Pre-Dinner Science

Soon I Shall Explore the Science of Tacos

Emo Tree
What terrible force can lead a tree to such depths of depression?

We may never know.

Source: The Daily Telepgraph

Similar Features
Not an Etheridge song, but a solar system very similar to our own, if a bit small.

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.

They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.

...

"It's a kind of scaled-down version of our Solar System. The star the planets are orbiting is half as massive as the Sun and they orbit half as distant to their host star as Jupiter and Saturn orbit around the Sun," said Dr Dominik.

Pint-sized.

The researchers hope to find Earth-like worlds soon using these techniques, which would be great. The more stuff like this we find, the further the religious fundies have to bury their heads to ignore it, and eventually they'll just wander off into their own little dreamworlds. I hope.

Source: BBC News

Creepy
A NASA office building apparently may have an astonishing rate of cancer.

CLEVELAND -- There are 40 cases of cancer among people who work in the same building at NASA Glenn Research Center.

Dozens of the employees fear that their cancer was triggered by years of working in the developmental engineering building, NewsChannel5 reported.

The union that represents hundreds of scientists and other workers said nearly half of the 100 employees on the third floor of the building have been diagnosed with various forms of cancer in the past three to four years.

"What we've seen in the way of cancer here has just been astronomical on this third floor alone and we're just a little scared," said Dennis Pehotsky, of the Lewis Engineers and Scientists Association.

In a written statement, the head of safety at NASA Glenn said an employee survey shows cancer rates among workers are within the normal range, saying "Glenn management has no evidence of the number of cases that the union is reporting."

Union officials said they believe many employees feared reprisal for answering the survey honestly.

Wow. If this is right, there has to be something off about that building. I wonder what could have changed recently to make it so toxic. A chemical spill? Exposed insulation?

Source: WEWS Cleveland News

Stem Cells Again
Yet another possible cure for a heinous disease derived from stem cells or their artificial equivalents.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Skin cells re-programmed to act like embryonic stem cells eased symptoms of Parkinson's disease in rats, researchers reported on Monday in a first step toward tailored treatments for people that bypass concerns about using human embryos.

The experiment suggests it may be possible to take a small sample of skin and turn it into a transplant perfectly matched to patients with Parkinson's and other diseases, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It also supports the usefulness of newly created cells that resemble powerful embryonic stem cells. The stem cell experts used so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, which are skin cells reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells.

...

Stem cells taken from very early embryos appear to be the most malleable and the most powerful. But many people object to their use because the embryo usually must be destroyed to extract them.

Several teams have reported a way to re-program ordinary skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells by adding several genes. Jaenisch's team tested some of these cells in rats and mice. They first got such cells to take up residence in the brains of unborn mice.

...

Then they damaged the brains of rats to resemble Parkinson's, which is caused by the destruction of certain brain cells that produce a message-carrying chemical called dopamine. Patients lose abilities associated with movement, and progress from a type of shakiness to paralysis and death.

There is no cure. Transplants of cells from fetuses have offered some relief from symptoms in a few people.

In the rats, the cell transplants improved symptoms markedly, the researchers said.

...

Viruses are used to carry the new genes into the skin cells and transform them, an approach that could cause cancer.

But the researchers said their approach is equivalent to so-called therapeutic cloning, which uses cloning technology to create perfectly matched cell transplants. Last month a team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York said they used the cloning approach to treat Parkinson's in mice.

It's a big breakthrough, but wouldn't it be simpler to just create real embryos to fix people, from their own DNA/cellular material?

Oh wait, we can't do that, because God in his infinite wisdom wants us to suffer and die. So sayeth the religious right.

At least until they get sick.

Source: Raw Story

Watery
Our water infrastructure is as badly off as our roads, trains, bridges, power, energy production and agriculture, it seems.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion.

Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group.

Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation's water systems, especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.

This isn't entirely the fault of the GOP, but their constant 'lower taxes, fewer services' mantra has hurt a lot.

