You Go For It

In the spirit of Eurovision I post this for my little cousin Yuko.

They are called "Hinoi Team" and Yuko can dance this one.

Keika is the leader and what is astonishing is that the girls were aged twelve and thirteen (two of each) at the time (2005)

Yuko can do this and I have no dance in me.

I am too old for this Sh*t, as Murtaugh would say.

The title is "Ike Ike", which means "Go, Go", or, in Western terms, "Go for it!"

Fifty Bonus points only for sussing the pun in the post title.

Don't get me wrong - I am not going soft - watch this space for a deep physics post.

A Circular Argument

This is a question oft asked by non-physicists:

"If a hole was drilled right through the Earth from one side to the other what would happen if a man jumped into it?"

Ok, we know that the Earth had a liquid core, but let's assume for the sake of argument, that it is solid all the way through, and there is hole right through it.

Incredibly, the answer lies in something I covered very recently, Simple Harmonic Motion.

Ignoring air resistance for now, the guy jumps in *(let's make the hole about 2.5 meters in diameter - the reason will become clear later on) and gravity accelerates him towards the centre, at the rate of "g", the acceleration due to gravity at the surface. The key to understanding this is to realise that the guy's acceleration depends on how much of the Earth is beneath him.

So as he falls, his acceleration gets less, until he reaches the centre. He overshoots the centre, and now starts to slow down, as gravity now acts against him.

Now what? Well, he keeps getting slower and slower, and because of the symmetry, emerges at the other end at exactly the same height at which he jumped in.

He stops for a microsecond, then falls back again, and the same thing happens, but in the other direction. presently, he emerges where he first jumped in. He falls back again, and it starts once more (remember we are ignoring air resistance).

he keeps going back and forth forever.

I guess you can figure out what happens if we include air resistance. he does the same, but each time he changes direction, he will do that at successively lower points inside the hole.

He goes back and forth, each time being shorter than the last, until finally air resistance stops him at the centre of the Earth.

He is suspended at the centre of the Earth, because all parts of the Earth attract him equally. Furthermore, he cannot get out by himself, as he he is too short to grasp both sides of the tunnel to give him traction! A ladder has to be lowered from either end of the hole for him to climb up (a long climb!)

Anyway, in the original scenario, the guy oscillates across the Earth's centre with SHM.

What is even more interesting is this - if you could sit in a stationary orbit (where you are above the same point on the Earth's surface all the time) and watch what happens, of course, with a telescope, you would see the guy disappear, then after some time he would emerge from the other end. NOW, if you hurled an object (again ignoring air resistance) perpendicularly directly away from you so that it entered into orbit, say , one meter above the ground, it would travel around the Earth in such a way (at constant speed, no acceleration) that when the guy emerged at the other end, it would hit him!

The travel time for the guy to travel through the earth at an acceleration, and then a deceleration, is exactly the same as an object (of the same mass) going around the Earth at constant speed.

How do we know all this? The simple equations of SHM tell us. The simplest way of describing it is to say the SHM exhibited by the guy inside the Earth is the "projection" (shadow) of the circular motion of the object in orbit outside the Earth.

Simple Harmonic Motion is the projection onto a plane of circular motion.

Evolution as We Don't Know it

This is a memorised paraphrase from the "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy":

I quote:

Human evolution has often been categorised into three distinct and increasingly sophisticated phases, known as the "How, Why, and Where" phases.

For example:

Survival:

1. "How do we eat?"

2. "Why do we eat?"

3. "Where shall we have lunch?"

Warfare is similar only in the fact that there still three phases:

Warfare:

1. "I am going to kill you because you killed my brother."

2. "I am am going to kill you because I killed YOUR brother."

3. "I am going to kill MY brother and then kill YOU on the pretext that YOUR brother did it."

Unquote

Aki's Take on this:

Science:

1. "I am going to invent something which will revolutionise the World."

2. "I am going to invent something else I should have thought of before that."

3. "I am now going to invent something so complicated that it will take a fourth invention just to understand it."

Alexander the Great did not Exist AND he had an Infinite Number of Limbs.

NOTE TO READERS - I bet 0.5 KRW that this gets at least one serious comment.

NOTE TO THE INSANE - this article was actually published in a book.

NOTE TO THE INTERESTED - this is what we get up to when the beer runs out.


I Quote:

"Bertrand Russell has defined mathematics as the science in which we never know what we are talking about or whether what we are saying is true. Mathematics has been shown to apply widely in many other scientific fields. Hence, most other scientists do not know what they are talking about or whether what they are saying is true. Thus, providing a rigorous basis for philosophical insights is one of the main functions of mathematical proofs.

To illustrate the various methods of proof we give an example of a logical system.

The perjorative calculus

Lemma 1: All horses are the same colour.

