Interstate Blues

Standing in Buffalo Park, a bluff above Flagstaff, it's hard not to be struck by the full moon. At an altitude of over 7,000 feet there's less atmospheric interference so it looks like there's a floodlight on everything, every diction you look. But it's not just the altitude that makes Flagstaff a unique city for looking at celestial phenomena. It's the world's first dark sky city. Meaning, it's the first city in the world to actively minimize its light pollution. The streetlights are designed to emit barely any ambient light on anything but the streets themselves, and there are strict codes on what kind of lighting setups businesses can have. And even up here in Buffalo Park, looking out over Flagstaff's dark sky, you can still hear the roar of two interstate highways meeting.

But this city owes its existence, or at least its current state of existence, to that very interstate. Flagstaff is located only 70 miles from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and it's the city you have to drive through to get there. And you'll probably end up staying here too, since Nature in all her wonder doesn't seem to be enough stimuli for the people who hop out of their cars at the rim and wave their iPads around for a few minutes and then go to a motel so they can watch real hosewives of somewhere on the story box. The next day they will drive another eight hours to spend another few minutes with their iPads in front of another natural wonder. It's where the tourists come, and it's also where the truckers come, and the road trippers who haven't seen anything but mountains and desert for hours in both directions. It's also the place you have to pass through to get to Las Vegas or LA from a big chunk of the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard. And it's all because Interstates 40 and 17 meet right in the center of town.

It's not hard to see that for many Americans, where you live has been determined by the Eisenhower Administration. If you look at one of those pictures of America at night, or for the more empirically minded, one of those maps where a red dot represents x many people, you'll see that population patters form a Cartesian grid across the middle. The people go where the roads go.

Flagstaff itself might be the exception that proves the rule. It first rose to prominence because of the railroad lines, and then was sustained by the oft-romanticized Route 66. Now two only two trains stop each day, one going east and one going west, and Route 66 is a creation myth. But it survived as the hub of Northern Arizona because, well, as far as the interstate patterns go, it is the hub. It's why Flagstaff is Flagstaff, instead of Holbrook or Winslow or Bellemont or Williams. And it wasn't just a silly name that's kept Tuba City from taking that place. Instead of the roads fitting the population geography, the population geography fits where the roads are.

But how has the interstate system shaped our minds? Or more specifically, how does the interstate make us think about where we are and where we're headed? (In a strictly literal sense, and not the kind of literal that actually means figuratively.) Because if you're headed somewhere, you're probably taking the interstate.

That's how I got to Flagstaff. It was in a van that doubled as the owner's house. I found the ride on Craigslist. We left Albuquerque at 10 AM and got to Flagstaff at 2:30 PM, the whole time taking just one road. We needed no landmarks to navigate. We crossed the Continental Divide without having to find the most gradual ascent or the most suitable passage. The interstate took us there.

And still, this is some of the more scenic fare the interstate system has to offer. Between the Rockies and the Appalachians, all you can see from the interstate is urban sprawl and signs for gas stations on top of long poles. There's no navigating that has to take place other than figuring out which exit to take and maybe a few interchanges.

The problem I have with this way of navigating is that you're not aware of how where you're going is related to where you are, and you certainly aren't aware of any of the points in between. There's no spatial awareness being developed, no mental map being made of the land and the terrain. It's just a series of tubes that will get you to your destination. Every place becomes an isolated location in which you just appear.

Now we don't even need to look at a map. Your phone just tells you where to turn if you ask it. There's no brainwork involved in figuring it out.

I've always been a person who values knowing exactly where I am, and where that is in relation to everything else. I have a smart phone but I don't use the GPS. I look at the map and figure out where I'm going manually. Why? Because I like my mind being engaged that way. And I want to know where I am.

The most useless people when it comes to orienting themselves are generally the ones who grew up in mass-produced suburbias. They've got to be driven everywhere in your mom's minivan, with a gameboy or DVD player in the backseat to keep them from looking out the window and observing where they're going. These kids grow up thinking you just appear in places. They don't see how all the places are connected. And most of us, thanks to the interstate system and internet-assisted navigation.

