March 2013 – Page 2 – The Oredigger

Not-so-scientific discoveries this week

Transylvania, Romania
For many years, the scientific community believed that vampirism was a hoax. Last week a group of biochemists and biological engineers working under Dr. Rupert Dracula uncovered the secret of vampirism. Dracula is the descendent of the famous Count Dracula and seeks to carry on his powerful legacy through his vampire work. The group started by analyzing the remains of Count Dracula and the various people he bit throughout his long and industrious career, hoping to find a genetic indicator that would lead them to the cause of the Count’s mysterious abilities. After many years of study, they discovered that the Count possessed the unearthly ability to physically alter his victim’s DNA.

News from Around the Galaxy

North Korean president Kim Jong-un and United States president Barack Obama met for a man-date at the Melting Pot fondue restaurant in Littleton, Colorado, to discuss nuclear armament and peace in the Middle East. Oddly enough, Kim is not concerned with bombing the United States. In the meeting, he expressed interest in assisting the United States in dealing with the various threats from the Middle East.

Mythical creature terrorizes mines

A dragon has taken up residence on the Colorado School of Mines campus.

Dennis Rodman undercover mission a success

Declassified CIA files have been released that indicate retired Hall of Fame basketball player Dennis “The Worm” Rodman is or was a CIA spy planted in North Korea to gain the trust of Kim Jung-un. The papers suggest Rodman’s goal was to assess Kim’s motives and determine whether or not North Korea posed a threat to the United States.

Claudius Pendleton and the LAIS invasion

Claudius Pendleton was pretty much your average mime attending the Colorado School of Mimes. Twenty years old and not a single word had escaped him since he discovered the art of miming at thirteen years old, a fact his parents barely hesitated to brag about to anyone who would watch, for they too were great mimes. Most people could talk and many engaged in conversations using only words but Claudius could not afford the distraction. He had work to do, especially if he was going to earn the title, The Great Hand, a.k.a. greatest mime of all time!

Campus research at the speed of dark

Recently, the race to overcome physics’ speed of light speed limit has become passe. New research on the speed of dark is becoming more interesting and valuable to understanding the universe.

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Game Review: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Fans of the hit 1982 film “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” should be excited to find that there was a videogame adaptation for the Atari 2600 also released in 1982. This game is without a doubt one of the most influential in the history of video games, as it completely altered the market for such products. In addition, it permanently altered the path of Atari, Inc., by setting a rather high bar for video games based on existing intellectual properties. This game has also been immortalized in a memorial in Alamogordo, New Mexico, so the video game industry will never forget the story of the Atari 2600 version of E.T., which is honestly better than the film.

A new version of reality – Portal Gun

For years, professors at the Colorado School of Mines have been working in secret to create the world’s most coveted fictional device—the portal gun. This device is the Mona Lisa for geeks everywhere. As popularized in the game “Portal,” this gun allows people to move between two places without going through the area in between. The user shoots a blue portal on one surface and an orange one on another. When he walks through the blue portal, he emerges from the orange one. This simple manipulation of space proved to be quite the engineering conundrum. Scientists all over the world have tried to perfect the device since its debut in 2007, but only recently have any been successful.

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Movie Review: Vlasic Park

This cinematic gem from well-known Croatian director and producer Vladislov Andreavich Titov somehow managed to fly under the radar. The production quality of “Vlasic Park” is simply phenomenal, making its limited reputation hard to believe. What makes this film incredibly noteworthy is the sheer originality; it is difficult to draw comparisons between it and any other movie ever made.

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Faculty Spotlight: WolframAlpha

Since his inception, WolframAlpha, or Alpha for short, has been a favorite professor among students at the Colorado School of Mines. Alpha has become a go-to guy for solving tough derivatives, plotting weird functions, doing Laplace transforms, and even doing simple arithmetic when TI-84 was not available during her office hours. “I’m especially talented at computational knowledge,” said WolframAlpha.

Monthly Archives: March 2013