NEW MEXICO'S GETTING HOT, HOT, HOT

As you already know from my profile, I’m from the great state of Wisconsin. If you didn’t know that, you can read my profile just over there to your right. If can’t read my profile, maybe you should be using the Internet to learn how, instead of looking for pictures of President Bush and monkeys. C’mon faithful readers, they weren’t all that funny the first time. What if people put pictures of you up on the internet and compared you to, I don’t know, a constipated whale or something. Yeah, I’m talking to you constipated-whale-face guy, don’t think there aren’t pictures of constipated whales out there to draw comparison to. It’s the Internet man, it’s got EVERYTHING. Including this very cool story from New Mexico.

New Mexico, from what I hear, is a lovely place to live, vastly improved over Old Mexico, as long as you steer clear of the rattlesnakes and radioactive scorpions. Last month, however, Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico got a whole lot hotter. About 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That’s 2 billion degrees Kelvin if you’re really into science. 7.3 billion degrees Hobbes if you’re not. This temperature is the hottest ever created on the face of the Earth. The inside of the sun is only, ONLY mind you, 15 million degrees Kelvin. But that’s really more of a dry heat, so it’s like apples to apples that are on fire.

What the lab does is use a giant Z Machine to generate these high temperatures. The Z Machine, to put it plainly, is a giant gun. A giant gun that shoots tiny plates at incredible speeds. Example, if you were to put your mother’s good China gravy boat in the Z machine and pointed it straight up, the gravy boat would be passing Pluto by the time your brother could rat you out to your mother. The Z machine fires these plates into a wire mesh screen a quarter inch away and the resulting impact of super-speed plate on solid steel wire results in incredible temperatures that superheat the metal into plasma. For all my comic bookers out there, imagine The Flash running into The Juggernaut full bore. [Impossible, they exist in separate universes- Ed.] [What about 1997’s industry crossover Marvel vs. DC?- 2^nd Ed.] [NERD!- Ed.]

A magnetic field compresses the plasma into something the thickness of pencil lead, which results in the high temperatures. Normally, these temperatures are in the millions of degrees, but in February the lab reached a temperature four times hotter than any other result. And here’s the kicker, even though they’ve been able to repeat the experiment, they have no idea how it happened. It just Does.

“My goodness doctor, you replaced this man’s heart with a car battery and he’s still alive!”

“Yeah, I don’t know how that happened, just lucky I guess.”

“But you did it to four other people too!”

“Just very lucky I guess.”

As if all that weren’t bizarre enough, between the incredible temperatures and the inability to explain why it happened, this last bit kicks the oddness notch into overdrive. When the temperatures were reached, the ions were at the point where they should have been losing energy rather than gaining it. And the Z machine was putting out more energy than had been put into it.

I don’t know yet if we all should be worried or not. I’ve been consulting with religious leaders, but there’s nothing about it in any of their texts. All I know is that none of this happened while Arrested Development was on the air.

That's all I'm sayin'.