Proof by induction:

It is obvious that one horse is the same colour. Let us assume the proposition P(k) that k horses are the same colour and use this to imply that k+1 horses are the same colour. Given the set of k+1 horses, we remove one horse; then the remaining k horses are the same colour, by hypothesis. We remove another horse and replace the first; the k horses, by hypothesis, are again the same colour. We repeat this until by exhaustion the k+1 sets of k horses have been shown to be the same colour. It follows that since every horse is the same colour as every other horse, P(k) entails P(k+1). But since we have shown P(1) to be true, P is true for all succeeding values of k, that is, all horses are the same colour. Q.E.D.

Theorem 1: Every horse has an infinite number of legs.

Proof by intimidation:

Horses have an even number of legs. Behind they have two legs and in front they have fore legs. This makes six legs, which is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse. But the only number that is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore horses have an infinite number of legs. Now to show that this is general, suppose that somewhere there is a horse with a finite number of legs. But that is a horse of another colour, and by the lemma that does not exist. Q.E.D.

Corollary 1: Everything is the same colour.

Proof:

The proof of Lemma 1 does not depend at all on the nature of the object under consideration. The predicate of the antecedent of the universally-quantified conditional "For all x, if x is a horse, then x is the same colour," namely "is a horse" may be generalized to "is anything" without affecting the validity of the proof; hence, "for all x, if x is anything, x is the same colour." Q.E.D.

Corollary 2: Everything is white.

Proof:

If a sentential formula in x is logically true, then any particular substitution instance of it is a true sentence. In particular then: "for all x, if x is an elephant, then x is the same colour" is true. Now it is manifestly axiomatic that white elephants exist (for proof by blatant assertion consult Mark Twain's The Stolen White Elephant). Therefore all elephants are white. By corollary 1 everything is white. Q.E.D.

Theorem 2: Alexander the Great did not exist and he had an infinite number of limbs.

Proof:

We prove this theorem in two parts. First we note the obvious fact that historians always tell the truth (for historians always take a stand, and therefore they cannot lie). Hence we have the historically true sentence, "If Alexander the Great existed, then he rode a black horse Bucephalus." But we know by corollary 2 everything is white; hence Alexander could not have ridden a black horse. Since the consequent of the conditional is false, in order for the whole statement to be true the antecedent must be false. Hence Alexander the Great did not exist.

We have also the historically true statement that Alexander was warned by an oracle that he would meet death if he crossed a certain river. He had two legs; and "forewarned is four-armed." This gives him six limbs, an even number, which is certainly an odd number of limbs for a man. Now the only number which is even and odd is infinity; hence Alexander had an infinite number of limbs. We have thus proved that Alexander the Great did not exist and that he had an infinite number of limbs. Q.E.D.

It is not to be thought that there are not other types of proofs, which in print shops are recorded on the proof sheets. There is the bullet proof and the proof of the pudding. Finally, there is 200 proof, a most potent spirit among mathematicians and people alike."

Unquote.


Aki's Choralarry:

"All infinitely white horses of the same color belong to either an indefinite number of horses' legs or Alexander the Great."

More Buzzword Bingo

These phrases on the left are apparently serious efforts of office people trying to communicate something meaningful, plus their actual meanings. A recent Local Government initiative in the UK banned these words. Sense at last has prevailed!


Across-the-piece - everyone working together

Actioned - do

Advocate - support

Area based - in an area

Area focused - concentrating on the area

Autonomous - independent

Baseline - starting point

Benchmarking - measuring

Best Practice - best way

Blue sky thinking - thinking up ideas

Bottom-Up - listening to people

Can do culture - get the job done

Capacity - ability

Capacity building - enough room in the system

Cascading - why use at all?

Cautiously welcome - devil in the detail

Challenge - problem

Citizen empowerment - people power

Client - person

Cohesiveness - together

Collaboration - working together

Commissioning - buy

Community engagement - getting people involved

Consensual - everyone agree

Contextual - background

Core developments - main things that are happening

Core Message - main point

Core principles - beliefs

Coterminosity - all singing from the same hymn sheet

Cross-cutting - everyone working together

Cross-fertilisation - spreading idea

Democratic legitimacy - voted in

Democratic mandate - elected to put people first

Dialogue - talk/discuss

Direction of travel - way forward

Distorts spending priorities - ignores people's needs

Early Win - success

Embedded - set in

Empowerment - people power

Enabler - helps

Engagement - working with people

Engaging users -- getting people involved

Enhance - improve

Evidence Base - research shows

Exemplar - example

External challenge - outside pressures

Facilitate - help

Fast-Track - speed up

Flexibilities and Freedoms - more power to do the right thing

Framework - guide

Fulcrum - pivot

Functionality - use

Funding Streams - money

Going forward - in the future

Good Practice - best way

Governance - Why use at all?

