Ray Guns Research Articles

“The Object Comes Alive”: A Conversation with Claes Oldenburg

Abstract In this interview, the late Claes Oldenburg looks back on both the motivations and the modalities of his distinctive practice. Among the topics discussed are his signature “guises,” such as the Ray Guns and the Flags, the performative basis of his early objects, and his sustained commitment to an aesthetic of shape-shifting.

Security Arms Race

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">In the classic</b> short-short science fiction story “The Swordsmen of Varnis,” by Clive Jackson, a warrior hero and Martian princess are facing the enemy. Swords flashing, our heroes are about to win until one swordsman says “Bah, this is ridiculous,” takes out his ray gun and blasts our poor heroes out of existence. You might remember a similar scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where Indy, about to duel a bad guy, just shoots him instead.

Review: Media Hot and Cold, by Nicole Starosielski

Review: <i>Media Hot and Cold</i>, by Nicole Starosielski

Stranger Things, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics

<i>Stranger Things</i>, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Study of Adiabatic Flame Temperature of a Jet Combustor using a Non-Circular Inlet

An experimental investigation on heat transfer at various zones of the combustion chamber has been carried out using a non-circular inlet at the flame tube. With an aim to improve the turbulent level in flow, the non-circular section used here is an elliptical one. In addition to this, two rectangular tabs are placed at major axis of the ellipse to achieve an efficient mixing of fuel and air. Fuel used for combustion is kerosene while LPG gas is used for pre ignition. Fuel is fed to the chamber by gravity system and it has been atomized by two fish tank pumps. Ignition of the fuel is done by spark plug with a separate setup. The setup comprises of growler and CDI coil which are powered electrically. During the experiment, combustion has been initiated by allowing the air from blower to the chamber. The fuel is sprayed into the flame tube through fuel injector placed at a specified distance. After the proper mixing of fuel and air, the mixture is ignited by spark plug setup. Initially LPG gas was used for preheating followed by kerosene for combustion. Fuel tank has been calibrated for mass flow rate. The experiment has been carried out for different intervals of time and the heat transferred from the flame tube wall and chamber wall is been measured using an infrared gun (ray gun) by pointing laser on the wall. The temperatures at different zones have been measured. It is seen that the overall heat transfer at secondary zone is minimum when compared with other zones for the same period of time. This indicates that if the fuel injector is placed before the secondary zone, then a maximum flame temperature can be obtained. This leads to an improvement in efficiency of the combustion chamber.

My Gun In Texas Scents Traveled Faster, and: Dead Man’s Lashes

My Gun In Texas Scents Traveled Faster, and: Dead Man’s Lashes Anna Journey (bio) My Gun Looks like a power drill,space-alien ray gun—blackwith a neon-blue circle on the grippanel. Triangular handle. It’s uselessfor bank robbing, for muggings, for crimesof passion, unless you countmy spine’s abnormalityas a crime. I use my gunon myself—percussive massage gun that pummelsthe paraspinal muscles with rapidpunches of its polyurethane fist. My favoriteof the gun’s multiple attachments: the onecalled “the cone,” for its stabbyshape and the way it sticksdeep into scar tissue, breaks upthe old damage, or at least softensthe edges of the hardestlumps. Once, in Richmond, I lived acrossthe street from Lombardy Market,where I’d buy six-packs of Harpoonfor the ale’s malted-caramel tastebut mainly for its label’strippy filigree of orange lotuses.And buttermilk biscuits with pork sausage, [End Page 24] too, from the Southside biker dudenamed Lucky who workedthe counter, and whoseblack ponytail swungwith his movements. His beefy armsand snake tattoo could seemscary, except once he spokeyou realized he was sweet,that he meant it when he called youHoney. I’d sell him pot sometimesduring his breaks when he’d dartout to my place, or rathermy boyfriend Patrick’s placein which I stayed along with hischildhood friend John, a recentIraq War vet. Because John woke upmost nights kickboxing the darkas he hopped on his bed,shouting as the steel springsclanked like a muffled accordion,Patrick finally had to put a padlockon the inside of our bedroom doorand a second one on our sideof the shared bathroom. During one of our fights, I slammedthe front door, shouted,John needs to move!, and, sobbing,ran barefoot onto the sidewalk. I noticedthe glow of Lucky’s cigarette cherryflare across the street as he leanedagainst the brick frontof the market. He didn’t say anythingthen, just pulled out anothercigarette, wiggled its white papertip the air, motioned me over. We smoked,side by side, until I cleared my throat, [End Page 25] told him I was going to take a walk.He said, Wait, ducked inside,and came back with a singlepaper-bagged Harpoon, handed it to me.I lived on that block half a yearbefore I finally learnedthe origin of Lucky’s nickname: that during an armed robbery at the market,he’d emptied the register while heldat gunpoint, then raised his hands.The robber aimed a pistol at Lucky’sforehead, point-blank, and pulledthe trigger. The gun jammed. After that,Lucky made sure the neighborhoodknew he kept a loaded Coltsomewhere up front. Sometimes, when I’m drilling my backwith my gun, I think of how Luckyonce stared down the barrelof a real one. Even after I knewthe story I could never say moreto him than: Want to swing by later?I just got more weed. Or:Two biscuits today, sir, I’m massivelyhungover. I never said goodbye to Lucky when I movedto Houston. Almost fifteen yearslater, I’ve driven by Lombardy Marketmany times on my visitsto Richmond, but I can’t bearto go inside. I’m afraidLucky won’t be there. I’m worriedsome stranger’s face willdisplace his if I look, so I just glance [End Page 26] once at the whitewashed brick,avoid the upper half of the window.If I balance the angle of my gun’scone attachment so it pointsstraight down, let gravity drive inthe tip, the edges of the hardscar tissue begin to break. In Texas Scents Traveled Faster because of the humidityand heat. There, where the airmolecules and I were both more volatile. Often,after my boyfriend and I argued,I slipped out to the front porch’s steps,where it took less than a secondfor the smell of our neighbor’s...