Now I'm all for progress, but I don't know if I would call this progress. Technology has advanced, but our brains have regressed in a certain kind of spatial understanding. Call me idealistic but I think that technology exists to make humans better and more effective, not the other way around. (I think even Ray Kurzweil could agree with me on that one.) Technological advances are a failed endeavor if they downgrade humans in the process.

So let's be aware of where we are. Look at a map, look at the landmarks, watch the subtle changes in ecosystem and landscape as you go. And find your way without asking the internet or your phone where to go. Think of it like a game. And you get points for doing well. Those points make your brain level up and then eventually you get a better brain.

But if you don't use your brain, it will never level up.

The 3rd Millennium: Where Big Brother Doesn't Care

On the spectrum of sci-fi, smartphones are somewhere past radioactive milk and a little before corporations owning patents on your DNA. It's an extension of your body and an extension of your brain and you can connect to the internet from anywhere (ok, not anywhere) which is essentially a lite version of tapping into a hive mind or global consciousness. An incomprehensible wealth of information is literally now at my fingertips as long as my eyes don't go bad from squinting at the tiny screen, but by the time they do, your smartphone will just have a heads-up display projected directly into your optic nerve.

But then there's also the sketchy feature of GPS tracking. Most of us (and by "most of us" I mean "most of you," because I have a superpower, which probably came from drinking too much radioactive milk, where I always know exactly how to get where I'm going) love the GPS feature on our phones, because we never have to worry about getting lost and we don't have to invest any thought into paying attention to where we actually are so we can instead fully focus on singing along to the Nicki Minaj single we foolishly purchased on iTunes and sipping from our emo screamo froth out your ass frappuccino while we feel so good about driving our Prius on our hour long commute. But it goes two ways. Apple claims that they track your location so they can better provide you with coverage, and this is also the reason that they keep a log of where you have been that goes back for a full six months, or at least that's what they tell you.

Android is specifically designed to further Google's agenda of knowing exactly what you like and targeting ads specifically for you. Android phones are all about getting people to search for things so Google can make more relevant ads. If you look up song lyrics, they know what kind of bands you like. If you search for bicycle parts, they will know you're into cycling. If you search for Volvo mechanics, they will know you drive a Volvo. If you search for baby products, they will know you have a baby. And if you search for Korean porn, then, well, you get the drift. And this information is used to provide the most "relevant" ads, that is, the ads that they think you are most likely to click.

And speaking of relevant ads by Google, have you looked around lately? Some pretty enticing sponsors we got here...

Now, my phone isn't exactly smart. It's a C student, gets its fair share of detention, but it'll graduate and have a decent job at the Dollar Tree. But I can still access the hive mind and search for things. And someone probably knows where I am.

And I'm not sure I really care. It's not like I go anywhere interesting, it's not like I'm spending my Friday nights sneaking into Area 51. And they know that the other day, I was curious to see if you could buy elephant steaks. (In case you're wondering, the answer is not legally.) They know all the inane things I've googled, all the boring places I've been. But they know this for everybody. And it's all just getting handled by one big algorithm. Is it scary? Does it have the potential to be dangerous? Yes, of course it does. But for right now, no one actually cares where you've been, and no one actually cares what you're searching for. Big Brother is watching, but he's also watching everyone else. And you would have to be really arrogant to think that Google would single you out, out of all their millions of users, and take an interest in all the nothing you've been doing.

The truth is out there. It's just kind of boring.

Nature vs. Legislature

It was thought that God was dead, but now it seems He is guilty of patent infringement.

I really wish this were science fiction, but with a world getting more sci-fi by the minute, something like this was bound to happen. Under US patent law, you (and I don't actually mean you, because let's face it, you're reading the Ozone Shack which means you're probably not in a lab doing groundbreaking research) can patent a molecule. Not a means of synthesizing it or extracting it or distilling it or purifying it or packaging it or distributing it or administering it, but actually the molecule itself. You (again, probably not you) have to discover it and prove you discovered it, so it's not like you're all of a sudden going to have to start paying royalties on oxygen every time you breathe. (Or ozone, for that matter, which would spell the end for my stint in the blogosphere.)

