Originally posted August 30, 2011.
Tag: ek Humor
Dec 04 2012
Cartnoon
Dec 02 2012
Holiday Books NOT To Give
The Onion Book of Known Knowledge
Starting at $15.97 (used) The Onion Book of Known Knowledge is useless even for emergency toilet paper or starting fires.
Sample entry-
Arson, term used when the purity of setting something aflame gets all tainted by meddling police and lawyers.
Do not be misled by that atypically admirable example, the bulk of the book is consumed by outrageous lies and falsehoods illustrated by this more repesentative excerpt-
Appalachian Trail, 2,180-mile-long path along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States that is the worst, least efficient way to travel from Georgia to Maine. Traversed each year by those who willingly deny the existence of America’s vast transportation system for some inexplicable reason, the Appalachian Trail takes roughly four months to hike but can be covered in two days by car, 26 hours by rail, or five hours by plane-three fully air-conditioned means of conveyance that offer zero chance of getting bitten by mosquitoes, spraining an ankle, or going weeks without bathing. If one absolutely must walk from Springer Mountain to Mount Katahdin, a far more sensible choice would be to use Interstate 95: It’s a straight shot, and there are plenty of stores and hotels along the way so that one doesn’t have to travel across 14 states while carrying 50 pounds of gear. Overall, hiking the Appalachian Trail offers nothing but the chance to grow a mangy beard and waste time. It literally defies logic.
Everyone knows that the Appalachian Trail is an entirely fictional destination used to deceive your spouse while doing the horizontal mambo with your Argentine paramour.
Product Details
- ISBN-13: 9780316133265
- Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
- Publication date: 10/23/2012
- Pages: 256
- Product dimensions: 8.74 (w) x 10.92 (h) x 0.84 (d)
(for a more extensive preview visit truthout.org)
Nov 30 2012
Life Models
You know, I do have other interests.
My comment at the moment was-
Fields have different expressions depending on how you interact with them.
Nothing so hard about that.
But the Standard Model is only as useful as Newtonian Mechanics. Good for some things, not so much for others.
This is the kind of pithy insight that has some of my acquaintance begging me to get a crack habit twitter account.
Well, I have one and a few blogs that I frequent which leads me to gratefully accept affirmations of sanity.
Supersymmetry Fails Test, Forcing Physics to Seek New Ideas
By Natalie Wolchover, Scientific American
November 29, 2012
As a young theorist in Moscow in 1982, Mikhail Shifman became enthralled with an elegant new theory called supersymmetry that attempted to incorporate the known elementary particles into a more complete inventory of the universe.
“My papers from that time really radiate enthusiasm,” said Shifman, now a 63-year-old professor at the University of Minnesota. Over the decades, he and thousands of other physicists developed the supersymmetry hypothesis, confident that experiments would confirm it. “But nature apparently doesn’t want it,” he said. “At least not in its original simple form.”
…
“Supersymmetry is such a beautiful structure, and in physics, we allow that kind of beauty and aesthetic quality to guide where we think the truth may be,” said Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University.
…
“I think it is a mistake to focus on popular versions of supersymmetry,” said Matt Strassler, a particle physicist at Rutgers University. “Popularity contests are not reliable measures of truth.”