SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Scientists have reported new breakthroughs in the effort to determine which household item the universe is shaped like. Following reporting last year that the Universe was shaped like a soccer ball, SlashNOT has now learned that the Universe is apparently shaped like a trumpet, a Pringles chip, a bugle, or a funnel. Other research going on in India points to a morphology similar to a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, or a rope.

Matthew writes: IAEA Chief Mohammad Al Baradei and IKEA President Anders Dahlvig have announced that their two organizations will merge to form IKAEA.

“Both organizations will gain a lot of synergy from this merger.” Claims Mr. Al Baradei. “The IAEA has had a lot of trouble penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the nuclear programs of North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Pakistan. IKEA has the logistical capabilities to put cheap but stylish home furnishings in the hands of even the poorest third-world nations, and we can piggy back on those capabilities to bring nuclear inspectors into every home.”

“We’re designing an entirely new line of home furnishings to complement our partnership with IAEA” says Mr. Dahlvig. “We’ve designed the new ATOM line of couches and love seats with the belligerent nuclear aspirant nation in mind. We’re also setting up a new GEIGER line of stainless and lead kitchen utensils that will permanently change colors in the presence of trans- uranics in the soils or foodstuffs. These markers will make the IAEA inspectors jobs a lot easier.”

J.T. Kirk writes: CIT Professor William Johnson announces the source of his invention, Liquid Metal. In an exclusive inteview by SlashNot.com investigator Duya Noit, Professor Johnson stated that he first obtained the idea from two men claiming to be engineers. “I recall one of them had a thick scottish accent,” Johnson said.

“They came to me one day hoping to enlist my aid in manufacturing some new materials they needed. When they thought I wasn’t listening I overheard them discuss worries about paradox and time travel.”

Professor Johnson then goes on to say this caught his interest so he followed the two men when they left. He says they went to a park where they proceeded to board some kind of invisible craft.

Psychologists have yet to comment on Mr. Johnson’s sanity, saying he may only have been joking.

Matthew writes: NASA has announced today that the Spirit Rover has found evidence of naturally occurring Weapons of Mass Destruction in the crater that it is exploring.

“We know this is quite a bombshell, and frankly, it’s not what exactly what we were looking for, but we’ve found evidence of WMDs all over the surface of Mars.”

“Of course, we’ve only found trace amounts of rocky materials. But this same material, if accumulated in a large mass and ejected from the surface of mars towards earth, would cause major devastation to whatever area it hit. In fact, a large enough accumulation of Martian rocky material impacting earth could end life as we know it.”

In reaction to the news, President Bush has announced that he has ordered NASA to invade Mars, and is increasing funding for the space agency to develop and test the technology to do so.

Mearzuh writes: German tourists visiting the Grand Canyon, spotted and photographed the Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity in the middle of the Arizona desert.

According to preliminary reports, the husband and wife couple did not report this to anybody right away. “We wanted to have our fun with it, first,” said husband Hansel, “so we kinda took funny pictures with it.” The couple admits that they may have damaged the Spirit rover by toying with it. NASA, however, was able to restore it to full functionality.

As to how the two rovers ended up in Arizona rather than on Mars, even officials are not sure. One official suggests that scientists and technicians involved in the missions may have confused the American with the Metric system, and instead of programming the rover to fly to Mars, it was programmed to slingshot back to Earth.

NASA intends to auction the rovers off on Ebay since they are of no use anymore. But this story is not all that bad, for the couple got to keep its pictures along with their bragging rights. Says a smiling wife Gretle, “I mean come on! How many people can say they have been on Mars and have undoctored pictures to prove it?”

Matthew writes: Spirit operations project manager Pete Theisinger admitted on Saturday morning that the Spirit rover’s embedded operating system was actually Windows 98, acquired through NASA’s COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) procurement process as part of the better-faster-cheaper oxymoron under which NASA’s projects since the Space Shuttle have been designed.

“We did a lot of testing. A lot. We really thought we had covered pretty everything. We had Norton System Recovery, MIME Sweeper, ZoneAlarm Pro, and CrashRecover 2 installed. But last Monday when the computer on Spirit started crashing, one of the engineers remembered that we left the OEM copy of McAffee ViruScan running in the system tray, which may have been triggered by an unknown Martian virus, or a Gator popup. McAffee ViruScan is notoriously unreliable on Windows 98, and is also a suspect in the loss of the British Beagle 2.