There’s a Starman Waiting in the Sky

There’s a Starman Waiting in the Sky Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Publisher Editor (bio) “The time,” said David Bowie to William Burroughs, “is five years to go before the end of the earth.” Bowie was explaining to Burroughs some of the ideas underlying his fifth studio album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which had been released about a year and half earlier. The two were meeting for the first time at the behest of Craig Copetas, who was conducting a two-way interview of them for Rolling Stone Magazine. Burroughs was nearing 60 at the time and Bowie was a few months shy of 27 — the mythical age of death of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and many other prominent musicians. The last track on Ziggy Stardust, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” grimly recalls the fate of the 27 Club: You’re too old to lose it, too young to choose it And the clock waits so patiently on your songYou walk past the café but you don’t eat when you’ve lived too long You’re a rock ‘n’ roll suicide Though Bowie would far outlive the 27 Club, Ziggy does not. He is taken by the rock ‘n’ roll death drive. Sigmund Freud, who coined the notion of the death drive, regarded it as a mediation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s affirmation of the will and Arthur Schopenhauer’s negation of it. But this is not the death drive that took Ziggy. It was one tempered more by Lacanian than Freudian thought. Slavoj Žižek, the great contemporary Lacanian philosopher, argues that the death drive should not be confused with the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension or with the craving for self-annihilation. For him, “the death drive, on the contrary, is the very opposite of dying, it is a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.” After the Ziggy Stardust tour, the Ziggy character disappeared as quickly as he appeared — giving way to the titular character of Bowie’s follow-up album, Aladdin Sane (1973). I’d like to think though that fifty years after his disappearance from the Bowie tour stage, he lives on in a variation of the “undead” eternal life described by Žižek — rising and falling in the endless repetitive cycle of the spinning of the well-worn black vinyl of Ziggy Stardust. ________ The setting for their meeting was Bowie’s home in London, which we are told was decorated in a science-fiction mode. A huge painting by an artist who was a cross between Salvador Dalí and Norman Rockwell hung over a plastic sofa. Lunch, reports Copetas, was a Jamaican fish dish served with avocados stuffed with shrimp and a Beaujolais nouveau. It was prepared by a Jamaican in the Bowie entourage and served by, what he describes as “two interstellar Bowieties.” The Starman himself was wearing three-tone NASA jodhpurs — those full-length trousers, worn for horseback riding, that are close-fitting below the knee and have reinforced patches on the inside of the leg. Keep your ‘lectric eye on me babe Put your ray gun to my headPress your space face close to mine, loveFreak out in a moonage daydream oh! yea! (Bowie, “Moonage Daydream”) Burroughs, who lived at the time in a two-room flat in Piccadilly and shared a cab with Copetas to Bowie’s home, must have thought he landed on another planet — the glam psychedelic one where the Starman-in-the-sky-who-would-like-to-come-and-meet-us-but-thinks-he’d-blow-our-minds lives. Their meeting was on November 17, 1973 — two years and two days after the first recording sessions for Ziggy Stardust had ended. While their meeting was not as significant in literary history as say the dinner Horace Liveright had with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce on January 4, 1922, where by the end of dinner that night, Liveright had retained the services of...

Rockets and Ray Guns: The Sci-Fi Science of the Cold War by Andrew May

Rockets and Ray Guns: The Sci-Fi Science of the Cold War by Andrew May

The ray guns are coming

The U.S. Navy's most advanced laser weapon looks like a pricey amateur telescope. As it emerges from a chassis high on the USS Ponce to look out onto the daytime sky above the Persian Gulf, its operator sits in a darkened room elsewhere on the ship holding what looks like a game controller. The screen before him is showing a small boat floating near the Ponce, carrying a dark object. The infrared beam hitting the object is invisible, but you can see one spot grow brighter until the object suddenly explodes, sending metal shards spiraling into the water.

