Intercept from Planet Mollyringwald / Hilfe! m'Aidez! Vleeptron wants to know what they're saying

You can buy this poster HERE. (also t-shirts, coffee mugs, baseball caps, the usual tchachki.)

I think I will. Or make screen wallpaper out of it.

Right now my screen runs the panel of the Bayeux Tapestry that shows astrologers gazing up at Comet Halley as it passed near Earth in 1066.

Isti Mirant Stella
These men look at the star

It was clearly signalling to the astrologers that Great Events would soon take place on Earth, very likely in Normandy and England. Mathilde, wife of William the Conquerer -- a Viking, more or less -- is credited with designing and leading the team of embroiderers [it's embroidery, not tapestry] who chronicled the Norman invasion of England.

But this VLA sucker wouldn't be shabby.

The Very Large Array seems (to my limited understanding of such things) to be our planet Earth's most powerful ear/eye/nose/finger/tongue into our universe. It perceives the Universe in the radio frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. A computer averages the many signals of 27 large radio receivers all aimed at the same sky point, and this averaging yields a composite signal significantly clearer and more precise and full of useful information than even the huge semi-steerable dish in the dead (*) volcano crater in Arecibo, Puerto Rico (a colonial possession of the United States of America).

(*) Only a volcano knows if it's dead or not. We're just guessing and hoping and deep in denial.

An unimaginably tiny wattage from unimaginable distances and from unimaginably ancient events gets bounced down to a parabaloid, a surface of revolution of the parabola, a surface with the virtue of bouncing it all back to a single collection point, an antenna. Circuitry, much of it bathed in supercool liquid nitrogen to keep out unwanted radio noise, further refines and amplifies an unimaginably tiny radio wattage to a clear and rich pattern of useful quantifiable information about that region of the Universe. This machine lets us smell the fragrances and hear the corny old Love Songs of stars and black holes and gas clouds fifty galaxies away from the Melkweg.

We are quite lucky. It almost doesn't matter how little energy remains in the exhausted radio Signal, as long as it's a tiny bit stronger than the unwanted Noise of the Universe and the machinery. That's all we need to extract huge volumes of information from very far away.

If I got any, or most, or all of this wrong, please Leave A Comment. Curse and humiliate my ignorance at length. We don't get a lot of astrophysicists writing in to complain around Vleeptron. I think more should drop in.

We are, after all, a sentient civilization with a 2-bedroom vacation apartment in the capital city (nearest Underway station: Shoemirrors) of Another Planet in Another Star System in another Galaxy (nearby Dwingeloo-2), you would think a few astrophysicists might Google here by mistake and then might want to get into a dialogue about this.

Vleeptron is dumb as rocks, but we are sentient, we know which end of a cheap Russian import telescope to look through, and we do live part of the time on another planet. We know Some Stuff the pros just might want to know. And the pros know stuff that I'd like to know.

Like how the Very Large Array works, and where do you eat lunch or dinner around there? (The bar at the bottom of the road from the Montserrat Volcano Observatory is the Desert Storm Bar. This is a hard bar to get to even if the last thing you want to do is observe a volcano. But you drink there, or you don't drink. It overlooks the Caribbean in the back.)

In Alma, New Brunswick, Canada, a restaurant proclaims:

EAT HERE OR WE'LL BOTH STARVE

Well, anyway, the Vleeptron Advanced Mathematics Research Institute (VAMRI) got a grant from the High Non-Junk Science Council and bought some time on the VLA, and has instructed the staff to point it at Vleeptron and its adjacent planets.

Because the Intercept From Yobbo -- astonishingly and rapidly decrypted by Vleeptron Head Wrangler Mike -- was not just a one-time shout-out, this was no deleted Spam from Space, or interstellar Nigerian scam e-mail.

Whatever it meant to the sentients who heard it, it elicited a passionate and prompt reply burst from the rarely-heard-from and little-understood Planet Mollyringwald.

I have no idea what Mollyringwald is shouting.

It is not a random nursery tantrum fling of alphabet blocks. We have shoved it through Statistical Package for the Analysis of Extraterrestrial Possibly Intelligent Activity (SPÆPIA), and it not random. It is non-random. It is The Other Thing. Order. Meaning. Purpose.

Well, the VLA did its part and intercepted this sucker, and VAMRI paid them via PayPal. There's still some money left over from the grant, but probably only enough to take most of us to the Northfield Drive-In, which is open again for the summer. (We gonna see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 when it 2nd-runs, and eat hot dogs and drink Dr. Pepper. I don't know what the other movie will be.)

Now it is up to Mike, or the megasmart Amy, or Dame RheLynn (who knew what QuickSort was when it wiggled at her), or the Astonishing Occidental Mystic RamanuJohn, who solved the 7-Node Travelling Santa Problem (TSP), or PatfromCH who knows about the Poe Bug Thing but is just lazy, or Klaas from Rotterdam, or a high-school boy who programs in BASIC, or the Dutch Power Cows --

Well, I need help with this Intercept from Mollyringwald.