Guidelines - guide

Holistic - taken in the round

Improvement levers - using the tools to get the job done

Incentivising - incentive

Income Streams - money/cash

Indicators - measurements

Initiative - idea

Inspectorates - monitoring bodies

Interdepartmental - working together

Interface - talking to each other

Joined up - working together

Joint working - working together

Level playing field - everyone equal

Leverage - influence

Localities - places/town/city/village

Lowlights - worst bits

Meaningful consultation- talking to people

Meaningful dialogue - talking to people

Mechanisms - methods

Menu of Options - choices

Multi-agency -- many groups

Multidisciplinary - many

Municipalities - towns/cities/areas

Normalising - make normal

Outcomes - results

Outcomes - focused

Output - results

Outsourced - privatised

Parameter - limits

Participatory - joining in

Partnership working - working together

Partnerships - working together

Place shaping - creating places where people can thrive

Pooled budgets - money

Pooled resources - time and money

Populace - people

Potentialities - chances

Practitioners - experts

Preventative services - protecting the most vulnerable

Prioritization - most important

Priority - most important

Process driven - shouldn't everything be people driven?

Procure - buy

Procurement - buying

Promulgate - spread

Proportionality - in proportion

Protocol - guidance

Quick Hit - success

Quick Win - success

Rationalisation - cut

Reconfigured - reform

Resource allocation - money going to the right place

Revenue Streams - money

Risk based - safest way

Robust - tough

Scaled-back - cut/reduce

Scoping - work out

Seedbed - idea

Service users - people

Shared priority -- all working together

Signpost - point in the direction of

Single conversations - talking to

Single Point of Contact - everything under one roof

Situational - situation

Slippage - delay

Social contracts - deal

Social exclusion - poverty

Stakeholder - other organisations

Step Change - improve

Strategic - planned

Strategic priorities - planned

Streamlined - efficient

Sub-regional - work between councils

Sustainable - long term

Sustainable communities - environmentally friendly

Symposium - meeting

Tested for Soundness -- what works

Thematic - theme

Third sector - charities and voluntary organisations

Toolkit - guidance

Top-Down - ignores people

Trajectory - route

Tranche - slice

Transformational - change

Transparency - clear

Upward trend - getting better

Utilise - use

Value-added - extra

Vision -- ideal/dream/belief

Visionary - ideal/dream/belief

Welcome - necessary and needed/step in the right direction

Wellbeing - healthy

Worklessness - unemployed

Loopy

This is called a Klein bottle. It has no inside or outside. I use the concept to insult certain dumb individuals that infest the internet chat rooms with their smug arrogance.

Here's the party game you can play.

Announce a race - a cutting race. The participants have to cut a long loop of newspaper into two separate long loops of newspaper.

You need three people...

....and three long loops of newspaper.

Hana! Dul! Se! Go!

And the victims frantically start cutting, trying to be the first to produce two separate loops of newspaper.

We have a winner!

You raise his arm as the victor, then inspect his loops. Oh dear, there must be some mistake - you only have ONE giant loop! Where is the other one? Disqualified!

The second to finish is proclaimed the winner and her hand is held aloft.

We have a winner!

Let's just check your handiwork....hang on, you are supposed to get two SEPARATE loops - yours are linked like a chain! Disqualified!

The last to finish is now approached, and the disgruntled announcer inspects his work, and YES! he has two separate loops.

A WINNER!

Of course, the real winner is the math. Ten bonus points if you figure out how it's done.

137 million if you can construct a Klein bottle

Just For Laughs Part 2

Robin Williams is never better than here as the Genie in Disney's "Aladdin". The Genie even looks like him.

NB This cartoon was the first animated feature where each character had it's own team of animators, characterisations, voices, producers and directors.

Buzzword Bingo

Office-Speak: The Art of saying something Very Ordinary using Flowery Speech. These are only a few of many examples of serious people trying to commmunicate something to others. Has English really been reduced to this? (From an article on the BBC website)

BEWARE! EXTREMELY FUNNY

1. "When I worked for Verizon, I found the phrase going forward to be more sinister than annoying. When used by my boss - sorry, "team leader" - it was understood to mean that the topic of conversation was at an end and not be discussed again."
Nima Nassefat, Vancouver, Canada

2. "My employers (top half of FTSE 100) recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brain storm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers. I think that says it all really."
Anonymous, England

3. At my old company (a US multinational), anyone involved with a particular product was encouraged to be a product evangelist. And software users these days, so we hear, want to be platform atheists so that their computers will run programs from any manufacturer."
Philip Lattimore, Thailand

4. "Incentivise is the one that does it for me."
Karl Thomas, Perth, Scotland

5. "My favourite which I hear from the managers at the bank I work for is let's touch base about that offline. I think it means have a private chat but I am still not sure."
Gemma, Wolverhampton, England

6. "Have you ever heard the term loop back which means go back to an associate and deal with them?"
Scott Reed, Lakeland, Florida, US

7-8. "We used to collect the jargon used in a list and award the person with the most at the end of the year. The winner was a client manager with the classic you can't turn a tanker around with a speed boat change. What? Second was we need a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach, whatever that is."
Turner, Manchester

9. "Until recently I had to suffer working for a manager who used phrases such as the idiotic I've got you in my radar in her speech, letters and e-mails. Once, when I mentioned problems with the phone system, she screamed 'NO! You don't have problems, you have challenges'. At which point I almost lost the will to live."
Stephen Gradwick, Liverpool