Theisinger also admitted that the computing hardware consisted of a used Compaq Presario notebook computer that he personally had donated to the effort. “Perhaps we should have re-installed the operating system from scratch, but nobody could find a Windows 98 CD-ROM, and the laptop can’t boot from CD anyway.”

NASA now has the rover running in “Safe Mode” to bypass software problems. Enabling safemode was a dicey hacking operation, considering that NASA’s control protocol is a VNC server that is not available until the computer is completely booted.

“Opportunity is running Windows NT 4 Workstation, so we shouldn’t have any problems with it.”

matthew writes: Three days after the successful landing of the Spirit Rover on Mars, NASA Chief Sean O’Keefe has admitted than a member of the Spirit Rover team left the keys to the robotic rover on Earth in his jacket pocket, leaving the rover stranded withing the landing module and unable to transit down the ramp onto the Martian surface.

“We’re currently exploring various avenues to get the rover started without the keys, but at this point we may have to face the fact that we’ve already seen the best pictures we’re going to get from the Mission. We’ve subsequently initiated an investigation into the location of the keys to Spirit’s twin, the Opportunity rover, which will touch down on the Martian surface in two weeks, and yes, the same Engineer was found with those keys as well.”

JPL Engineers have been attempting to use the Rover’s small robotic arm to move a bolt found lying on the floor of the lander into position where it can short the ignition contacts. It’s not clear why the Rovers were designed with key operated ignitions, considering the lack complex life on Mars. Consultants to Slashnot have speculated that cost cutting measures under NASA’s smaller, faster, cheaper program have necessitated the re-use of components from the automobiles of Engineering personnel.

Matthew writes: A new hypothesis suggests that black holes are not actually infinitely dense pinpoints in space—rather, they are a complex system most closely represented by the 1982 Atari video game “Gravitar“.

In the video game, ships, stars, and other space stuff is drawn into a sphere in the center of the console, whereas in black holes, ships, stars, and other space stuff is drawn into the sphere in the center of the black hole.

“The parallels between the new theory and the old video game are quite remarkable”, says Emil Mottola of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “In fact, I had my inspiration for the theory while reminiscing the game with MAME.”

Critics of the theory note that Gravitars do not contain as much entropy as traditional black holes, nor to traditional black holes require a constant diet of quarters in order to operate.

Matthew writes: Australian scientists have mapped out the Glactic Habitable Zone within which complex life may exist. The stars within this zone are four to eight billion years old, making 75% of them older than our own five billion year old sun. Dr. Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales puts this into perspective:

“75% of the potential alien invaders have a one billion year evolutionary head start on us, and half of them have a two billion year head start. To put that in perspective, it only took us 500 million years to evolve from worms into humans. This clearly means that any potential alien threats are far more highly evolved than we are, perhaps having acid for blood and the ability to gestate within the gastrointestinal tracts of other species. Also, they would have developed vastly higher technology than humans, which makes it unlikely that they would spare us for use as slaves.”

“The other major take-home fact is that their sun is going to burn out much sooner than ours, making them greedy for interstellar conquest so to move their doomed race to a new homeworld.”

“We’re currently broadcasting a beacon signal of interstellar goodwill, in hopes that we might soon hear from our noble brothers in space. I’m sure that once they get to know us, they will respect us in much the way we respect less evoloved species.”

Mathew writes: The Advocacy High Command has announced the capture of yet another alien spacecraft, marking the 24th such craft to have been successfully captured and disabled by the high command’s newly formed Alien Invasion Defense Force.

Commander Agfrap Glok explains: “This is another one of the bouncing crawler type ships designed to survey sites for the eventual construction of an alien colony. This one clearly could not have come from a great distance on it’s own, so we believe that there may be a mother ship, perhaps containing an invasion force, orbiting above the planet now.”

“Citizens should remain calm and remember that these landings have been going on for nearly 15 revolutions, when the first landing alien ship was destroyed. Go about your labors, and keep all three eyestalks skyward. Immediately report anything falling from the sky. Remember that it’s far easier for us to destroy these craft than it is for the aliens to send them. Soon, they will realize the futility of their invasion and cease forever.”