Raving Lunatic Obviously Took Some Advanced Physics
STANFORD, CA--Known throughout the community for his verbal outbursts and his shopping cart full of trash, area street denizen "Cosmic Stan" must have studied advanced physics at some point, sources reported Monday.
[Photo Caption: Cosmic Stan asks for enough change to take a bus to the Riemannian manifolds.]
"Where's my cheese? Don't take my rowboat! Got no room!" the lunatic screamed from his regular spot near the Campus Drive bus stop. "I need space! Gimme space! Infinite dimensional separable Hilbert space!"
Though his rants seem nonsensical to most passersby, some astute listeners say they contain evidence of higher learning.
"I'd always see him around that bus stop, dressed in his ragged wool clothes, duct-taped shoes, and that plastic sheeting covered over with symbols drawn in magic-marker," Stanford Ph.D. candidate James Willard said. "Then, a few days ago, he was out there waving his tin-foil wand at random strangers, and I heard him yell, 'I demand that you buy me an ice-cream cone! My third-favorite flavor is strange! My second-favorite is top! My favorite flavor is anti-charmed!' Suddenly, I realized the guy was talking about quarks."
Willard said he spent the next several minutes listening to Cosmic Stan's rant.
"Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds," Willard said. "I'm not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could've happened to him?"
Stanford theoretical physicist Carl Lundergaard seconded Willard's theory on the loonball.
"He's definitely had some advanced training, though I'm not surprised that it went unnoticed for so long," Lundergaard said. "It's hard for the layperson to differentiate schizophrenic ramblings like 'Modernity chunk where the sink goes flying on the ping-pang' from legitimate terminology like 'Unstable equilibria lie on the nodal points of a separatrix in phase space.'"
Lundergaard said he first became intrigued by Cosmic Stan in December 1999, when the homeless man threw a chicken bone at him and said, "Components of the Weyl conformal curvature tensor." The professor said he initially suspected that Stan was repeating a phrase "from a textbook he'd found in the garbage." Then, several weeks later, the screaming nutcase shouted some things that indicated a strong grasp of high-level science.
"As I was buying coffee in the quad one morning, Stan came by waving those roller skates he sometimes wears on his hands," Lundergaard said. "I distinctly heard him say, 'I can't be in two places at once! I can't meddle in my own affairs! I can't destructively interfere with my own future plans! What do I look like--the uncollapsed wave function of an electron?' He was referring to the seemingly paradoxical aspects of wave/particle duality as illustrated by the 'two-slit' experiment in electron diffraction. Stan wasn't just mouthing phrases: The crazy homeless man knows his stuff."
Added Lundergaard: "I almost approached him the other day to see if he had any ideas regarding the general solution for the relativistic force-free equation describing the structure of the pulsar magnetosphere, but he was busy smearing a plastic doll with glue."
Cosmic Stan also appears to be versed in other academic subjects, Lundergaard said.
"He seems to have a working understanding of several of the higher maths, including Zurmelo-Fraenkel set theory, category theory, and algebraic topology," Lundergaard said. "He also seems to be quite interested in the subjects of religion, sexuality, fast-food restaurants, Ferdinand de Saussure, malevolent evil, '70s TV shows, and shadowy authority figures."
Lundergaard said he has no knowledge of Cosmic Stan's past, but theorizes that his nickname derives from the physic
I read somewhere that you only need about 50 digits of pi to describe a circle the size of the observable universe to within the diameter of a proton, let alone a chocolate donut.
This isn't to say that 1350 digits wouldn't be useful! If you ever wake up in an alternate universe (you were warned about operating quantum machinery while drunk!) just look up pi in a math book. The degree of trouble you're in could correlate to the digit at which your memorized value, and the local value of pi, diverge.
If pi only diverges after 1000 or more digits, you're probably alright, except for having to re-memorize pi. If pi diverges after 100 digits, there may be some minor historical divergences, like, say, President Nixon being impeached, or Bush winning a second term. The mind boggles! If pi diverges after 30 or 40 digits, look out the window. Do dinosaurs roam the earth? Since you're surrounded by ruthless, math-book-publishing carnivores, consider donating yourself to the primate house of the zoo. If local pi begins with a number other than 3, you should start to get worried, or maybe implode.
Maybe "sheer glee" is the jelly-like substance that canned hams are packed in?