10. "You can add challenge to the list. Problems are no longer considered problems, they have morphed into challenges."
Irene MacIntyre, Courtenay, B

11. "Business speak even supersedes itself and does so with silliness, the shorthand for quick win is now low hanging fruit."
Paul, Formby, UK

12. "And looking under the bonnet."
Eve Russell, Edinburgh

13-14. "The business-speak that I abhor is pre-prepare and forward planning. Is there any other kind of preparedness or planning?"
Edward Creswick, Exeter

15-16. "The one that really gets me is pre-plan - there is no such thing. Either you plan or you don't. The new one which has got my goat is conversate, widely used to describe a conversation. I just wish people could learn to 'think outside the box' although when they put us in cubes what do they expect?"
Malcolm, Houston

17. "I work in one of those humble call centres for a bank. Apparently, what we're doing at the moment is sprinkling our magic along the way. It's a call centre, not Hogwarts."
Caroline Garlick, Ayrshire

18. "A pet hate is the utterly pointless expression in this space. So instead of the perfectly adequate 'how can I help?' it's 'how can I help in this space?' Or the classic I heard on Friday, 'How can we help our customers in this space going forward?' I think I may have caught this expression at source, as I've yet to hear it said outside my own working environment. So I'm on a personal crusade to stamp it out before it starts infecting other City institutions. Wish me luck in this space."
Colin, London

19. "The one phrase that inspires a rage in me is from the get-go."
Andy, Herts

20. "'Going forward' is only half the phrase that gets up my nose - all politicians seem to use the phrase go forward together. 'We must... we shall... let us now... go forward together'. It gives me a terrible mental image of the whole country linking arms and goose-stepping in unison, with the politicians out in front doing a straight-armed salute. Is it just me?"
Frances Smith, Toronto, Canada

21. "I am a financial journalist and am on a mission to remove words and phrases such as 360-degree thinking from existence."
Richard, London

22. "The latest that's stuck in my head is we are still optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline (ie: we actually haven't sold anything to anyone yet but maybe we will one day)."
Alexander, Southampton

23. "I worked in PR for many years and often heard the most ludicrous phrases uttered by CEOs and marketing managers. One of the best was, we'd better not let the grass grow too long on this one. To this day it still echoes in my ears and I giggle to myself whenever I think about it. I can't help but think insecure business people use such phrases to cover up their inability for proper articulation."
Leon Reilly, Ealing, London

24. "Need to get all my ducks in a row now - before the five-year-olds wake up."
Mark Dixon, Bridgend

25. "Australians have started to use auspice as a verb. Instead of saying, 'under the auspices of...', some people now say things like, it was auspiced by..."
Martin Pooley, Marrickville, Australia

26. "My favourite: we've got our fingers down the throat of the organisation of that nodule. Translation = Er, no, WE sorted out the problems to cover your backside."
Theo de Bray, Kettering, UK

27. "The health service in Wales is filled with managers who use this type of language as a substitute for original thought. At meetings we play health-speak bingo; counting the key words lightens the tedium of meetings - including, most recently, my door is open on this issue. What does that mean?"
Edwin Pottle, Llandudno

28-29. "The business phrase I find most irritating is close of play, which is only slightly worse than actioning something."
Ellie, London

30. "Here in the US we have the cringe-worthy and also in addition. Then there's the ever-eloquent 'where are we at?' So far, I haven't noticed the UK's at the end of the day prefacing much over here; thank heavens for small mercies."
Eithne B, Chicago, US

31. "The expression that drives me nuts is 110%, usually said to express passion/commitment/support by people who are not very good at maths. This has created something of a cliche-inflation, where people are now saying 120%, 200%, or if you are really REALLY committed, 500%. I remember once the then-chancellor Gordon Brown saying he was 101% behind Tony Blair, to which people reacted 'What? Only 101?'"
Ricardo Molina, London, UK

32. "My least favourite business-speak term is not enough bandwidth. When an employee used this term to refuse an additional assignment, I realised I was completely 'out of the loop'."
April, Berkeley, US

33. "I once had a boss who said, 'You can't have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.' It was in that moment I knew I had to resign before somebody got badly hurt by a pencil."
Tim, Durban

34. "Capture your colleagues - make sure everyone attends that risk management workshop (compulsory common sense training for idiots)."
Anglowelsh, UK

35-37. "We too used to have daily paradigm shifts, now we have stakeholders who must come to the party or be left out, or whatever."
Barry Hicks, Cape Town, RSA

38. "I have taken to playing buzzword bingo when in meetings. It certainly makes it more entertaining when I am feeding it back (or should that be cascading) at work."
Ian Everett, Bolton

39. "In my work environment it's all cascading at the moment. What they really mean is to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards. What they don't seem to appreciate is that it sounds like we're being wee'd on. Which we usually are."
LMD, London

40. "At a large media company where I once worked, the head of human resources - itself a weaselly neologism for personnel - told us that she would be cascading down new information to staff. What she meant was she was going to send them a memo. It was one of the reasons I resigned - that, and the fact that the chief exec persisted on referring to the company as a really cool train set."
Andrew, London