How the ray gun got its zap: odd excursions into optics

How the ray gun got its zap: odd excursions into optics

Ray Guns and Radium: Radiation in the Public Imagination as Reflected in Early American Science Fiction

The 1920s and 1930s were a period which saw great popular interest in radiation and radioactivity in America, and the establishment of a new genre of pulp literature, science fiction. Radiation was prevalent in American popular culture at the time, and sf stories were dependent upon radiation for much of their color and excitement. In this case study of stories in Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories, two of the leading sf pulps, the connections between actual scientific ideas and discoveries and sf plots and imagery are analyzed, demonstrating the general optimistic belief in the possibilities of scientifically-controlled radiation.

First Day on Earth (review)

Reviewed by: First Day on Earth Claire Gross Castellucci, Cecil . First Day on Earth. Scholastic, 2011. [160p]. ISBN 978-0-545-06082-0 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 7-12. A gentle soul who helps out strangers in need and patiently cares for his alcoholic, depressed mother, Mal would love to leave this world, to be free and far away from human cruelty, and when the aliens—the ones who abducted him for three days when he was twelve—come back, that's exactly what he'll finally be able to do. His accidental attendance of an abductee support group in place of the Alateen meeting he usually attends puts him in contact with Hooper, whose strange, otherworldly behavior is explained when he claims to be an alien himself. Castellucci plays powerfully with the ambiguity surrounding the truth of Hooper's identity and Mal's past experience in a way that recalls Fisher's Corbenic (BCCB 11/06), and the balance of indicators for mental illness versus extraterrestrial event is expert and provocative. Mal's base-level depression is so powerful that he seems unable to imagine an earthly cure ("If I could help [my mother] to understand . . . she would maybe laugh, and the brown dead plants in the garden that she has forgotten about would turn green again. . . . They must have a ray gun for that"), while Hooper lives isolated and detached from human experience, offering commentary on the world's evils but nevertheless evincing a childlike joy in the acts of kindness he witnesses from Mal. The prose is spare but dense, lyrical and strongly emotive, and younger teens will find the story accessible and affecting even as older readers can revel in its emotional complexity and thematic sophistication. Mal's innate warmth, along with the tenuous connections Hooper helps him build with a couple of peers, bring glimmers of light to what is overall a painfully sad (if ultimately hopeful) story of abandonment and disaffection. Ultimately, it hardly matters whether the aliens are real or metaphorical; it is Mal's earthly journey that will grab readers' hearts. [End Page 139] Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

How Outlandish Can Imaginary Cases Be?

abstractIt is common in moral philosophy to test the validity of moral principles by proposing counter‐examples in the form of cases where the application of the principle does not give the conclusion we intuitively find valid. These cases are often imaginary and sometimes rather ‘outlandish’, involving ray guns, non‐existent creatures, etc. I discuss whether we can test moral principles with the help of outlandish cases, or if only realistic cases are admissible. I consider two types of argument against outlandish cases: 1) Since moral principles are meant for guiding action in this world, cases drawn from other worlds are irrelevant. 2) We lack the capacity to apply our intuitive moral competence to outlandish cases. I argue that while the first approach is importantly flawed, the second approach is plausible, not because our moral competence per se is limited to cases from this world, but because we lack the capacity to imagine outlandish cases, and we cannot apply our moral competence to a case we fail to imagine properly.

Ray guns get real

Cheap rockets fired by insurgents are taking a deadly toll in the Middle East. The article looks at whether a new generation of solid-state lasers can blow them out of the sky.

Killing in Self‐Defense

Can we ever permissibly kill others in self-defense, and if we can, what is the moral principle that permits such lethal acts? Consider a Villainous Aggressor who wants to kill me simply because he hates me, and I see him coming at me with an axe. Can I permissibly kill him if this is the only way to save my own life? What about the case of an Innocent Aggressor? This is someone who has the intention to kill me, but they are not morally responsible for forming this intention: perhaps a villain slipped them a drug which temporarily caused them to have this intention. Finally consider an Innocent Threat—someone who threatens my life even though they have formed no intention to kill me and exercise no agency at all. An example would be someone who has been pushed off a cliff and will land on me and kill me unless I vaporize him with my trusty ray gun first (if I do not shoot he will survive the fall). Like Judith Jarvis Thomson, I think these are all cases where it is permissible to kill one person in order to save my own life. Jeff McMahan, Michael Otsuka, and several others, however, have offered a powerful argument against the permissibility of killing Inno-

