WEEKLY WHINE

Please deposit solutions for everything here

As you know, a new test of neutrino speed at CERN has demonstrated that neutrinos do not travel faster than light after all. So the whole thing was a waste of time, but it still got people thinking about the possibility that some of our most important, deeply held theories and beliefs are wrong.

So which of your most important, deeply held theories and beliefs would you like to be wrong? We now present sixteen of our suggestions.

THE DAY IS ONLY 24 HOURS LONG

Let’s have the day suddenly be 36 hours, so that we can have an extra twelve hours to sleep, watch television, sleep, take up birdwatching, sleep, learn to play a musical instrument, sleep, finally get around to writing that novel we’ve been talking about for years, sleep, write about things that we wish were wrong, and sleep.

EARTH HAS ONLY ONE MOON

Astronomers have over the years witnessed things that they believed to be additional moons of Earth, only to be proven wrong each time. But if Earth really does have an extra moon, where would it have been hiding all this time? It would have had to have a very low albedo, maybe negative. But objects can’t have negative albedos. Wait a second...

OBJECTS CAN’T HAVE NEGATIVE ALBEDOS

Albedo measures the percentage of incident light that an object reflects. But if an object absorbed more light than fell on it, what would happen? Well, it would probably heat up continually with no way to cool it down again. So you might be able to make a perpetual motion machine out of it, at least until it overheated and exploded.

THE HIGGS BOSON EXISTS

What if it’s not really out there? Well, there are plenty of proposed models of particle physics that don’t have a Higgs boson and offer some other way to give all the other particles mass. But we would then have to figure out which one – if any – is correct. And that would be long and expensive. So let’s just go ahead and find the Higgs boson, okay? Okay.

NO OTHER INTELLIGENT CIVILISATIONS EXIST IN THE UNIVERSE

Hey, if there’s anybody out there who wants to drop by and share their cures for all known diseases and their solutions for letting all peoples live together in peace and harmony, that would be all right with us.

SALADS ARE HEALTHY

All the female members of the GoobNet Special Projects Enhancement and Enforcement Division [SPEED] were enthusiastic about the possibility that the healthiness of salads is just a gigantic myth. Gaby summed up everyone’s feelings: “Salads are supposed to be so fucking great for you. But they’re just so damn slow. And the dressing is always full of fat and stuff, even though that’s the best part! So it’s like, what the fuck?”

TWITTER IS USEFUL

We have a few people here at GoobNet who are anti-Twitter. Their opinions on the matter were best expressed by Amber Lynn: “Is this really what we need as a society? Another venue where Ashton Kutcher’s voice can be heard?”

BASHAR AL-ASSAD IS A RUTHLESS DICTATOR

If it was suddenly revealed that Assad likes LMFAO and Harry Potter, wouldn’t he have to stop killing his own people? Let’s leak some E-mails and put that theory to the test.

SARAH PALIN IS RELEVANT

Casting her vote for this, Amber Lynn remarked, “That would change the game.”

GOD TOTALLY WANTS PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER

If there’s anybody reading this who thinks that your religion says you should kill people who are of other faiths, or other ethnicities, or other nationalities, or other sexual orientations... maybe you should seek out a second opinion.

TRAVELLING CLOSE TO THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND GOING TO DIFFERENT GRAVITY LEVELS ARE THE ONLY WAYS TO EXPERIENCE RELATIVISTIC TIME DILATION

According to relativity, objects moving at different speeds, or in different gravitational fields, experience time differently. But there have to be more ways to make time slow to a standstill, right? Like putting an entire David Bowie and Mick Jagger music video in the middle of an already unremarkable episode of Family Guy?

THERE ARE ONLY THREE PRIMARY COLOURS

We may not know what a new colour would look like, but there is a clear use for it. The new colour would be used on traffic lights to indicate those two seconds after the light has gone red but everybody who has encroached into the intersection from the turn lane is still making their turns.

THE PURPOSE OF THE US CONGRESS IS TO COOPERATE AND PASS LEGISLATION BENEFICIAL TO THE NATION AS A WHOLE

Congress has low approval ratings because its members continually argue with each other and block the legislative process. But what if it turns out that that was exactly what the framers of the US Constitution had in mind? What if papers by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison suddenly came to light that showed that they wanted the House and Senate to do nothing whatsoever? Wouldn’t that change everything? Wouldn’t that mean that Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are actually the best party leaders the Senate has ever had? Wouldn’t that totally blow your mind?

MERMAIDS AND CENTAURS DO NOT EXIST

When Jhonny mentioned that he is a mermaid fan, Wen immediately expressed interest in being a centaur. So apparently it takes a specific type of mind to join the SPEED.

AMERICANS DON’T LIKE FOOTBALL

When he proposed this, Rich said that it would be cool if it suddenly turned out that football is really popular in America. But then Edvard said, “It is really popular in America. Each World Cup gets higher and higher ratings. Matches from the English league, the Spanish league, the Champions League, they’re all getting higher and higher ratings. And MLS attendance is climbing.” So, then, snap.

SPACE TRAVEL IS DIFFICULT

Wouldn’t it be so awesome if it suddenly turned out that travelling in space was not nearly as difficult as we all thought it was? That there is some secret way to launch things into space and protect your body from the vacuum and extreme temperatures? That you can avoid losing bone and muscle mass without all that time on the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill? Yes, that would be awesome.