But, if a team at Dow Chemicals discovers a new compound, let's call it hexyl-methyl-buggerol, that occurs naturally in the excrement of giraffes, and they patent it, any distributor would have to pay royalties for selling products that used hexyl-methyl-buggerol, even if it were synthesized in a lab. The patent law essentially treats the scientist who was first able to determine the molecular structure of a compound like it would the inventor of a device or piece of technology. And unlike the telephone or the jet engine or fiber-optics, you don't have to actually figure out how to make the molecule to get the patent. You just have to show that you discovered hexyl-methyl-buggerol and our bloated and undiscerning U.S. patent system will grant you the rights to control any use of hexyl-methyl-buggerol.

This is unnerving not just because someone can claim royalties for something they didn't technically invent, but because it implies that a person "invented" a molecule. It doesn't matter what theological or philosophical ideas you subscribe to, or even if you don't subscribe to any, you know there's something wrong with this. In any possible way of conceiving the universe, the structure of molecule itself was created or designed or came into being because of something  - be it God or laws of quantum mechanics or karmic cause effect or even the evil demiurge Yaldobaoth - something other than the conscious ideas of its discoverer. From a scientific standpoint it is unethical because assigns a human "inventor" to something that already existed or could form in nature, and from a religious standpoint it could be seen as borderline blasphemy, taking credit for something made by the creator. And it is for these above reasons that I find it dystopian that a molecule - and again, not a means of synthesizing it - can be patented.

Now, you may be thinking: "but Nate, it I'm not religious, nor do I have any ethical qualms about this because it provides incentive for scientific progress and supports capitalism. Why should I be terrified by this?"

Because someone has a patent on your DNA, that's why!

For the first few centuries of the patent concept's lifetime, living organisms were considered off-limits as being "products of nature." Then biotech came along and blurred the lines as to what was a product of nature and what was a product of human inventiveness. In 1988 a cancer-resistant mouse was patented, and many disease-resistant strains of crops followed suit. Once we mapped the entire human genome, essentially a collection of very large molecules, it was inevitable that scientists pharmaceutical companies would take the opportunity to stake their clam to specific genes. (And this is not to imply at all that they are nefarious Bond villains trying to control the world by controlling our genes, it's just a logical step to take given legal and scientific parameters.) So right now, the rights to about 10% of your genome are owned by a specific person or corporation. (Hey man, corporations are people too!)

Now obviously, they won't be charging a 3% royalty fee every time that gene replicates itself. But they can claim ownership over any gene therapy drugs that involve that section of your DNA. There are also implications for genetic testing, and basically anything else that involves the human genome. And as the speed we can sequence genomes increases exponentially, it is now possible to patent the entire genome of an organism. An example is the neem tree in India, whose genome is now the intellectual property of the W.R. Grace company. The tree itself may still be a "product of nature," but from a legal perspective, someone owns the information on how to make it.

The good news is that the supreme court has overturned many of these "gene patents," so hopefully all of our DNA will once become public domain. But if that is to happen, we need to realize that adhering to an absolute ideology will only lead us astray. We need discernment and the courage to stop before we get to the ideological extreme, in this case, that it is in the best interest of a capitalist society that every bit of intellectual property can be patented. Because if we did get there, the world would be very sci-fi indeed.

The 3rd Millennium: Your Team's Best Player is a Robot

Here are three myths about sports that aren't true and one that is.

1) Sports are Fair


It isn't commercial timeouts or salary caps that ruined the NFL.  It's those video replays.  The referees practically  have to get Washington on the line and have all nine supreme court justices review the footage to validate what we all thought, yes, he was out of bounds when the catch was made, and now I've just spilled nacho cheez on my Jason Campbell jersey that I wear to SUPPORT MY TEAM, because it's GAME DAY!  (The exception is at Washington Redskins games, where the supreme court sits in a special box, along party lines, and uses their genetically-enhanced JusticeVision to call plays, because football is more important than politics.)  Then once the oracle has spoken, the most stoic of the referees must face the crowd and tell the message to the people, even the deaf people who can conveniently read his hand signals.  And he was definitely out of bounds and now Oakland is being charged with a delay of game and oh Christ wearing hoverboots this is so frustrating!  (cut to commercial - Ever thought about buying a Ford?  WELL YOU ARE NOW MOTHERFUCKER!)