If true, it would follow that sheer glee lies somewhere between solid glee and liquid glee. I would pursue this further, but all this talk of ham jelly is making me hungry and/or nauseous.
You can wavelet and fractalate and vigourously wave your hands in the air
Fractalate! Fractalate!
How did you know this would be my new favorite word? Honestly, if you had used "wavify" instead of "wavelet", I would have mailed you a ham out of sheer glee.
I love when they take a pipettor, dip into a large beaker of solution left open on their benchtops and pull back a half-full tip with air bubbles in it, with big droplets hanging off the side, then squirt some of it into an unlabeled test tube. The show is great, but as a biologist, I cringe every time they do that.
Also, if you ever see a M.E. kneeling over my corpse, touching my hair and saying "oh, poor baby, who did this to you?" you have my permission to slap her! Or as David Caruso would say, "You have my permission...[dramatically puts sunglasses on]...to slap her."
I don't think color film has a 'black' pigment layer; a white object would produce cyan, yellow, and magenta dye in the film, making a black (negative) image. A black object would produce no pigment in the film, so light would pass through freely. Maybe. I'm no expert either!
Is there a service where you can copy your color negatives to three b/w negatives, one for each color layer, so they can be recombined later to make a full color image? This strikes me as the best long-term analog solution to losing precious color pictures.
I believe the now-cancelled Solar Probe mission was to have flown at night, for the same reason you posted. IIRC, some portion of its trajectory was to have placed it in the shadow of a sun-grazing asteroid...local night. This would have a) kept its electronics cool until it was ready to begin its final mission, and b) given us a chance to study the asteroid at close range.
Since the mission was cancelled, the NASA "Fire and Ice" page (combining this mission and the Pluto-Kupier Belt probe has been taken down), so I can't verify that this was the plan.
Very good point! If the power companies have to pay taxes on the land that their wind farms sit on, you can bet the electricity will cost a LOT more than $0.01/kwh...
...if you broke the secret law, the duck would come down and give you 50 dollars.
Why you want Andromeda Strain lab colors:
on
Color Me Productive
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Interior Wildfire lab. A message flashes across a computer screen:
DEGENERATIVE CHANGE IN GASKET G455-1
DEGENERATIVE CHANGE IN GASKET G455-2
DEGENERATIVE CHANGE IN GASKET G455-3
HALL: The lab's been compromized!
COMPUTER VOICE: Self-destruct sequence has been initiated. There are now five minutes to detonation. STONE: Quick, you've got to get up to the taupe level, to stop the sterilization protocol! HALL: (long pause) Taupe?! STONE: Yes, there's no substation on the beige or ivory levels. Get going! Hall slowly walks off. HALL: (to himself) Taupe? What the hell kind of color is taupe?
Later:
COMPUTER VOICE: There are now thirty seconds to detonation. Hall exits the stairwell and looks around. The walls are a uniform grey color. He presses the intercom button.
HALL: Hey, Stone! Is this taupe? It all looks gray to me.
STONE: What are you doing on the ecru level? Taupe, Hall! Taupe!
HALL: TAUPE?!? Yeah, I got your taupe right here--
The nuclear device detonates, vaporizing everyone in the complex. The resulting mushroom cloud is a lovely shade of umber.
I think you're describing the same problem I had. I found a fix via Google that worked. Here's what I did (running XP):
Go to My Computer > Folder Options > File Types
Select URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol and click "Advanced" Select "Actions: open" and click "Edit" In the "DDE Message:" field you should see something like "%1",,-1,0,,,, Delete all the text in the field and click "OK". Repeat the above steps for the File Type "URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol with Security".
I think I read that unchecking the "Use DDE" box will work as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Raving Lunatic Obviously Took Some Advanced Physics
STANFORD, CA--Known throughout the community for his verbal outbursts and his shopping cart full of trash, area street denizen "Cosmic Stan" must have studied advanced physics at some point, sources reported Monday.
[Photo Caption: Cosmic Stan asks for enough change to take a bus to the Riemannian manifolds.]
"Where's my cheese? Don't take my rowboat! Got no room!" the lunatic screamed from his regular spot near the Campus Drive bus stop. "I need space! Gimme space! Infinite dimensional separable Hilbert space!"