On the brighter side, check out the amusing anecdote they start the story with.

Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.

The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

People are so stupid they will drive out of their way to drink MYSTERIOUS WATER.

Man, where's dysentery when you need it?

Source: Raw Story

Lies
So the Pentagon is issuing a new 'lie detector' to troops in Iraq, whose results will be used to help make life and death decisions.

Pity it doesn't work worth a damn and the whole thing is a con.

planning to give US troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan "hand-held lie detectors" aimed at rooting out potential insurgents and terrorists. But polygraph experts doubt the system's accuracy and Defense Department memos show results of the few tests that were run were manipulated to demonstrate more success with them than was achieved, according to an MSNBC investigative reporter.

"The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing," MSNBC's Bill Dedman reports. "The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well."

The Pentagon argues the portable polygraphs have accuracy rates up to 90 percent, but Dedman reports the military arrived at those figures by omitting some results from the tests. The Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, or PCASS, uses a hand-held computer that analyzes readings from censors attached to an interviewees hand and wrist. The computer displays "Green" if it believes the person is honest, "Red" if they are being deceptive and "Yellow" if it is unsure.

The Pentagon, in a PowerPoint presentation released to msnbc.com through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the PCASS is 82 to 90 percent accurate. Those are the only accuracy numbers that were sent up the chain of command at the Pentagon before the device was approved.

But Pentagon studies obtained by msnbc.com show a more complicated picture: In calculating its accuracy, the scientists conducting the tests discarded the yellow screens, or inconclusive readings.

That practice was criticized in the 2003 National Academy study, which said the "inconclusives" have to be included to measure accuracy. If you take into account the yellow screens, the PCASS accuracy rate in the three Pentagon-funded tests drops to the level of 63 to 79 percent.

63 percent. That's the best they can manage?

People are going to DIE because of this device. Our guys and Iraqi civilians. We're going to see actual bombers let go and innocent people shot, all because the Pentagon wanted to roll out a shiny toy.

Shameful.

Source: Raw Story

More Hep
Basically, 'Made in China' means 'DO NOT CONSUME' these days.

More than 100 people have died from taking the blood thinner heparin, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday, after imports of the drug were halted due to contamination linked to production in China.

The 103 deaths reported to the FDA of patients who had been using heparin occurred between January 2007 and February 2008, the agency said on its website. Sixty-two of those deaths were reported to have involved allergic reactions.

The FDA on March 5 said it had detected an unidentified contaminant in heparin injections sold by Baxter International pharmaceuticals.

It was determined that most of the active ingredients in the drug came from a plant in Changzou, China working with Wisconsin-based Scientific Protein Laboratories, which supplies Baxter.

Nice job, FDA. Nice job screening our medicine supply.

Source: Raw Story

Quasars
An article about quasars, which apparently dwarfed hypernovae in terms of raw power. I apologize to quasars for not paying them enough attention.

On the other hand, they apparently no longer exist, so hypernovae are still the current champs.

Source: The Independent

Polar Bear Madness
So apparently the Germans have a polar bear war on their hands.

You might not think it, to look at these cuddly pictures, but the prospect of a polar bear "war" was looming large over Germany yesterday.

Flocke, a recently born cub who caught the public imagination by being rejected by parents and raised by humans, was making a long-awaited public debut – accompanied by her keepers, including Horst Maussner (right), before a 350-strong crowd of excited press photographers, TV camera crews and cheering fans. The four month-old female, whose name translates as "snowflake", has been described by the local media as the arch rival, in the battle for Germany's public affection, to Knut – another polar bear cub, who was born at Berlin Zoo in 2006 and also raised entirely by humans.

At present, Knut can still claim the title of world's most famous polar bear (after all, a Hollywood film has been made about him), but Flocke is catching up fast. Her backers spent yesterday plastering Nuremberg with hundreds of pink posters bearing a suitably cuddly image of Flocke and the barbed message, "Knut was yesterday".

Honestly Germans, is there nothing you can't fight about?

