You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [38]
1. THE VORTEX CANNON
What is it?
Another Wunderwaffen, or Willy Wonka’s weapons of whimsy, the vortex cannon worked on the idea that even small-scale turbulence could knock fighter planes out of the sky. The Nazis figured if they could create turbulent skies on demand, they could economize on the massive resources they spent building shells for antiaircraft artillery and start really getting serious about the giant sun laser. A Nazi scientist named Dr. Zimmermeyer developed the first version of the vortex cannon, which was astoundingly simple technology considering we’re talking about a tornado gun: A giant mortar barrel was sunk into the ground and loaded with shells containing coal dust, hydrogen, and oxygen. When the shells detonated, they would create a mini-vortex strong enough to bring down any planes within a hundred meters and cause everybody witnessing it to quit the war because “dark wizardry” isn’t covered under the Geneva Conventions.
Did it work?
Holy shit . . . yes?! At one point in history, the Nazi forces had a functioning tornado gun they used to whirl planes out of the sky? Presumably Indiana Jones got to them before it could be deployed, as that is the only conceivable reason why we won the war against the Axis of Ridiculous Superweapons.
Well, actually it was because the gun didn’t work nearly as reliably as conventional antiaircraft weaponry. Considering the whole appeal of the vortex cannon was that it was supposed to consume fewer resources than a normal gun to take down a plane, the Axis decided to stick with the stupid, boring old explosive shells.
So really, it all boils down to this: The only reason you’re not living in a fantastical comic book world of wacky doomsday devices is because the people in accounting ran the numbers, and supervillainy, while totally feasible, was just too damned expensive.
THE FOUR GREATEST THINGS EVER ACCOMPLISHED WHILE HIGH
REMEMBER DARE? Those brave police officers came into your school and told you nothing good ever came from drugs? They were lying too.
4. FRANCIS CRICK DISCOVERS DNA THANKS TO LSD
Francis Crick is the closest the field of genetics gets to a rock star, which it turns out is pretty damn close. In 1953, he burst through the front door of his Cambridge home and told his wife, Odile, to draw two spirals twisting in opposite directions from one another. She drew what he described, having no clue that her sketch would become the most reproduced drawing in the history of science: a first draft of the double helix structure of DNA that scientists today still describe as “balls on.”
The drug: LSD
When not discovering the key to life, and winning the Nobel Prize for it, Crick spent the 1950s and ’60s throwing all-night parties famous for featuring that era’s favorite party favors: LSD and bare-naked breasts. Crick never made it a secret that he experimented with the drug, and in 2006 the London Mail on Sunday reported that Crick had told many colleagues that he was experimenting with LSD when he figured out the double helix structure.
Why it makes sense
The double helix is essentially the Sgt. Pepper’s of scientific models, a ladder that’s been melted and twirled by a pasta fork, or the two snakes from the caduceus if one of them was boning the other with a hundred dicks (depending on whether the artist ate the good or bad acid). Now, obviously scientists don’t arrive at models by doodling on their Trapper Keepers and picking out the shape that looks the coolest. Crick was a fan of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a study of the human mind undertaken, like all good studies, while driving around LA on mescaline.
Huxley wrote that the sober