Though his rants seem nonsensical to most passersby, some astute listeners say they contain evidence of higher learning.
"I'd always see him around that bus stop, dressed in his ragged wool clothes, duct-taped shoes, and that plastic sheeting covered over with symbols drawn in magic-marker," Stanford Ph.D. candidate James Willard said. "Then, a few days ago, he was out there waving his tin-foil wand at random strangers, and I heard him yell, 'I demand that you buy me an ice-cream cone! My third-favorite flavor is strange! My second-favorite is top! My favorite flavor is anti-charmed!' Suddenly, I realized the guy was talking about quarks."
Willard said he spent the next several minutes listening to Cosmic Stan's rant.
"Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds," Willard said. "I'm not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could've happened to him?"
Stanford theoretical physicist Carl Lundergaard seconded Willard's theory on the loonball.
"He's definitely had some advanced training, though I'm not surprised that it went unnoticed for so long," Lundergaard said. "It's hard for the layperson to differentiate schizophrenic ramblings like 'Modernity chunk where the sink goes flying on the ping-pang' from legitimate terminology like 'Unstable equilibria lie on the nodal points of a separatrix in phase space.'"
Lundergaard said he first became intrigued by Cosmic Stan in December 1999, when the homeless man threw a chicken bone at him and said, "Components of the Weyl conformal curvature tensor." The professor said he initially suspected that Stan was repeating a phrase "from a textbook he'd found in the garbage." Then, several weeks later, the screaming nutcase shouted some things that indicated a strong grasp of high-level science.
"As I was buying coffee in the quad one morning, Stan came by waving those roller skates he sometimes wears on his hands," Lundergaard said. "I distinctly heard him say, 'I can't be in two places at once! I can't meddle in my own affairs! I can't destructively interfere with my own future plans! What do I look like--the uncollapsed wave function of an electron?' He was referring to the seemingly paradoxical aspects of wave/particle duality as illustrated by the 'two-slit' experiment in electron diffraction. Stan wasn't just mouthing phrases: The crazy homeless man knows his stuff."
Added Lundergaard: "I almost approached him the other day to see if he had any ideas regarding the general solution for the relativistic force-free equation describing the structure of the pulsar magnetosphere, but he was busy smearing a plastic doll with glue."
Cosmic Stan also appears to be versed in other academic subjects, Lundergaard said.
"He seems to have a working understanding of several of the higher maths, including Zurmelo-Fraenkel set theory, category theory, and algebraic topology," Lundergaard said. "He also seems to be quite interested in the subjects of religion, sexuality, fast-food restaurants, Ferdinand de Saussure, malevolent evil, '70s TV shows, and shadowy authority figures."
Lundergaard said he has no knowledge of Cosmic Stan's past, but theorizes that his nickname derives from the physic
Ahrrrrrr! Batten down the code base, ya scurvy dogs!
But why so short?
...while their pr0n is oft interred with their bones.
I think this is how that Nomad robot from Star Trek got its start...
Sterilize soil samples...fix user errors...sterilize...users? Sterilize users! Got it!
Does anyone have a math book I can borrow? I really need to look something up.
I read somewhere that you only need about 50 digits of pi to describe a circle the size of the observable universe to within the diameter of a proton, let alone a chocolate donut.
This isn't to say that 1350 digits wouldn't be useful! If you ever wake up in an alternate universe (you were warned about operating quantum machinery while drunk!) just look up pi in a math book. The degree of trouble you're in could correlate to the digit at which your memorized value, and the local value of pi, diverge.
If pi only diverges after 1000 or more digits, you're probably alright, except for having to re-memorize pi.
If pi diverges after 100 digits, there may be some minor historical divergences, like, say, President Nixon being impeached, or Bush winning a second term. The mind boggles!
If pi diverges after 30 or 40 digits, look out the window. Do dinosaurs roam the earth? Since you're surrounded by ruthless, math-book-publishing carnivores, consider donating yourself to the primate house of the zoo.
If local pi begins with a number other than 3, you should start to get worried, or maybe implode.
Maybe "sheer glee" is the jelly-like substance that canned hams are packed in?
If true, it would follow that sheer glee lies somewhere between solid glee and liquid glee. I would pursue this further, but all this talk of ham jelly is making me hungry and/or nauseous.
You can wavelet and fractalate and vigourously wave your hands in the air
Fractalate!