Meanwhile it seems there's a campaign against raising these bears with human keepers.

While some insist that bears born in zoos have a right to human intervention to save and secure their lives, others such as the German animal rights activist, Frank Albrecht argue that they become so dependent on man that they end up divorced from nature and turn into hyperactive, disturbed freaks.

"Knut is a problem bear who has become addicted to human beings," he said.

The German zoologist Peter Arras has described Knut as a "psychopath".

The debate has grown following the birth of three polar bear cubs at Nuremberg Zoo to two different female bears. A team of highly experienced zoologists initially argued that nature must be allowed to take its course. They allowed one of the females, which had rejected its two cubs, to kill and eat her offspring because they were too weak to survive.

But the zoo's "bear infanticide" policy coincided with television pictures designed to melt the heart of anybody who cannot help assuming that polar bears are just like human beings. They showed the zoo's other female polar bear, Vera, carrying her female cub, called Flocke or Snowflake, by the scruff of its neck through her enclosure.

Within hours of the images being broadcast, Nuremberg Zoo had performed a complete policy U-turn: a keeper was sent into Vera's enclosure and Flocke was removed "for its own safety". Amid growing fears that the last remaining cub might also be eaten the zoo promptly announced that the cub would be fed from a bottle.

"I don't think anyone could have stood it, if we had allowed our last bear cub to be eaten by its mum," said Nuremberg's deputy mayor.

I'm not sure a dead bear is inherently better than a live one. It's entirely possible that in the wild the mother bear would have been less stressed and not eaten them.

In any case, Knut's mother was a disturbed circus reject. There's nothing 'natural' about that. You might as well save him as not, given the circumstances.

Finally, the article repeats the old canard that polar bears aren't in trouble.

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's Environment Minister, has adopted the bear, claiming him as a symbol of the world's endangered species. Yet evidence suggests that polar bears are not facing extinction, even if the ice caps are melting. Alaska. home to a fifth of the world's 25,000 polar bears, currently has its largest bear population in 40 years.

Sigh. From my post about Glen Beck:

There is currently an estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide who are threatened with “losing their habitat and becoming extinct over the next 50 years” because of global warming and melting sea ice. The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that without action, “11 of the 19 subpopulations will be extinct by the middle of this century, with an additional three subpopulations vanishing shortly thereafter.”

Those flakes at the USGS! You know they're just a bunch of dirty hippies.

Source: The Independent
The Independent

H Plane
So Boeing has developed a hydrogen powered plane. Sort of.

The first aircraft to use only a hydrogen battery for power in the air has successfully completed a test flight. The US company Boeing said that the flight, in Ocaña, central Spain, was “a historical technological success for Boeing [and] full of promises for a greener future”.

The aircraft, which is capable of carrying two people and has a wingspan of 16 metres (52ft), flew at 100km/h (62mph) for 20 minutes. Hydrogen power involves fuel cells using the energy produced from the transformation of hydrogen and oxygen into water. According to Boeing, it provides a cleaner and renewable energy resource because it produces only water vapour as waste.

The director of the Boeing research centre at Ocaña, Francisco EscartÍ, said that hydrogen batteries could become the main source of energy for small aircraft, but that they were unlikely to power larger passenger aircraft.

In other words, it's a nice PR stunt. Nothing more.

Meanwhile of course you get the hydrogen propaganda about 'only water vapor as waste'. Nevermind that you make hydrogen by splitting water with huge amounts of electricity. Which you get from power plants.

Most of which burn fossil fuels.

Which aren't exactly clean.

Idiots.

Source: The Times Online

Advancing the Frontiers of Retroactive Cartography
It's a new field, but as with so many dubious things, the South leads the way.

Lawmakers in drought-parched Georgia voted Friday to ask mapmakers to redraw their state's northern boundary in hopes of tapping the Tennessee River, in a vote that potentially escalates a conflict with their neighbor.

If negotiations fail, the bill would authorize Georgia's top attorney to file a lawsuit to try forcing a boundary change.

