The Guardians of the Universe, the bosses of the Green Lantern Corps, have divided the universe into 3600 sectors, each under the jurisdiction of one (originally) or two (currently) Green Lanterns.

This is obviously absurd. But let’s pause for a moment to consider just how absurd it really is.

Current estimates place the number of galaxies in the universe at somewhere between 100 billion and 500 billion. So let’s say 300 billion. That means that each sector has, on average, about 80 million galaxies in it.

Suppose you’re a Green Lantern scanning your sector for signs of trouble. Suppose further, absurdly, that scanning an entire galaxy takes only one second. At that rate, it will still take you two and a half years to scan your entire sector.

Just watch this video and think about trying to police the entire universe with a force of 3600 (or 7200) cops:

Now back in the 1970s there was some confusion at DC about the scope of the Guardians’ authority; while usually described as the Guardians of the Universe, they were occasionally described instead as merely the Guardians of the Galaxy (not to be confused with Marvel’s super-team of the same name). There was even a silly plot point once where the bad guys removed Earth from the Green Lantern Corps’s jurisdiction by yanking it out of the Milky Way.

This certainly makes more sense, but still not much. The number of stars in the Milky Way is thought to be roughly the same as the number of galaxies in the universe; so it’d still take two and a half years to scan a single sector, if scanning at the rate of one star system per second.

No wonder there’s never a Green Lantern around when you need one.

No, I don’t get it either.

a slight eruption

Check out a bunch of absolutely amazing pictures of the Puyehue eruption in Chile.

Jesse Walker’s latest column does a great of replying to internet critics like Eli Pariser, Andrew Shapiro, and Cass Sunstein, who think the internet is isolating us from viewpoints we disagree with.

You can post a comment disagreeing with him, but I won’t read it.

Science fiction and mystery author Philip Wylie sounds, from his Wikipedia page, like an interesting guy. His stories and novels (When Worlds Collide is the best known, and the only one I’ve read) have been credited with inspiring some of popular entertainment’s most famous characters – Superman, Flash Gordon, Doc Savage, and Travis McGee. He’s been both hailed as a feminist and condemned as a misogynist for his writings on women (I haven’t read the writings in question and so can’t render a verdict).

But my present concern is with the following rather alarming anecdote:

As early as 1939, [Wylie] had written a story about the Germans making plutonium bombs in a cave in Colorado. “The Paradise Crater,” written for American Magazine, was, as Sam Moskowitz points out, rejected as “too fantastic,” but later was accepted by Bluebook, which turned the magazine over to Washington for approval. When Washington balked, the editor of Bluebook returned the manuscript to Harold Ober, Wylie’s agent, who had “already been contacted by the CIA.” Wylie, who had been put under house arrest, was told by an aggressive major that he [the major] would take Wylie’s life if necessary, to plug the leak. Wylie agreed to tear up the manuscript. But the decision was made to hold back publication instead. According to Moskowitz, “Four months later, the Atom Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Bluebook asked to have the story back. It was published in the October, 1945 number.” Wylie, through his own research, had learned enough about atomic weaponry to become a security risk [John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, went through a similar experience when one of his authors submitted a story featuring an atomic bomb].
(Clifford P. Bendau, Still Worlds Collide: Philip Wylie and the End of the American Dream, pp. 42-43; brackets in original. The reference to the CIA must be a mistake for the OSS.)

Saints be praised!

Herbert Spencer has received a surprisingly positive and balanced assessment in a ‘popular’ source.

2012 must be the end of time!

The article is actually fairly positive (albeit superficial) about Spencer’s ideas, but makes Spencer the person sound a bit of a jerk. But that’s fair, because he was.

I see that Jesse Byock’s 1995 article “Egil’s Bones” is now online. (See also this earlier piece.) The article helps to support the historical reliability of the Icelandic sagas by showing how an aspect of Egil’s Saga once considered fanciful – the protagonist’s skull’s invulnerability to axe-blows – may have a basis in fact.

As of 2005, Byock was seeking Egil’s grave for confirmation; I’ve heard nothing since, though the project seems to be active.