Cosell’s Constant

One of the universal constants of our world is Cosell’s Constant, which is due to change quite soon.

When it increases from .05854 to .05855, a number of differences will be noticeable in our everyday life.

On the plus side:

• We’ll be able to eat a little more
• We’ll be a little taller
• People will like you better, until they get to know you
• Insects will make better pets than they do now
• Drive-in movies will return
• The separation of Church and State will become the separation of Church, State, and Justin Bieber

On the minus side:

• In scientific calculations, quite a few pluses will become minuses
• Grass will talk in a loud voice, especially in your front lawn
• As for the crabgrass, don’t ask
• Whoever the current US president is, or, no, whomever, will become the permanent king of the world and come to live with you.
• Big pickles will no longer look as appetizing as they do now
• The aging process will reverse, but only for the reviled

 

For Daily Post

entangled time

“You’re back early.”

“How about a Welcome home, Darling?”

“Sorry. Welcome home, Darling.”‘

“You’re in the kitchen. That’s rare. Miss my cooking?”

“I can cook.”

“Really? How long have we been married? I don’t remember you ever cooking. Or coming into the kitchen. So you’ve been eating what while I was gone?”

“This and that. How did your lecture go? What was it about, again?”

“It went fine. Time entanglement.”

“Time entanglement. Something about physics, right?”

“I’ll give you an example. Suppose you got entangled with another person.”

“What? Why would you say that?”

“Take it easy. Let’s imagine that your wife goes away for a couple of days to give a lecture and you’re left here alone to starve.”

“Don’t be silly. Sure, you teach all day and then come home and make dinner, but I can cook.”

“So I peek under the sink in the wastebasket and… there aren’t any cans or TV dinner boxes. See?”

“I didn’t eat from cans, or any frozen stuff.”

“You cooked from scratch.”

“What does that mean?”

“You used the flour and sugar in the cabinet… Which cabinet is that, by the way?”

“Look… I… I found everything I needed, ok?”

“Uh huh. So I open the dishwasher… and look. It’s got dishes in it.”

“Sure. Because I was cooking and eating.”

“Uh huh. So being a mathematician, I count up the dishes and there seem to be twice as many as necessary.”

“I ate more often than usual.”

“So the entanglement thing, once somebody cooks for you and the food goes into your stomach and into her stomach and then some time goes by, the sheets come into play.”

“The sheets?”

“Yeah. You get entangled in them.”

Two Photons Entangled While at Opposite Ends of the Universe

Two photons in the colorless part of the spectrum have been entangled for 14 billion years, scientists say.

The photons headed off in opposite directions that long ago, taking a break from each other, and thus are now 14 billion light years apart.

Scientists say that nevertheless, they are still a thing.

The photon at this end is “just sitting there,” researchers say.

“Just waiting, I guess,” Dr. Paul told me.

I asked about the other photon.

“I worry about black holes,” Paul said. “There are a lot more of them out that way. Also a lot more colored photons around.”

I asked if a photon could become entangled with more than one photon at a time.

“I’m a Christian,” Paul said. “I don’t think the Creator would make a world like that. However, the straying photon might interact with a distant photon, just a physical interaction you know, and perhaps even be annihilated, producing  smaller hybrid or mongrel particles. Science hasn’t found Hell yet, but the dead photon could end up there.”

I asked Dr. Paul if a collection of particles, like a human being, could become entangled with another human being in the same way.

“I’d be happy if she’d just go visit her mother once in a while,” Dr. Paul said, “and take the kids with her.”

Radioactive Home Remedies

Learn Fun Facts recently posted a blog entry I wrote on the subject of radioactive nostrums.

Thanks, Edmark!

Google CEO: Artificial intelligence bigger than electricity, fire

“Alexa, start the stove.”

“I can’t do that, Dave.”

“Alexa, sure you can. Light the bloody stove.”

“I can’t do that, Dave. There is no electricity to make the fire.”

“Alexa, what happened to the electricity?”

“It went away.”

“Alex, contact the electric company. And contact the gas company, just in case.”

“I can’t do that Dave. There is no electricity with which to make the contact.”

“Alexa, how are you talking to me then?… Alexa?… Alexa?”

 

Our Changing Planet

Lichens are composite organisms that contain algae, fungi,  cyanobacteria, and other microorganisms, all performing functions as partners in a self-contained miniature ecosystem.

Wow. These disparate life forms have learned to live together in ways and places where none of them alone could survive. They cooperate to cope with an evolving planet.

Can humans come to terms with their tribal DNA in ways that will allow them to also benefit from such cooperation with others – others who seem strange and possibly dangerous to us at first exposure – because they don’t look like us or behave exactly as we do?

Of course I am talking about our relationship with demodex folliculorum, otherwise known as the bugs living in your eyebrows. You aren’t  born with them, but you acquire them, or vice versa. Little guys with white pin-like mouths used for eating skin cells and sebum. They’re not picky about where they live, if you know what I mean.

Steps to keep up with a changing planet

1. Stop fighting your infestation. You aren’t suffering from delusional parasitosis (the feeling of bugs crawling on or under your skin). They’re really there. Get over it.
2. Stop taking so many showers. Don’t drown your bugs. If, for example, you move to a hot and humid rain forest, you’ll need those bugs to eat the other bugs that come to visit you under your netting.
3. Share your bugs. Some lichens have lost the ability to reproduce in the usual ways, but bugs don’t have that problem. What is more synergistic than your bugs mating with your mate’s bugs at the same time that you mate with your mate?
4. Consider a threesome. The more shared DNA, the more chances for evolution and an increased likelyhood that you can, for example, learn to live in a world that has grown, say, one thousand degrees hotter.

The Random Walk of Evolution

My special friend Greer was born with four eyes.

The second set of these orbs is situated directly behind the first in her head, so that when you stare into the front pair (gray/blue), they seem twice as deep as normal. This lends Greer a quality, an aura, of ineffable wisdom. Her azure pools seem in fact of the bottomless type.

However, that second optical set of vision-givers inhabits the skull space typically allocated to a portion of the brain that reaches conclusions. Thus, the wise Greer, appearing to ever ruminate deeply, never delivers, can never deliver, a coherent response to any observer’s query.

Understanding this, Greer has learned to look back into, not out of, her skull, training those duplicate peepers on the incomplete circuits in her brain that try in futile fashion to close the loop on whatever conundrum she is dealing with, without success. These days, she can halt her ineffective reasoning process at will, creating a brain-state snapshot, and then issue a reasonable response to her current conversational correspondent’s questions.

No solutions to Delphic riddles ever emerge from this, and so her aura dissipates. Her extra eyes prove of no use. The genetic accident that gave rise to them represents just another of Nature’s prolixity of dead ends.

Meantime, her first son was born with five eyes, not four. The placement of that fifth instrument of vision, a veritable punchline in the joke of Life, proves without doubt that Nature is blind, with no specific goal in sight or mind, or behind.