We know very little about Planet Mollyringwald, it is small and usually hiding behind its Moon, which is larger than Mollyringwald. We know only that they speak English, and a little Papiamentu, and that they go totally apeshit for eel. SPÆPIA outputs

NOT PAPIAMENTU

so it's in English.

Which is like a 100-meter head start for the Head Wrangler. He's seen this movie before.

But the other Usual Suspects are pretty fast on the uptake, this bunch hits the pavement running. NOTE:

Give the tortoise just a little head start,
and Achilles can never overtake
Earth's slowest creature.

I would really like to see some Dutch Power Cows, or the folks at Kafe Internet Sofia, or Phrost Who Folds Proteins, or some lawyers, or social workers, or Duncan Dancers, or Icelanders, or iPod or Crackberry users, take a whack at it. Or Brandon from near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who pops in now and then. Siderite -- you can get in on this. You're not Cyrillic. Multumesc!

In eras gone by, Ordained Clergy used to be pretty slick at stuff like that, they ate brain snacks like this for breakfast. Malthus. The Rev. Henry Briggs. Joseph Priestly. Gregor Mendel. They could do this.

The free and breezy residents of Praha have laptops and HPs and Dells all over the fucking place now! And They Are Smart! Decrypt this Intercept from Mollyringwald! Let's hear from the Czech Republic! Let's hear from Walloons! From Slovakians and Slovenes! Let's hear from Tallin! Let's hear from Ice Cube in the fucking Antarctic! Before it melts! And he has two brothers, Mush Boy and Utopia Guy, they have both displayed Wit previously.

Where is our Man on the Ground in China? Our drivebys from Thailand? Where are the Ozzies, where are the Kiwis? Does Bangalore have no one who can decrypt this?

Doesn't abbas mutter about being in IT? Generally he curses the mathematical boil on Vleeptron, but didn't he say he was in IT? Well, this is I, and he must have access to some T. Or some woman down the corridor who does this for fun when she's supposed to be working.

And where are the Artists? the Kunstlers? Are you pleading Congenital Thickness re Intergalactic Cyphers? I know this artist in Berlin whose child life was electrified by a newspaper serial of "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" auf deutsches, von ............ Edgar Allan Poe!!! If Poe was all fucked up on Cyphers, why are the Kunstlers too dainty to get a little crypto-dirty?

Why are the Musicians and Fabric Artists ducking this like the neocons in the Bush administration dodged military conscription?

There's this other guy in the USA state shaped like the palm of the human right hand, and he lives down the street from a whomp-ass world-class Brain Campus which has got to be crawling with crytographers.

I would really like to know what Planet Mollyringwald is trying to tell us. Is eels the only thing they eat? Are they shaped like doughnuts? How many dimensions do they have? Do they wear the Frasier Tartan? Have they solved the ethical dilemmas of organ donation? Does everybody get all the kidneys they need? Do they like Django Reinhart? Or do they polka to Frankie Yankovich till the cows come home?

You are smart.

You can do this.

Or, as Irving Copi taught me so long ago, the inescapable Material Implication:

If you cannot do This,
then you are Not Smart.

Here it is, hot out of the VLA's paraboloid. Tear ass.

KOVFG HUISX GMHSF RGHNF VKEBR GCRSP FUGNK XOVTK IGPMS VKEUF GHUXU SGNFH OSNOV MGPXE NFKNG TVUGH MKNKX HTEUF GNBRH BPSGB RRHUF ELKNO GOKUG KQGUS HOXKU CGUBH SNSNX KUOGF BRHBB RSMKE UCSBV ISPPT GTEUN GFISB RXSUG XUKOR GHQGN SNIRS CRXGH UXEPK QGUBR UKITK BROVM GPXIS BRBRG GOVIS XGHNF VKEOV MIGGB THTGM MRHPP OSMGU HTPVC KOGBK UESNG ACGLB BRGIR SCRVG BSMGG NKBMK OGIHV KXGMC HLGCH NTGXK ENFIR GUGTV IGOHV TGFGP SQGUG FHBBR SMRSM UGPHB SKNMI GUGMK UGHOH ZGFNK BXKUB RHBBR GVTGP SGQGF BRHBI RHBRG RHFMH SFBKB RGOIH MBUEG TEBTG CHEMG BRGVB RKEWR BBRHB MKOGX UGNZV FSMBG OLGUR HFWKB SNBKR SMRGH FBRGU GXKUG SBFUH ISNWB KIHUF MNSWR BHNFB RGVRK LSNWB RHBMP GGLOS WRBMG BBPGR SMTUH SNMIS BRHPP RHMBG BRGVW KBRSO BKTGF TEBBR GNSWR BIHMH MBUKE TPGMK OGBKR SOHMB RGFHV IRGUG XKUGS NMBGH FKXMP GGLSN WRGML GNBSB SNMSW RMHNF BGHUM DKRNT ENVHN BRGLS PWUSO MLUKW UGMM