my second steradian
May 2011
I… I don’t get it :|
The number of letters in various words:
- What is a word made up of 4 letters
- yet is also made up of 3.
- Although is written with 8 letters,
- and then with 4.
- Rarely consists of 6,
- and never is written with 5?
Let’s ignore the fact that this doesn’t make grammatical sense anyway, I think the reason this is dumb was best put by xkcd:
Back when I was a sprightly young man - I couldn’t have been older than 12 - I used to live in Melbourne. One day some family friends decided to take me with them to a science fiction exhibition fair thing at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. I was big into star wars cards, and I think there was a thing about them there.
So we were wandering around, and just getting ready to leave when we heard that there would be a panel coming up, including Douglas Adams. We were all shocked! So we went to the panel, obviously. It was DNA, Joel Silver (fresh from producing the Matrix, which had just been released but wasn’t a big deal yet) and someone else.
Everyone else got kind of bored and left, but I stayed and listened to the panel. Then there was Q&A at the end. So I put my hand up to ask a question. The person with the mic thought I was adorable, and had me stand on a chair, where I asked an utterly irrelevant and quite impertinent question: so, Mr Adams, just how many stones are there in Wales?
He wouldn’t tell me. I went up afterwards and got his autograph, and pressed, to which he responded “I can’t remember, but it was a very big number.”
So yeah, that’s when I met Douglas Adams.
Afterwards we spent about 20 minutes talking to Joel Silver about science fiction film and this new “bullet time” thing…
I really did have a blessed childhood in many ways.
imagine if the end of the world did just happen
only it was so instantaneous that we didn’t feel it
and the afterlife is exactly like the life we lived before
Or if the universe was immediately recreated. Identical except for a few differences which are now written into history and our memories, so we don’t even notice.
What are you talking about? The moon has always been there, hasn’t it?
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