Light Wars: The Bright Future of Laser Weapons

Light Wars: The Bright Future of Laser Weapons WAR TECH SPRING WAR TECH by Hemma Mistry Lasers as directed energy weapons: this idea may sound like the ray guns and light sabers of a science fiction writer’s dreams, but the idea of incorporating lasers into military technology has been pursued since lasers were first invented. The U.S. government has spent millions of dol- lars attempting to make laser weaponry a reality. In 1983, the Reagan administration initiated an ambitious effort to create missile defense systems using lasers in space, nick- named “Star Wars.” Although these systems were never realized, the “Star Wars” program paved the way for future laser research. The Clinton administration continued the effort for missile defense laser weaponry with an agreement with the Israeli government in 1996. Currently there are several U.S. military funded programs developing laser weapons. What is a Laser? http://cord.org/step_online/st1- 5/images/Fig05-01.gif fying light through the process of stimulated emission. In 1916, Albert Einstein first theorized stimulated emission as one of the three processes by which light can interact with matter (Perram, et al. 2004). In this process, a photon of light hits an electron in an excited, high energy state, caus- ing the electron to fall to a lower energy state which releas- es a photon of light with the same wavelength, phase, and direction as the incident light. Mirrors are then used to amplify the emitted light, resulting in a beam of monochro- matic, coherent, directed laser light. This diagram shows the basic components of a laser. The gain medium, or amplifying medium, contains atoms whose electrons are stimulated to emit light. Mirrors on either end of the optical cavity reflect the light back several times through the gain medium, amplifying the beam. An energy input is also required to excite the electrons in the gain medium into a high energy state so that stimulated emission can occur. Military Interest in Lasers The characteristics of laser light give lasers the potential to make effective weapons. Because a laser beam is focused in one direction, laser weapons have the poten- The basic components of a laser tial to be extremely accurate in hitting targets. In combat, Lasers can serve as a valuable technology in warfare this accuracy would minimize the destruction of surround- because the light they emit has important and useful quali- ing area that is caused by more imprecise weapons such as ties. Laser light is monochromatic and coherent, which explosives. The precise aim of the weapon and the mini- means that not only does the light have a uniform wave- mal destruction would also reduce the harm caused to civil- length, but also the light waves maintain the same phase ians and other unintended targets. Lasers would also relationships over time. The waves also propagate in a def- enable the military to attack targets from far away, provided inite direction. These properties allow laser light to carry a that there is an unobstructed path for the laser’s beam to large amount of energy travel between the that can be applied in a weapon and target. specific direction, which Lasers could be used to destroy satel- Since the beam would is highly advantageous lites in space, or conversely, space-based travel at the speed of for a weapon. light, the weapon would lasers could attack targets on the ground. be effective on these The word laser is actually an acronym distant targets almost for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of instantaneously. This long-range capability of lasers also Radiation,” and as the name implies, lasers work by ampli- means that a laser attack could be carried out covertly from

The E-bomb: how America's new directed energy weapons will change the way future wars will be fought

This is a timely book that explains the next revolution in military - - and how tomorrow's wars will be fought. In science fiction, futuristic soldiers are often shown wielding light emitting - Flash Gordon used a ray gun, Captain Kirk carried a phaser, and Darth Vader brandished a lightsaber. But, today, the imagined future of science fiction is soon to be a reality. After more than two decades of research, the United States is on the verge of deploying a new generation of that discharge light-wave energy, the same spectrum of energy found in your microwave, or in your TV remote control. They're called directed-energy weapons - lasers, high-powered microwaves and particle beams - and they signal a revolution in weaponry, perhaps, more profound than the atomic bomb. first (DE) are being tested right now, and their deployment is planned in the very near future. In The E-Bomb, author J Douglas Beason, a leading US expert in research, will explain in clear and non-technical prose these exotic new and answer the questions that we'll all want answered: What is Directed Energy? How do DE work? What can these DE do? And are these safe to use? As the once-imagined of the future begin to appear on today's battlefield's, The E-Bomb will help explain how and why the future is now.

AI bites man? [science fiction stories

In future installments of this department we'll look at the important writers, thinkers, works, and ideas in speculative fiction that have got us thinking about the way technological change could affect our lives. This is not to imply that science fiction writers represent a particularly prescient bunch-I think the norm is ray guns and spaceships-but when they're good, they're very good. And whatever gets us thinking is good. To get started, let's take a look at some of the key subgenres and eras in science fiction's history.

Félix and Gilles's Tempestuous, Monstrous Machines

The concept of the machine circulates in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in highly abstracted terms, yet they frequently maintained that it was not to be understood as a metaphor. This paper draws on the example of the film Forbidden Planet to explore the potential for cinematic representation to convey the terms under which Deleuze and Guattari ask us to imagine the machinic complex.