Category: Fragment

From a “woman seeking man” ad:

OBSESSIVE COLLECTOR OF ANTIQUE MATH-TEXTBOOKS Pure math is a lot like art. Relatively soon I will be leaving Seattle to travel around the world. Make my aquaintance now, before I die of dysentary or malaria in the dark jungles of Swaziland. minitrue, 22 #115063

And no, I didn’t find this ad myself but was led to it by a friend who was using the personals as part of an art project.

Yesterday, while waiting for the bus, I was acosted by a homeless man who was missing his front teeth. I asked him how he was doing and he said he was high. I told him I was a theoretical physicist and he said “Amazing! Because I don’t live in reality, so it’s strange that we should meet.” (Indeed!) Then he asked me if the manhole cover in front of us turned into a portal which would take me to an alternate reality whether I would jump into the hole. Of course I said I would. Then somehow our conversation turned to time travel (doesn’t it always) and he said he thought that he was in a situation where things kept repeating themselves. I told him that physicists call this a “closed timelike curve.” He asked me how he could get off the closed timelike curve. Which made me sad.

Life feels strange when it begins to feel like an episode of the Simpsons. Today I actually payed a “Monorail tax” of two hundred plus bucks to register my card.

Marge: According to this book, the monorail goes over 150 miles an hour! What if something goes wrong?
Homer: “What if.” What if I stepped in the shower and slipped on a bar of soap? … Oh, my God! I’d get killed!

Some days, it just seems that anything I search for gives me interesting results. The previous search was for information on some properties of the golden ratio. Now I just did a searching for “harmonic series fractal” which remarkably sent me to the same site and this fun page which opens with

An open letter to significant scientists begging them to embrace and embed the arrival of self-aware consciousness in the Earth’s magnetic body, by redesigning power systems which now bleed our collective coherence bubble.

Wave Mechanics Allow Embedding to Draw You into Gravity Centers: HOW TO INHABIT ANYTHING

This may indeed me the most nerdfully painful thing I have ever seen. Warning: people singing about math.

Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia is a resource I really love. Mostly it’s just hard to avoid letting it take you to a random page and reading. Actually I think encyclopedias are one of the great self-teaching tools for young kids. I recall stories from both Borges and Feynman about devouring encyclopedias as small children.
Now, via Michael Nielsen’s blog, I learn that in addition to all the other wiki(insert word here) there is Wikibooks a collection of free open-content textbooks. So far some of the textbooks are pretty incomplete, but definitely a cool site to watch grow.

If you survive ’til two thousand and five,
I hope you’re incredibly thin.
For if you are stout,
you will have to breathe out,
so the man next to you can breathe in. – Pink Floyd

In some bizarre twist straight from the pages of a Pynchon novel, the Air Force in 1994 became interested in chemicals that might annoy the bad guy and in particular (thanks to a memo made available at the memory hole):

Chemicals that effect [sic] human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected [sic]. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.

As a weak minded liberal I guess I should be happy that the military was finally heeding the hippy mantra “make love not war,” but still..

An amusing little article about beer and geology. Speaking of mountains and beer, anyone remember the Rainier Beer ads with the motorcycle whose engine noise sounded out the words “RRRRaiaiaiaiaiaineeeeeeeeeer Beeeeeeeeeer”?