The House and Senate both approved the measure on the legislative session's final day. It now goes to Gov. Sonny Perdue, who has not said whether he supports it.

Congress in 1796 designated that Tennessee's southern borders stretch along the 35th parallel, but surveyors in 1818 were a bit off the mark. They now know that the border was placed about 1.1 miles south of where it should be.

The resolution asserts that the flawed survey mistakenly placed Georgia's northern line just short of the Tennessee River, which has about 15 times greater flow than the one burgeoning Atlanta depends on for water.

Tennessee hasn't taken kindly to Georgia's drought-inspired bid; lawmakers there have reacted with a mix of scorn and humor.

This instead of facing their lack of infrastructure like adults, building reservoirs and the like.

If Georgia can't solve a problem by cheating, they might have to work hard! That sucks! It would take time away from their banjo practice and moonshine distillation!

Source: Raw Story

Dimwit Analysis
So a misanthropic jerk at The Reg thinks that Al Gore's green initiatives will be bad for the public because they'll create high paying jobs.

What?

Al Gore is unleashing the climate campaign you can't ignore, in the shape of www.wecansolveit.org, which will spend $300 million to sign up some millions of people who will march, write letters and like, agitate. In the face of this government and business will be forced - the plan goes - to take climate change seriously.

Clearly it's all being done for the very best of reasons: no man could need more than a Nobel and an Oscar to assure him of his status. But all that money being spent to get governments to do as Al Gore thinks they should ought to give us pause for thought.

And unfortunately, there's a flaw at the heart of the plan - a failure of economic logic which rather undermines the justification for the whole campaign:

"Thousands of new companies, millions of new jobs, and billions in revenue generated by solutions to the climate crisis - this is the clean energy economy we can adopt with today's technologies, resources, know-how, and leadership from our elected officials."

Leave aside the absurdity of our (or anyone elses') elected officials being able to create jobs, companies or revenues: if they could they wouldn't be elected representatives, would they? They'd be off getting rich. Look rather at those claims that the plan will create all those jobs, all those revenues: they clearly think that this is a good idea, a benefit of the plan. But it isn't a benefit, it's a cost.

Because everyone wants to be a rich businessman! Nobody ever does anything for altruistic reasons, or base power, ambition and advancement!

But all three of them are making the same error, what Bastiat in 1850 (clearly, 158 years isn't long enough for such a simple point to sink into politicians' brains) called the Broken Window Fallacy, or as it is sometimes known, the make work fallacy. For, as I say, all those jobs, all those revenues, are properly counted as a cost of such schemes, not a benefit.

When we come to evaluate a plan we need to know how wonderfully fabulous the results are going to be. I'm certainly not going to try and argue that a richer world without the threat of climate change would be less than wonderfully fabulous. But as well as that elysian future, we have to work out what it is going to cost us to get from here to there. That means being very careful in how we work out what are the costs. It might still be a good idea, just as it might not be, but this is exactly what our cost benefit analysis is designed to tell us: will it all be worth it?

Al's actual campaign will certainly be worth it: the dweebs that populate the green movement need opportunities to congregate and repopulate just as much as any other unfortunate section of society: otherwise who will the next generation buy their burgers from? But will the actions we are being urged to take be worth it?

HAHA dirty hippies always end up working at McDonalds HA HA HA my 150 year old economics will shatter their dirty dreams!

So consider what happens when we 'create' millions of jobs. Yes, certainly, millions of people then have jobs. That's wonderful for them of course, although quite why everyone insists that it is a good idea that these are 'high paying”' jobs rather escapes: that rather means that whoever is buying their products (i.e., us) is paying more than if they were low paying jobs. But much more important is what is unseen here. What would those people be doing if they weren't doing these newly created jobs? Something else, certainly, we've not just sown dragon's teeth to create these new workers now, have we? And what was it that they were doing previously?

Yes, it's better that people (other than the author of course) work cheap, so he can afford lots of cheap swag to line his apartment!

Everyone else can go fuck themselves!

