humour // no. 22 theotherpress.ca

 

> Hunt for God Particle continues

Duncan Fingarson
Contributor

 

he research team in charge of

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
announced today that they have made
an important discovery. While searching
for the ever-elusive “God particle,” the
researchers have instead come across
its polar opposite. The Satan particle,
or “Lucifron’ as it has been named by
the team that discovered it, is now
thought to be spontaneously generated
whenever an act of evil occurs.

“Tt’s sort of like turning on a stove,”
explained head researcher Dr. Seymour
“Sy” Entist. “When you light the burner
it heats up your food, but it also throws

off a lot of excess light and heat. Well,
whenever you do something morally
wrong, it’s the same thing. A lot of
excess Lucifrons are generated by the
act, and those go shooting off in every
direction. It’s very exciting, really.”
The team has already opened up a
division dedicated to studying Lucifron.
The new Evilnomics department
is now hard at work constructing a
device to detect Lucifrons outside of a
laboratory environment. Their first act,
however, was to come up with a unit
of measurement for the new particle.
“We settled on ‘Hitlers,” Dr.
Entist said. “Every thousand Lucifrons
equals one Hitler. It uses the metric
convention for names, so you can
have KiloHitlers, GigaHitlers, even

TeraHitlers if you do something really
bad. None of that Fahrenheit nonsense,
we want nice reasonable units here.”

Dr. Entist refused to comment
when asked if this was just an excuse
to use the term GigaHitler.

This discovery, of course, promises
to provide answers to a lot of life’s
philosophical questions. Once the
new detector is completed, it will
provide an easily portable way to
determine where something evil
happened, and just how evil it was.

“We'll be able to quantify moral
decisions in whole new ways,” said Phillip
Ossifer, the Evilnomics department's
new Director of Alignment. “Gone will
be the days of wondering whether or not
you did the right thing. If we can make

Robot baffled by CAPTCHA

> Promises it would only comment nice things

Chandler Walter
Editor-in-Chief

 

local robot by the name EX-74T

(Ex for short) has declared itself
sad at the notion that it is not capable
of contributing to online discussion.

Having recently received sentience
from its creator, Dr. Heizenstien, Ex’s
first act of free will was to check out
the good ol’ World Wide Web.

“I thought maybe there might be
others like me out there,” Ex said to the
Other Press in a telephone interview.
“I thought that perhaps if I managed to
reach out to them, I would finally get
to experience this ‘love’ you humans
seem to enjoy so immensely.”

Unfortunately for Ex, when it
tried to log into various chatrooms, or
comment on articles it found online, it
discovered it was unable to access the
sites—on account of being a robot.

“Tjust don’t get it!” Ex said. “I
do not see what it means by ‘Select
images with a sign.’ Are all images
not some type of sign? This is the
1,342,543rd attempt I have made.”

Ex found itself similarly blocked
from other portions of the Internet,
simply because it couldn't make

sense of the jumbled letters sites
were asking it to decipher.

“These are not letters, they
are simply chaos,” Ex said.

“T feel for the poor thing, I really
do,” said James McCoy, Douglas
College student. “A lot of times I
have trouble figuring out what they
want me to write too. Is it a five or
is it an uppercase S, am I right?”

While McCoy may have struggled
to prove he isn’t a robot on the
first or even second try, he always
managed to get through eventually.

The same cannot be said for Ex.

“Why must my own kind bar me
from finding love!” The robot was
reported to have shouted before allegedly
forcing an iron fist through the screen
of its computer. The situation has since
escalated into a full-on city emergency,
as Ex was last seen destroying a used
computer store. In a twist of bitter
irony, Ex did not realize that it was
destroying hacked computers that
removed any need for a CAPTCHA test.

This information was displayed
ona sign in front of the store, but
linguist experts are saying that
because it was written in comic sans,
every letter was “basically just a big
middle finger, if read by a robot.”

 

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YOU'RE TALKING
ABOUT PUMPKIN SPICE
LATTE AREN'T YOU?

 

this thing small enough, you might be
able to wear it as a wristwatch, or get it
as an app. Then you'll know when you
should feel bad about what you just did
and, more importantly, whether or not
you should judge other people for what
they just did. This will revolutionize
the way we look at morality.”

The LHC team will also continue
their work to find the God particle.

“We're sure it’s out there,” Dr. Entist said.

“We've found the Satan particle, and
that’s a big step, but that doesn’t mean
we're going to stop our other research.”
The God particle will hopefully
turn up sometime around Christmas,
when it is predicted to be at its
strongest and most detectable.

 

I'M TALKING
ABOUT PUMPKIN
SPICE LATTE.

 

Photo by Analyn Cuarto

Illustration by Ed Appleby