41. "Working for an American corporation, this year's favourite word seems to be granularity, meaning detail. As in 'down to that level of granularity'."
Chris Daniel, Anaco, Venezuela

42. "On the wall of our office we have a large signed certificate, signed by all the senior management team, in which they solemnly promise to leverage their talents, display and inspire 'unyielding integrity', and lots of other pretentious buzz-phrases like that. Clueless, the lot of them."
Chris K, Cheltenham UK

43. "After a reduction in workforce, my university department sent this notice out to confused campus customers: 'Thank you for your note. We are assessing and mitigating immediate impacts, and developing a high-level overview to help frame the conversation with our customers and key stakeholders. We intend to start that process within the week. In the meantime, please continue to raise specific concerns or questions about projects with my office via the Transition Support Center..."
Charles R, Seattle, Washington, US

44. "I was told I'd be living the values from now on by my employers at a conference the other week. Here's some modern language for them - meh. A shame as I strongly believe in much of what my employers aim to do. I refuse to adopt the voluntary sectors' client title of 'service user'. How is someone who won't so much as open the door to me using my service? Another case of using four syllables where one would do."
Upscaled Blue-Sky thinker, Cardiff

45. "Business talk 2.0 is maddening, meaningless, patronising and I despise it."
Doug, London

46. "Lately I've come across the strategic staircase. What on earth is this? I'll tell you; it's office speak for a bit of a plan for the future. It's not moving on but moving up. How strategic can a staircase really be? A lot I suppose, if you want to get to the top without climbing over all your colleagues."
Peter Walters, Cheadle Hulme, UK

47. "When a stock market is down why must we be told it is in negative territory?"
Phil Linehan, Mexico City, Mexico

48. "The particular phrase I love to hate is drill down, which handily can be used either as an adverb/verb combo or as a compound noun, ie: 'the next level drill-down', sometimes even in the same sentence - a nice bit of multi-tasking."
B, London

49. "Thanks for the impactful article; I especially appreciated the level of granularity. A high altitude view often misses the siloed thinking typical of most businesses. Absent any scheme for incentivitising clear speech, however, I'm afraid we're stuck with biz-speak."
Timothy Denton, New York

50. "It wouldn't do the pinstripers any harm to crack a smile and say what they really felt once in a while instead of trotting out such clinical platitudes. Of course a group of them may need to workshop it first: Wouldn't want to wrongside the demographic."
Trick Cyclist, Tripoli, Libya

How Old Are You? "I'm Twenteen"

Part of my repertoire is teaching English to Korean kids. I get the odd "How old are you?" - "I am fine" responses, but this clip is far funnier.

It is part of a TV show broadcast from Manila at 1300 daily called "Wowowee". It is very popular because it gives the poorer people a chance to earn some hard cash by "performing" on camera. Last time I was in Manila there was a stampede to get onto the show in the queue outside the TV station, several people being hurt.

Although English is widely understood in the Philippines, and is the official business language, the poorer people do not know the language as well as they should because education is expensive there. In this section, a young girl has to hold a conversation in English in order to earn her prize money.

It is very funny. Please note that ther presenter and the audience are not laughing AT her, but WITH her. Another presenter of nickname RR (the one in pink below), gives the line above, and is even less knowledgeable than the contestant! She also says " I have been there once. But not twice"

Whenever I am in Manila, this is the show I like to see, along with Who Wants to be a Millionaire (in Taglish).

Enjoy!




My thanks to Raquel for providing this feature. Coincidentally, the girl has the same birthday as Yuko, my cousin!

And the Winner is.....

Having recently taken another trip to Europe to personally oversee how my SSA project is continuing to grow in popularity, it prompts me to list some other inventions, that maybe didn't quite make it thus far.

1. The polystyrene anchor

2. The inflatable dartboard

3. Battery powered battery charger

4. Helicopter ejector seat

5. Re-usuable bathroom tissue

6. Black Highlighter

7. Fire-proof matches

8. Waterproof sponges

9. Solar-powered torch

10. Glow in the dark combat uniform

Permission to laugh is granted.


One of these ten is a viable invention that actually has a use (and has been made).

Can you guess which one?

Just For Laughs Part One

This is the sort of thing that makes me laugh.......

A Sequence of Events

A sequence is a succession of numbers that follow on from one another.

The simplest is

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.....

Where all you do to get the next is add 1 to the last.

2, 4, 6, 8, 10....

is similar, in that you add 2 to the last one.

1, 3, 5, 7, 9....

is also similar, adding 2, but starting at a different number.

So much for addition.

How about 1, 2, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32....

This one is where you multiply the previous two to get the next.

Or even,

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ......

where you add the previous 2 to get the next.

And so it goes on.

So, a common puzzle is to guess what the next one is....

Try this..

1, 4, 9, 16, 25....?

The answer is of course 36, each being the square of the integers.

This one..

1, 8, 27, 64....

The answer is 125, since they are the cubes of integers.

What about this one?