I don't drive a Ford, but I'm still a man because I eat straight hops for breakfast. Fuck you advertising!

The rules change as the game changes to make the game stay the same.  Probably the best example is baseball, where they keep having to raise the mound as pitchers get better and better.  Otherwise it would eventually turn into a very fast-paced game of catch.  Their only audience would be seven other guys awkwardly standing in the general vicinity, kind of like what a weekday A's game looks like when there's no Lunch Money Monday or whatever kind of giveaway type thing they're doing right now.

Then you have regulations off the field (or court or rink or track or pitch or bucking bronco) that control even more aspects of the game.  Players have salary caps, a franchise can't spend more than x dollars on salaries within a decade.  We NCAA athletes have to be eligible and not getting any of the money that they're generating, or at least are supposed to be but we all know it's bullshit, and SEC football players not only get pay-for play arrangements, they also have a designated Asian to go to class for them and have stock options. (But all I get is a pair of shoes, if Nike doesn't forget to send them, which they do.)

The players, too, are regulated in a way that makes everything on the field of play appear "fair."  (No, and not in a Philip Sidney sonnet way where the lady appears fair and you piss tea and bleed iambic pentameter.)  It has to seem fair so that discrepancies in the quality of play by the two involved teams will be the only determining factor in who wins the game and who gets berated by the coach in the locker room for an hour about the heart of a champion.

But if games we really fair, we would all need the the same exact genome, the same exact parents, early childhood environment, diet, personalities, education, training, and probably all be taking the same steroids.  Because sports isn't really fair at all, because some people are drastically more talented, some people have almost infinitely more resources than others.  Some people have joints that go pop, some have tendons that just can't hold up under the stress of repeatedly getting smashed into by another elephant-sized lineman or throwing a 100 mph fastball.  Some people are straight up pussies and some can take hits all day.  And we're all going to find a way to win, even if it does mean breaking the rules.

It's ok, life is also not fair.  Maybe with this revelation we can know that real life is more like sports than we once thought it to be.  And, it makes this second pill a little easier to swallow, which is that:

2) Sports are not about who is the best team


It is because of this fallacy that we let a robot help us decide a national champion, thus putting us into the preliminary stages of a robocratic government.  In fact, since BCS rankings get people to care more than any political issue ever has or ever will, you could say that we are already letting robots make the decisions that influence our lives the most.  The polls come out, everyone gets uppidy about Boise State and TCU, arguments break out, family dinner is ruined, fights go down behind the dumpster, there are riots, North Korea sends troops into the demilitarized zone and no one even notices over here in America because we're still pissed that Boise State is either, depending on your persuasion, over or under ranked.

This is all because we want to find out who is the BEST TEAM IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL without actually doing the things nescessary to find out who is the best team in college football.  This would sort of be like trying to research bonobos in their natural habitat without actually going to their natural habitat, and instead going to the zoo and watching them fight over peanuts and then giving the two involved bonobos massive travel bills.  That's basically how the whole bowl system works.  (I should also add, then, that the reason you cannot go to the bonobo's natural habitat is because your robot overlords won't let you leave, but will crunch some numbers if you ask them real nice.)

Having a robot work the BCS looks a lot like, not to alarm you or anything, the preliminary stages of a Robotocracy.  A robot is helping us make an important decision, a decision that some people probably feel is more important than healthcare reform and social security put together.  But I digress.

The point of playing a game isn't to see which team is better overall, but which team can perform better on the day, and win the game.  Imagine that for a second.  It's not about rankings and statistics, it's just about who can win, on the day.  And that's how it's supposed to be, but we've forgotten.  The truth is that there is no objective way to measure who is the best team, we can only see who has a better performance on the day.

3) God Cares About Sports


For those of you with body fat over 10% and friends, and who haven't ruined your life with running, Ryan Hall  was once considered to be the next promising American marathoner.  Now people hate him and think he's gone off his rocker.  While he had always been adamant that God put him on this Earth for the sole purpose of running fast, he announced that he would be dumping his coach and training himself.  He stated that he would use prayer and taking a "biblical approach" his training, which many people assumed meant that God would be coaching him.

