport technology) drive the plots of the novels, placing them in a genre sometimes called "invention fiction" or "Edisonade".
Just think of the stories we can tell if this thing really starts to work and we can melt our enemies on the spot! The power! The control!! Who needs adverbs? Muhahaha... ahem.
Rock and roll? Why think of rock and roll when you can think of being Zeus frying evildoer libera... ah al-Qaeda in their tracks?
"Can't write a story about my coherent light weapon without using adverbs," yawned Tom laserly.
I am old enough to have read some Tom Swift stories in my childhood. No matter who authored one of the novels, their prose is filled with gratuitous adverbs; it's a convention. In the 1960s (I think), a genre of one-liners called "Tom Swifties" emerged, all of the form,
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"{declarative sentence spoken by Tom Swift}," said Tom {adverb ending in -ly}.
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The adverb was always a pun of some sort based on the sentence. Some examples from the Wikipedia entry:
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* "Pass me the shellfish," said Tom crabbily.
* "Can I go looking for the Grail again?" Tom requested.
* "I unclogged the drain with a vacuum cleaner," Tom said succinctly.
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The second entry is noncanonical because it has no adverb, but it is very much in the spirit of the genre. See the wiki for many more examples. Google for still more of them.
"If Tom Swift unclogged the sink with the vacuum cleaner, he's in the intensive care ward at the hospital," she said caringly.
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