3, 3, 5, 4, 4, 3, 5, ?

That's harder - the answer is 5, the numbers being the "number of letters" in the integers. ONE = 3, TWO = 3, THREE = 5 etc

NOW, try THIS one...

1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 8, 8, 8, 10, 9, 10, 11, ?

What is next? First prize is a can of worms

Loose Elastic

One of the funniest events ever to happen to me occurred in one of my Korean classrooms. My job was to teach these kids (aged 8-15) English in English.

The problem with Korea is that almost the entire population wants to speak English but can't. But they are getting there (gradually). They employ native speakers of English to be present in their English Language, er "Schools", and although technically my mother tongue is NOT English, INHA University managed to get me clearance to teach as a special case.

It's very easy. However, because of the way the system works, I never knew what classes I was to teach next, nor the age range.

So I got into the habit of asking each student what their names were before I started to teach, writing them down in my notebook, along with their position in the classroom (with 300 students, it was sometimes very difficult to recall names. These Koreans ALL look alike!)

In one of the classes, I had a new student. A little girl, aged maybe eight, very small in stature and quite angelic looking. She sat on the front row, right beneath my lectern. She had very big eyes couched in innocence. So, I started asking names. "My name is Danny", My name is Emma", "My name is Sandra", all of them announced rather shyly, and I wrote the names down.

Then the new student. I bent my head down and said quietly, so as not to embarrass her. "What is YOUR name?" I barely whispered.

Looking straight ahead, taking a huge deep breath, and with a voice Mr Richter would have been proud of, she bellowed

"MY NAME IS L U C Y !!!!!"

to the astonishment of all present.

I almost dropped my marker pen.

Fuzzy Logic

The previous post attracted a comment which incensed me greatly. The comment was about probability and quantum mechanics, and made dubious claims.

What the reader failed to state at any time was this:

"Suppose normal everyday objects obeyed the Laws of Quantum Mechanics".

And the person went on to describe a "marble-in-box" puzzle where the marble could have been been anywhere.

IT DOESN'T MATTER!!!! In normal everyday life, there is NO quantum mechanics!!! Quantum Mechanics was invented to explain normal everyday life when it got very small!

To those people who want to apply these rules to everything they see, let them. They will fail. There is a video out called "What the (bleep) do we know?" that claims everything is just an illusion because of Quantum Mechanics. Is it a vision by scientists, known and respected throughout the community? NO! it is a video made by doctors (neuro surgeons), philosophers, psychiartrists and other thinkers who claim they know Quantum Mechanics better than those who actually use those laws.

The best example of what I call to be the "Quantum Fuzziness" is Shrodinger's Cat (see the post "Wanted - Dead or alive"). He invented the Cat just to show everyone how silly it is to take Quantum Mechanics beyond the realm it was invented for.

Sadly, some people still believe that when they go to the store to buy an apple, there is a distinct probability that they will instead, buy a 14-toed giant sluglike marsupial Mexican Bandit instead.

On the planet Oohhuhuhooompha.

In subjunctive tents.

Numbers...?

So, just what is the point?

It began way back when one farmer wanted to know if he was richer than his neighbour. That's easy! Just count the sheep!.


Hang on a minute - what is counting? Ah, we just group the sheep and whoever has the largest group wins. Oh look! we both have the same number of fingers - let's compare the sheep by grouping them in groups of fingers and see who has the most! yeah!

So that's how it began. Soon, they found names for them all (Yes! All ten fingers!). As people got richer, they found larger and larger groups (All with names) were needed.
Then, the four basic operations were discovered - adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. With only these four, even today, people get along quite well. Nothing more seemed to be needed.

Then interesting things started to happen. Famer A had 9 sheep, but he owed Farmer B 11 sheep. These were called negative numbers, and today, they are usually written in red on bank statements. Farmer C had 15 sheep and 2 sons? How do the sons get equal shares on their birthdays? These were called fractions (rational numbers)and they are usually written as pennies on bank statements.

There was more to follow, as people started realising there is far more to this "counting" lark than meets the eye.

All sorts of things reared their ugly heads. Irrational numbers, percentages, squares, cubes, prime numbers, perfect numbers, imaginary numbers (each of which deserve their own posts) and even the fact that there is (at least) more than one type of infinity!

People found they needed to move sheep( money ) around without even knowing the exact amount, so equations were invented (see earlier post) to do this. If you wanted to find out how the number of sheep you had changed from day to day, you used calculus (see earlier post).

The point being, anything to do with numbers is all related as it all began with sheep (or cows, pigs, etc, or combinations of all three, plus the kids, etc, etc)

At Wits End.....

SUBJECTIVE POST!!!

....a little light relief.

When a bright and breezy youngster, I would sometimes let my sense of humor get the better of me.

For example, this true story was laughed about for years afterwards.

One of my hobbies is doing this puzzle, the Rubik's Cube.