Things are a little different if all those who take these jobs were previously in involuntary unemployment, but mass unemployment isn't something that's all that prevalent in either the US or the UK.

Check the latest figures for the US there, Kreskin. Unemployment is up SHARPLY. A huge number of people aren't even counted on the rolls as they've GIVEN UP HOPE ENTIRELY. Meanwhile, job creation has been consistently below new job seekers for about two years.

But other than being factually wrong, please, continue.

Certainly not amongst the skilled workers who would be needed to design, build and install the new glorious renewable energy systems, at least. So all of our new found workforce would have in fact come from doing something else. It doesn't really matter what else either, not to make the basic point. For we lose whatever else it was that they were doing at the same time as we gain our bright shiny new energy system. They might have been wiping babies' bottoms, stacking shelves at Albertson's or working to cure cancer. Whatever it was, that they are now not doing those things is a cost to us: smelly babies, the Great Famine that would follow Albertson's running out of food, the cancer that will get about a third of us, these are all costs.

See? You should give up your hope of gainful, meaningful employment so you can stock his shelves and wipe his baby's ass!

Or cure cancer. It's not like doctors are already a highly skilled and paid profession... oh wait. So they already DO contribute to higher costs and job defection from stocking grocery shelves!

The fiends!

They might indeed be bearable costs, they might even be worthwhile costs, it might make perfect sense for us to incur them to stop Manhattan from sinking under the waves: but costs they are and as costs we have to account for them.

Which is what makes all the willy waving so silly: what we actually want is someone to come up with a plan that doesn't create new jobs, one that doesn't cause us losses elsewhere. We actually want people to be boasting about how their plan destroys jobs, want what no man has yet done, people to boast of their micro-dicks. As, say, supermarkets themselves have:

"The New Economics Foundation has calculated that every £50,000 spent in small local shops creates one job. You must spend £250,000 in superstores for the same result."

How excellent, eh? Supermarkets use fewer resources (for the labour of a human being is most certainly a resource) but get the same job done. Our retail requirements are catered for and instead of five people working to do so, only one is. The other four are able to go off and wipe bottoms and/or cure cancer. We thus get both our groceries and fresh smelling babies (and perhaps that cancer cure will come before my Marlboros kick in). Excellent, we're richer, all of us as a society, by using less labour to complete a task.

That is why these claims of job creation should be treated as costs, not benefits, when we try to evaluate these schemes and, similarly, why the boosters of these plans are guilty of economic illogic.

Yes, it's great that people get trapped in dead end, low paying supermarket jobs forever, rather than own their own stores and contribute to their local communities in the form of taxes.

We should be on our knees THANKING Wal-Mart et all for their grotesque concentration of wealth at the top! It keeps productivity up by turning our towns and cities into wastelands of misery and poverty!

This is very closely related to the concept of opportunity cost: you can only use a resource, the labour of a person for example, to do one thing at one time. Which means that there is indeed a huge benefit to Al running this WE thing: if he's doing that he can't run for President again. Lucky, eh?

Oh yes, it's much better that we have a moron Texas-transplant oil man who has plunged the Middle East into a hellstorm of violence and death. What's a million Iraqi corpses as long as we don't have some DIRTY HIPPY running the country into the ground with his high paying jobs and clean energy programs?

THANK GOD WE AVOIDED THAT TRAGEDY

This is one of the stupidest, most selfish, narcissistic loads of crap I have ever read in my life. It stands as some of the rankest hypocrisy on record. What does the author do for a living, you might ask? How does he contribute to the lowering of wages and rise of efficiency?

Tim Worstall knows more about rare metals than most might think wise, and writes for himself at timworstall.com, and for The Business, among others. He is a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute.

Oh, he's a web columnist, psuedo economist and writer!

For shame, Tim! You could be wiping baby ass!

Idiot. Colossally elitist idiot.

Source: The Register

Pinch
I need to get one of these.