First of all, if you believe that the only reason you even exist in the first place is to run fast to glorify God, you're going to have a hard time coping with failure.  Now, what he had been doing in training was clearly not working out his lofty expectations, and it was fuckling with his brain, hence his decision to dump his coach.  He is obviously not praying every day asking "God, what should I run today?  Send a plague of locusts for mile repeats or turn Big Bear Lake into blood for a long tempo."  He's training on feel, which in some cases can be a good idea, because no one knows Ryan Hall like Ryan Hall does.  Now I'm not sure what the bible has to say about training, but unless there is an obscure passage in Deuteronomy that commandeth 8x1,000 meter repeats on the track every other Tuesday, I don't think there's a whole lot.  Maybe he won't be running on Sunday or something.

But in my opinion, it's downright disrespectful to pray for any kind of athletic success, other than maybe mental fortitude (or not dying of severe internal bleeding in a UFC fight).  If God cared about sports, Israel would have way more Olympic gold medals, possibly all of them.  Nothing really hangs in the balance of a sports contest.  Standings, rankings, statistics, they're all, in a big picture cosmic/spiritual sense, meaningless.  But still:

4) Sports are Important


There are no more mastodon to hunt, no more sabertooth tigers to run from, no more plains of the Serengeti to cross on foot with only a handful of dried berries and a skin of your own piss.  In post-industrial America, we don't have anything to physically test us anymore.  Back in the day, if I wanted some eats, I would have to grab my spear and my piss skin and run around the desert for at least a day until a wildebeest or a deer or something dropped dead from exertion, then carry it all the way back to my hut that I built myself out of sticks and mud and the bones of my brother who got his head smashed in by a neighboring band of foragers, and come home to an entirely new member of my family, because wife had to give birth all by herself while I was gone and then made a dust and placenta pudding because I was taking so friggin long to get back.  Now I can just pick up the phone and have an acne-encrusted teenager bring a pizza right to my house.

And as much as that physical exertion can suck, we need it, some part of us needs it to stay sane.  The more technologically advanced we get, the more physically useless we will become.  (Except of course if that technology leads to some great catastrophe and we're once again fighting to survive as a species against psychotic crocodile-buffalo hybrids that some R&D asshole thought would be a great idea to start manufacturing.)  And that's why we have sports, and that is why sports are important.

The 3rd Millenium: Party in the Robotocracy

I'm not afraid of robot overlords, trans-humans, test tube babies, government surveillance, mind control, corporate hegemony, alien overlords, or ramped-up eugenics.  I'm not even afraid of the grey goo that we'll all be turned into once nanotechnology goes awry.  I'm not afraid of a dystopia because, as I've made very clear before, we are already living in a dystopia.  The thing that scares me most about this dystopia is Miley Cyrus.

There are two types of people in 2010.  There are those who like Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA," and then there are those who hate it but for some reason deep down inside kinda like certain aspects of it.  For example, I'll punch a hole in the next speaker that I hear playing the song, but you can put a foil helmet on my head and call me paranoid if I don't like that guitar riff that they ripped off from some 70's R&B track who's title eludes me at the moment.  The song is ubiquitous. You can't escape it any more easily than you can escape the watchful eye of Big Brother.

The music industry has reached the point where they can pinpoint the exact musicological aspects of songs that people will find aurally pleasing.  If you've used Pandora you've experienced the lite version of this.  Songs are broken down into elements, or "genomes" as they're called by the folks at Pandora, and your feedback is used to determine which elements you like.  (For example, I'm all about extensive vamping, mixed electric acoustic and electric instrumentation, and busy horn sections, apparently.)  You can then discover music that sounds like the music you already know, but structured differently.

If you watched last election's presidential debates (ok, you probably didn't) you noticed that certain networks had instant feedback from voters using knobs to indicate whether what the candidates were saying had a positive or negative effect.  What people didn't realize is that this data was being used to determine which talking points were the best to hit, so speech writers could take the guesswork out of their jobs.

And now we have the same thing with music.  Using focus groups, record companies can find out which riffs are the most pleasing.  They're not looking for a riff that sounds good anymore, they're looking for the best riff, the riff that will hit our proverbial cash gag reflexes.  We don't know why we like the riff at the beginning of Party in the USA, we just do.  But the people who wrote and produced this song (aka, not Miley Cyrus) sampled literally dozens if not hundreds of riffs to use.  The same methodology was used for the synth bass line that everyone loves.  The lyrics are about what everyone loves: having fun, being un-inhibited, patriotism (sort of), hearing the music that you like, Middle America's disillusionment from Los Angeles, and the word "yeah!"