I solved it myself when I was 13 in 1995. I had no instructions, I chose to actually "solve" it. I first got it about 6 months later, having no idea how. After another 2 months, I had it again, with a slight insight as to how. It soon became apparent that the corners were the real problem. It took me a whole 4 months just to work out how to do just the 8 corners. I used a 7-move operation called a "swashbuckle", which moved 2 of the corners around an axis, leaving everything else the same. However, I needed 4 of these to complete the 8 corners (28 moves). Furthermore, I needed 3 right-handed swashbuckles followed by a left-handed swashbuckle.

The third time I got the puzzle correct I knew exactly how I did it. After that, it was a matter of refinement and my quickest time was about 2.5 minutes.

Then I found out I could do it without looking at the actual moves, just the positions.

Finally, the showbiz touch came - I was able to make all the moves behind my back, only having a look at maybe 10 positions in all. Time to do this, about 7 minutes.

So I usually say " can do the Rubik's Cube behind my back". Now, I fool everyone by just saying "can do the Rubik's Cube backwards".

But I digress. I was at a party organised by our local Church Group in London. It happened to be a Fancy Dress affair, and I decided to enter.

But being me, I wasn't going to be a Morticia or Elvira ( I was only 15 anyway!), but something a little more original.

The youth club had a pool table, and I took with me only a bush hat. At the time I was really interested in science. The hat had a zipper pocket on it, and I stuffed some tissue into it to make it look like I had a huge lump on my head. On the pocket I wrote in big black letters, the single word "POP!"

I then took a pool cue and wrote a girls name on it. Her name was the same as a valuable red gemstone. I wore the hat, picked up the cue and lined up with everyone else.

There was Alice in Wonderland, the Tin Man, the Snowman, Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and Kylie Minogue. They were all obvious to guess, but who was I?

I was asked.

I told them.

" A Fizzy Cyst with Ruby's Cue".

Three Stellas Please

FOR ONCE, A PERSONAL MESSAGE TO SHOW I AM MORE THAN A SCIENTIST

Fassbind Hotel Cornavin, Geneva. There hangs here the largest pendulum in the world, 30.2 meters.

It demonstrates that the earth is spinning. What happens is this, the bob (the end) swings to and fro in a fixed plane ( the same swing all the time).

This means that as the earth turns, the pendulum just keeps on swinging the same way.

The upshot is that the opposite is seen: The pendulum's swing rotates as the day goes by. It does 360 degrees in 24 hours.

Of course, it is not the pendulum that rotates, it is the earth.

Funny to see that when you go out in the morning, you can see it swinging, but when you return after work, it is swinging in another direction!

It is called the Foucault Pendulum, after the first guy to do it (he also tried to measure the speed of light).

Well, for a week I had a room booked there (about $200), and on my last night, on Friday, the bar was full of rich businessmen, in suits, some with Tuxes, a lot more with fat cigars, sipping cocktails in groups around the bar itself. Most being tall Americans.

And here's me, on the 8th floor, wishing I had some Stella Artois, as my fridge was devoid of the bottles.

This is what happened. I went downstairs to the bar in my tatty jeans, cropped T-shirt (no bra) and dirty sneakers. I was like a pimple on a perfectly smooth Asian face. So I waded my small frame in and out of the frowning suits, and approached the bowtied barman. Soon he would be tongue-tied as well.

Looking down his nose at me (combination of snootiness and my size).

"Yes, er, Madam?" after a curious look at my hips, and a frown at my chest.

"Trois Stella s'il vous plait pour ma salle."

"Don't you mean three Stella Artois for your room?" came the haughty reply.

He turned away, and returned with three full glasses of the required brew, ice cold, on a tray.

Then came my one-liner.

"You don't expect me to carry THIS all the way to the eighth floor, do you? How incongruous would that be?"

After All that Palava.......

.....Time for a bit of a larf.

Students, myself having been one,
make the oddest mistakes.

Here is an Homage to them
(the mistakes, not the students)


 'The World According to Student Bloopers'

                by Richard Lederer

                 St. Paul's School

(Verbatim, The Language Quarterly, Vol. XIII, No. 4)


The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies.
They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot.
The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants
have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the
dessert are cultivated by irritation.
The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge
triangular cube.  The Pramids are a range of mountains
between France and Spain.

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures.
In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses,
Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.
Oneof their children, Cain, once asked,
"Am I my brother's son?"  God asked
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma.
Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother's birth mark.
Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve
sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it.
One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the
Israelites.

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves
to make bread without straw.
Moses led them to the Red Sea,
where they made unleavened bread,
which is bread made without any ingredients.
Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide
to get the ten commandments.
David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar.
He fought with the Philatelists,
a race of people who lived in Biblical times.
Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives and 500
porcupines.

