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Issue 01
January 2003

Helping America procrastinate since 1636

March 28, 2024
 
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This Famous Scientific Concept Now Brought to You By...

By Nick Physics
CAMBRIDGE, MA - In the humanitarian spirit of corporate sponsorship that has swept the globe in realms as disparate as American sporting events to entire third world economies, Kodak announced this week that Einstein's photo-electric effect is now formally known as the Kodak photo-electric effect. As expected, reactions were mixed.

Fuji CEO Kenji Takamoto applauded the move, while hinting at Fuji's burgeoning efforts to sponsor several other well known physical affects ranging from the Mossbauer Effect to the Shapiro Effect, which although not directly thought up by Einstein, are both major effects resulting from Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Takamoto expressed displeasure at not having been first to consider what could have been the Fuji photo-electric effect.

"Einstein is a sure winner and we missed the boat. I just have to tip my hat to Kodak and ask my staff to find more peripheral ways to associate our company with Einstein's ideas. It sucks to be second best, but it sure as hell beats being third," said Takamoto as he chuckled from his 279th floor corner office overlooking downtown Tokyo.

On the other side of the coin, San Diego Chargers sports fan Kent Winters seemed rather incensed. "It's the same old shit! Qualcomm shells out 18 million clams to help us add some drink holders to the seats, and now they want us to call San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium "The Q". It's "The Murph", you bastards and it will always be!" When asked what he thought Einstein's particular position would be on the Kodak move, Winters replied, "Big Al is probably going apeshit in his grave. And I don't blame him. I mean, Einie won the fucking Nobel Prize for the photo-electric effect and now the world's largest film and camera company wants to own it because it has the word "photo" in it. Isn't that so goddamned cute?"

"Mind you, this is not actually a patent." claims Kodak spokesman Lanny Saperstein. "Its just Kodak's way of honoring arguably the greatest scientist on earth in the past millennium, surpassed maybe, just maybe, by Ike Newton." With the new sponsorship agreement, Kodak agreed to pay a lump sum of 23 million U.S. to the Einstein Estate managed by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. However, as stressed again by Saperstein, this in no way grants them any special patent rights on products that use the photo-electric effect. "We don't exactly own the effect, so although our legal staff would love to swing at it, we can't exactly sue the pants off other companies making digital cameras, or any other of the myriad of technological products that employs the Kodak photo-electric effect. But every time they sell one, deep down, they'll know, it was brought to you by Kodak."

When asked if the connotations of the word "photo" in Einstein's Nobel prize winning effect was really a major factor in convincing a company such as Kodak to sponsor the effect, Kodak CEO Ken Oilburton remarked "Hell yes!" and then laughed uncontrollably for several minutes, making everyone around feel extremely uncomfortable. After he stopped laughing, Oilburton made an abrupt turn to waxing philosophical. "Whenever a photon of the right frequency hits a metallic surface and knocks off one of its free electrons, night or day, in any nation on this earth, people will know that its not just one of the moments where we witness one of the miraculous laws of quantum mechanics, its more than that...its a Kodak Moment."

On a related note, McDonald's announced its plans to bring to you such well known astronomical concepts as "The Spherical Earth", and "The Dark Side of the Moon". When questioned about the fact that these concepts are in no way related to some pun on McDonald's menu items, shirking the Kodak paradigm, McDonald's spokeswoman Donna Carson remarked, "As the most ubiquitous dining establishment on the planet, McDonalds clearly transcends any need for some silly play on words as a ploy to associate ourselves with planet earth. And as you know, our founder Ray Krok was quite keen on getting one of our franchises to the Moon, so we have plans in the works for that. As you can see, the relevance of McDonald's as the natural sponsor for these astronomical ideas is manifest."

When asked to provide a counter point to Ms. Carson, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Director Irwin Shapiro, proud discoverer of the Shapiro effect, made his stance abundantly clear. "Any corporation who tries to put their name on my effect is going to have a tough time making ends meet when we divert several 2 kilometer asteroids on paths to their various continental corporate headquarters." When asked what he would do if he really really really had to choose one company to sponsor his affect, Shapiro softened up a bit. "Although there's absolutely no relation to the general relativistic time delay of radar signals between planets that I predicted, I do kind of like Adidas. Their sneakers are really cool." Shapiro added, "But if those Golden Arch fascists get even an angstrom (0.0000000001 meters) nearer to touching my effect, they'll have to McFucking answer to me and the Universe."

In a related story, the Universe announced today that it was now proud to be brought to you by Microsoft, who claims to have been simulating the whole thing all along from a massive network of supercomputers strung together in Bill Gate's subterranean hideout at the center of the earth. When questioned on the fact that the supercomputer network consisted of a Beowulf cluster of 144,000 Unix machines, Gates declined to comment.

This work was sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation, The Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics, Ray-Ban, and Adidas.  HSP 




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