At some point down the road, it could be fifty years, it could be five, this is how all pop music will be made.  It will be nothing but aggregations of musical elements that have been empirically proven to please listeners most effectively.  Pop music will essentially become a gray goo of songs that all sound kind of the same.  And if that's not a dystopia, then I don't know what is.

The 3rd Millennium: Introducing the iBorg

Apple would be the company to create the world's first human cyborgs.  They have already changed the way music is consumed, and have spawned a race of incessantly annoying beings who take every opportunity to insist you get a mac.  And now they have revolutionized society by introducing the next stage of human advancement.  Ladies and gentleman, let me introduce you to: the iBorg.

I am referring to a study conducted at Stanford University which found that 20% of iPhone users think of their iPhones as being extensions of their bodies.  They equated losing their iPhone with the loss of a limb.  The way iPhone users perceive things, they have integrated the iPhone into their physical bodies.  Human bodies augmented with some sort of computer.  Cyborgs!

It is a little-known fact that I created the first iPhone back in 05, when I Velcroed my cell phone to my iPod.  This couldn't think for me, but it could do the two things that the iPhone was originally intended to do: make and receive calls, and play music.  The problem was that it couldn't really fit in my pocket, especially since my phone was essentially the retarded cousin of the then-extremely popular RAZR, a flip phone that was so thick it could barely fit in my pocket.  (Fun fact, I still use this phone, as it is incredibly drop-resistant).  So my prototype was a failure.  That's ok, failure is how you grow.  But with the iPhone, you can't fail, because it will tell you where you are, where you're going, what you need to remember, etc.  There is probably even an iPhone app that monitors vital signs.  (This app will become obsolete once our bodies have become completely integrated into the iPhone and we no longer need any organic components.)

I asked Mr. Taylor Hughes, a 1st generation iBorg, about the nature of his relationship between his biological components and his electronic components.  He denied an attachment, but he admitted that it's become something he relies on.  "You don't need one until you have one," he said, but didn't admit that it has got to the point where his iPhone is a part of him.  He also said that all these apps are doing are making us dumber.  We use them to think about things we normally would think about, and instead of freeing up our brains to think about more things, they just make our brains useless.

Taylor Hughes, my sort-of roommate and first gen iBorg.  Note the good complexion and sense of style, two traits by which one can easily identify a cyborg.  Right now, he is using an app called "Eradicate Baseline Humanity."

The iPhone is marketed as not just a smartphone, but a universal accessory that can entertain you and yes, even think for you.  Need directions?  Consult your iPhone.  Need to find a place to eat?  Consult your iPhone?  Need to find out the name of the song that's playing?  Consult your iPhone.  Need something to distract you because 3rd millennium humans can't stand to be alone with their own thoughts for a second?  Consult your iPhone.  There will be an app for everything.

What apple has done with the iPhone is to create something that remembers things for you, figures things out for you, processes information for you, and yes, thinks for you.  You are buying an extra brain, but this brain is a computer.  Apple is selling an electronic upgrade for your brain, so that you can be superior to baseline humanity.  You can go from being just a man, to man and machine.  And if that's not sci-fi, then I don't know what is.

The 3rd Millennium

In addition to the Edible/Audible posts, I'm creating another series, which I'm calling "The 3rd Millennium," celebrating all that is science fiction in our modern day dystopia. Things that, at least in my estimation, are science fiction or dystopian, even though they are 100% factual. These are not intended to be stories that are off the beaten track, or are in any way obscure. While they may not all be mainstream either, my intention is to show how sci-fi our everyday lives are. Don't believe that we're living in a dystopia? Then why does our national paper currency (specifically the 20) prominently depict a man who effectively eliminated any national paper currency during his presidency?

This first installment features two stories about having radioactive bones, one which is awesome and one which is hazardous to your health.