Without the Greeks we wouldn't have history.
The Greeks invented three kinds of columns --
Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic.  They also had myths.
A myth is a female moth.  One myth says that
the mother of Achilles dipped him in the
River Stynx until he became intollerable.
Achilles appears in The Illiad, by Homer.
Homer also wrote the Oddity,
in which Penelope was the last hardship
that Ulysses endured on his journey.
Actually, Homer was not written by Homer
but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher
who went around giving people advice.
They killed him.
Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped,
hurled the biscuits and threw the java.
The reward to the victor was a coral wreath.
The government of Athens was democratic
because people took the law into their
own hands.  There were no wars in Greece,
as the mountains were so high
that they couldn't climb over to see
what their neighbors were doing.
When they fought with the Persians,
the Greeks were outnumbered because
the Persians had more men.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks.
History calls people Romans because
hey never stayed in one place for very long.
At Roman banquets, the guests wore
garlics in their hair.
Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the
battlefields of Gaul.
The Ides of March murdered him because
they thought he was going to be made king.
Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture
his poor subjects by playing the fiddle
to them.

Then came the Middle Ages.
King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived
in the Age of Shivery,
King Harold mustarded his troops
before the Battle of Hastings,
Joan of Arc was cannonized by Bernard Shaw,
and victims of the Black Death grew boobs
on their necks.
Finally the Magna Carta provided
that no free man should be hanged twice for the same
offense.

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate.
The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer,
who wrote many poems and verses and also
wrote literature.

Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow
through an apple while standing on his son's head.

The Renaissance was an age in which
more individuals felt the value of their human being.
Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at
Wittenburg for selling papal indulgences.
He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull.
It was the painter Donatello's interest in the
female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance.
It was an age of great inventions and discoveries.
Gutenberg invented the Bible.
Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure
because he invented cigarettes.
Another important invention was the circulation of blood.
Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world
with a 100-foot clipper.

The government of England was a limited mockery.
Henry VIII found walking difficult
because he had an abbess on his knee.
Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen."
As a queen she was a success.  When Elizabeth
exposed herself before her troops,
they all shouted, "hurrah."  Then her
navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance
was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money
and is famous only because of his plays.
He lived at Windsor with his merry wives,
writing tragedies, comedies, and errors.
In one of Shakespear's famous plays,
Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself
in a long soliloquy.
In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth
to kill the King by attacking his manhood.
Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet.
Writing at the same time as Shakespear
was Miguel Cervantes.
He wrote Donkey Hote.
The next great author was John Milton.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost.
Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

During the Renaissance America began.
Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who
discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta,
and the Santa Fe.
Later, the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean,
and this was known as Pilgrims Progress.
When they landed at Plymouth Rock,
they were greeted by the Indians, who came
down the hill rolling their war hoops before them.
The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their back.
Many of the Indian heroes were killed,
along with their cabooses which proved very fatal to them.
The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers.
Many people died and many babies were born.
Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars
was the English put tacks in their tea.
Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the
post without stamps.  During the War,
the Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls
over stone walls.
The dogs were barking and the peacocks
were crowing.
Finally, The colonists won the War and no longer
had to pay for taxis.

Delegates from the original thirteen states
formed the Contented Congress.
Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin,
and Benjamin Franklin were two
singers of the Declaration of Independence.
Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes
in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm.
He invented electricity by rubbing cats
backwards and declared, "A horse divided against
itself cannot stand."
Franklin died in 1790 and is still
dead.

George Washington married Martha Curtis and
in due time became the Father of Our Country.
Then the Constitution of the United States was
adopted to secure domestic hostility.
Under the Constitution the people
enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent.
Lincoln's mother died in infancy, a
nd he was born in a log cabin which he built with his
own hands.
When Lincoln was President,
he wore only a tall silk hat.
He said, "In onion there is strength."
Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg
Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg
on the back of an envelope.
He also freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation
Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment
gave the ex-Negroes citizenship.
But the Clue Clux Clan would
torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other
innocent victims.
It claimed it represented law and odor.
On the night of April 14, 1865,
Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat
by one of the actors in a moving picture show.
The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth,
a supposingly insane actor.
This ruined Booth's career.

Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a
reasonable time.
Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book
called Candy.
Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton.
It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when
the apples are falling off the trees.

Bach was the most famous composer in the world.
and so was Handel. Handel was half German,
half Italian, and half English.  He was very
large.  Bach died from 1750 to the present.
Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf.
He was so deaf he wrote loud music.
He took long walks in the forest
even when everyone was calling for him.
Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

France was in a very serious state.
The French Revolution was accomplished
before it happened.
The Marseillaise was the theme song of
the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon.
During the Napoleonic Wars,
the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their
shoes.  Then the Spanish gorillas
came down from the hills and nipped at
Napoleon's flanks.
Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very
tense and unrestrained.
He wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since
Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear children.

The sun never set on the British Empire
because the British Empire is in the East
and the sun sets in the West.
Queen Victoria was the longest queen.
She sat on a thorn for 63 years.
Her reclining years and finally
the end of her life were exemplatory of a
great personality.
Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

The nineteenth century was a time of
many great inventions and thoughts.
The invention of the steamboat
caused a network of rivers to spring up.
Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper,
which did the work of a hundred men.
Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy.
Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.
Charles Darwin was a naturalist who
wrote the Organ of the Species.
Madman Curie discovered radium.
And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.

The First World War,
caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a
surf, ushered in a new error
in the anals of human history.