Many high-voltage electronics enthusiasts make their own devices using pulsed power techniques to produce a theta pinch capable of crushing an aluminium soft drink can by pressure of strong magnetic field. (Warning! High-voltage electric shocks may be lethal).

An electromagnetic aluminium can crusher consists of four main components (1) A high voltage DC power supply which provides a source of electrical energy (2) A large energy discharge capacitor to accumulate the electrical energy (3) A high voltage switch or spark gap and (4) A robust coil (capable of surviving high magnetic pressure) through which the stored electrical energy can be quickly discharged in order to generate a correspondingly strong pinching magnetic field (see diagram below).

Of course, I'd want to use the magnetic field for evil, not can crushing.

Source: Wikipedia

Venus
Results out of the ESA's Venus Express probe suggest that Venus lost its water too quickly to become Earthlike.

In the early stages of the Solar System, Venus seems to have evolved very rapidly compared to the Earth. Data from Venus Express supports the theory that the Earth’s twin once had significant volume of water covering the surface but it appears that these oceans were lost in a very short geological timescale.

As a result of the loss of water, the geological evolution of the surface of Venus slowed right down because it was unable to develop plate tectonics like the Earth. Biological evolution was prevented altogether. Thus, in terms of Venus being another Earth in climate and habitability terms, it evolved too quickly at first, then too slowly.

'They may have started out looking very much the same,' said Professor Taylor, 'but increasingly we have evidence that Venus lost most of its water and Earth lost most of its atmospheric carbon dioxide.'

Bummer.

From what I';ve read the Earth, if it lived long enough, would die the same way, as plate tectonics constantly sips at our water supply where ocean plates plunge into the earth. Some water gets sucked down and locked up too where it lubricates the plate movement, and thus, eventually, there's no more water to be sucked, which would lock up the plates like Venus.

Of course we'll probably have been burnt to a cinder by then, so who cares much.

Source: Science Daily

First Korean Astronaut
The article focuses on fluff, but the event is worth noting. South Korea's first astronaut will be going up to the ISS soon.

South Korea's first astronaut said Monday on the eve of her launch to the International Space Station (ISS) that she will celebrate arrival in space by singing for her fellow crew.

"We will have food on April 12 on the Day of Cosmonauts and I will sing but it's a secret what is the song," Yi So-Yeon, 29, said at a press conference at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she is set to blast off on Tuesday.

Yi, who has listed singing as one of her hobbies, said her first reaction on reaching the ISS would be to cry out: "Wow!"

She also told reporters that she hoped people in North Korea would share in the "triumph" of her mission, which starts Tuesday when she blasts up into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

A South Korean space official said that Yi's 12-day mission would cost South Korea around 20 million dollars (12.8 million euros) and that he hoped the flight would help further his country's manned space flight ambitions.

An official committee headed by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, gave official approval Monday for the mission by Yi and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.

The three astronauts spoke to the press from behind a glass screen at the Hotel Cosmonaut in Baikonur as they are being held in quarantine for fear of being contaminated ahead of their space flight.

Russians celebrate Cosmonaut Day on April 12, the day Soviet hero Yury Gagarin became the first man in space, in 1961. Yi, Volkov and Kononenko will be blasting off from the same launch pad as Gagarin.

Good for South Korea, I suppose. Manned space flight doesn't accomplish much in the way of science, but there are worse ways to spend that much money.

Abstinence education, creationist museums, paying Karl Rove...

Source: Raw Story

Terror
The Japanese have come up with a bank that has a face, eats your money, and looks like The Book of the Dead from Evil Dead.

Seriously, someone should reskin and reprogram it to spout lines from the movies. It'd be sweet.

An earlier entry in this article mentions an 'AI' that learns how to control your devices and respond to voice commands.

Which could be handy for my future evil lair.

Source: PC World

Uwe Promise?
Uwe Boll, one of the worst directors alive, and sometimes called the Ed Wood of our day, has stated that he will retire from moviemaking if a million people petition him to do so.

WE MUST DO THIS FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND.

Source: /Film