There's nothing more sci-fi than willingly having radioisotopes injected into your blood stream. I had this happen to me circa late May 2007 after I got a stress fracture in one of my sesamoid bones. The sesamoid bones are two small, free-floating bones located below the joint between the first metatarsal and the big toe, and are the insertion points for the flexor hallucus brevis; essentially, they are two small and brittle bones which receive a lot of impact and are essential for keeping the structural integrity of the foot. I was told that this would likely be the end of me running competitively, and I almost let the experts be right... but that's another story.

Anyway, to diagnose a stress fracture, you can't use an x-ray, because x-rays can only detect (and don't quote me on this, the number is probably wrong) a 5% change in bone tissue composition. Stress fractures don't show up on x-rays, so in order to diagnose one you need to use a bone scan.

For my bone scan, I lay down on a table underneath a large gamma camera, a camera designed to detect gamma particles. I was injected with a solution of technetium-99m, a metastable isotope of technetium with a half life of about 6 hours. Since the fluid had just come out of a refrigerator, I could feel my arm get colder as I was injected. I was told to hold my arm up, shake it around, to get the technetium-99m (A FUCKING RADIOISOTOPE!) evenly dispersed throughout my circulatory system. They turned on the gamma camera and pointed it at my legs. A screen was displaying a real time image of the gamma decay going on, let me state this again, inside my blood stream! It was pretty damn cool, if I do say so myself. You could see where the major arteries and veins were, as well as a big white cluster in the ball of my foot. Since there was some sort of tissue damage there - we didn't know if it was bone tissue or not yet - my body was sending as much blood as it could to the region. Then I had to wait three hours for the radioisotopes to work their way into my bones.

Technetium behaves similarly to calcium, similarly enough to the point where it tricks your body into thinking that it is calcium. So, what hasn't decayed or got squeezed out of your blood stream by your kidneys gets used to make bone. In areas where you are trying to repair a bone, calcium uptake, and therefore technetium uptake, will be higher. If, during the second sequence of imaging, there is a spot where the gamma camera detects significantly more particle decays, there is bone damage. And sure enough, when they took that picture, there was a white glowing hairline right on my outer sesamoid bone. "Oh my God," I thought. "There is a 50-50 chance my life is over." Stupid. But again, that's another story.

Technetium 99m decays to plain old technetium-99, an incredibly stable isotope with a half life of 211,000 years. It beta decays into the stable ruthenium-99, an incredibly rare metal (the 74th most common element on God's Spaceship Earth!) There are trace amounts of this rare member of the platinum family IN MY BONES! And if that's not sci-fi, then I don't know what is.

The second story is not quite as uplifting. While I will probably have no health problems as a result of the Technetium-99 in my bones (it's the equivalent of having about 500 chest x-rays performed during your lifetime), there have been plenty of people to die as a result of having strontium-90 in their bones.

Strontium-90 (along with a whole cocktail of radioisotopes) got introduced to the Earth during the early Cold War, the Golden Age of nuclear testing. Many of the superheroes from this era got their superpowers from being exposed to fallout from these tests. Well it turns out that something like this happened in real life, and it happened to millions of baby boomers. But their superpower ended up being cancer, and instead of using it to fight crime, they died. And they try to tell us that the Cold War had almost no casualties. Bullshit.

Strontium-90 works its way into the soil, where it is absorbed in trace amounts by plants, including those used to feed livestock. Strontium is right below Calcium on the periodic table. As a result, they behave similarly chemically. So, when cattle eat plants with strontium-90 in them, it gets put in their milk. That's right, in addition to that calcium for strong bones, you're also getting strontium 90. Much like technetium-99m, strontium-90 gets put into bones, where it sits until it decays. Strontium-90 has a half life of 28.8 years, after which it beta-decays into Yttrium-90. This is where it becomes dangerous. Yttrium-90 has a half-life of 64 hours, and when it decays, it emits some nasty gamma rays, which slice through your DNA. All that milk you were supposed to drink as a kid so you grow up strong may be the reason you get cancer when you're older. You can thank the good people in Washington and Moscow for it. And if that isn't a dystopia, I don't know what is.

(On a slightly redemptive note, Strontium 90 is also the name of a short-lived proto-new wave band that eventually led to the formation of The Police, so it can't be all bad.)