Fractalate!
How did you know this would be my new favorite word? Honestly, if you had used "wavify" instead of "wavelet", I would have mailed you a ham out of sheer glee.
I love when they take a pipettor, dip into a large beaker of solution left open on their benchtops and pull back a half-full tip with air bubbles in it, with big droplets hanging off the side, then squirt some of it into an unlabeled test tube. The show is great, but as a biologist, I cringe every time they do that.
Also, if you ever see a M.E. kneeling over my corpse, touching my hair and saying "oh, poor baby, who did this to you?" you have my permission to slap her! Or as David Caruso would say, "You have my permission...[dramatically puts sunglasses on]...to slap her."
ballot-COUNTING contract?!? I thought you said a ballot-EATING contract!!
Mmmmm...tastes like Democracy...
For one thing, flying at Mach 10 doesn't devolve you into a reptile.
I don't think color film has a 'black' pigment layer; a white object would produce cyan, yellow, and magenta dye in the film, making a black (negative) image. A black object would produce no pigment in the film, so light would pass through freely. Maybe. I'm no expert either!
Is there a service where you can copy your color negatives to three b/w negatives, one for each color layer, so they can be recombined later to make a full color image? This strikes me as the best long-term analog solution to losing precious color pictures.
Every time someone mentions this possibility, I get the theme to "The Odd Couple" stuck in my head.
I believe the now-cancelled Solar Probe mission was to have flown at night, for the same reason you posted. IIRC, some portion of its trajectory was to have placed it in the shadow of a sun-grazing asteroid...local night. This would have a) kept its electronics cool until it was ready to begin its final mission, and b) given us a chance to study the asteroid at close range.
Since the mission was cancelled, the NASA "Fire and Ice" page (combining this mission and the Pluto-Kupier Belt probe has been taken down), so I can't verify that this was the plan.
I was going to reply, but I just failed my sanity check. BLEEEAAAAAAAYAYAYAYARRGGHGHHHH!!!
The video will air for the first time on MTV today on TRL, and afterwards can be seen on the MTV Choose or Lose site.
Having seen this year's candidates, I think this belongs on the MTV "Choose and Lose" site.
So, when Lance Armstrong has someone go down on him, does he say, "oh, yeah, baby, suck my...ball..."?
Yes, but is it bear-proof?
Yeah, I'm a Gen-X'er, and I know how glad I was to have an effective AIDS vaccine when I was growing up.
Very good point! If the power companies have to pay taxes on the land that their wind farms sit on, you can bet the electricity will cost a LOT more than $0.01/kwh...
...if you broke the secret law, the duck would come down and give you 50 dollars.
Interior Wildfire lab. A message flashes across a computer screen:
DEGENERATIVE CHANGE IN GASKET G455-1
DEGENERATIVE CHANGE IN GASKET G455-2
DEGENERATIVE CHANGE IN GASKET G455-3
HALL: The lab's been compromized!
COMPUTER VOICE: Self-destruct sequence has been initiated. There are now five minutes to detonation.
STONE: Quick, you've got to get up to the taupe level, to stop the sterilization protocol!
HALL: (long pause) Taupe?!
STONE: Yes, there's no substation on the beige or ivory levels. Get going!
Hall slowly walks off.
HALL: (to himself) Taupe? What the hell kind of color is taupe?
Later:
COMPUTER VOICE: There are now thirty seconds to detonation.
Hall exits the stairwell and looks around. The walls are a uniform grey color. He presses the intercom button.
HALL: Hey, Stone! Is this taupe? It all looks gray to me.
STONE: What are you doing on the ecru level? Taupe, Hall! Taupe!
HALL: TAUPE?!? Yeah, I got your taupe right here--
The nuclear device detonates, vaporizing everyone in the complex. The resulting mushroom cloud is a lovely shade of umber.
I think you're describing the same problem I had. I found a fix via Google that worked. Here's what I did (running XP):
Go to My Computer > Folder Options > File Types
Select URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol and click "Advanced"
Select "Actions: open" and click "Edit"
In the "DDE Message:" field you should see something like "%1",,-1,0,,,,
Delete all the text in the field and click "OK".
Repeat the above steps for the File Type "URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol with Security".
I think I read that unchecking the "Use DDE" box will work as well.