Here’s another little favorite from my collection.
It’s a satire designed to illustrate the rather large difference between correlation and causation. But unlike the dihydrogen monoxide hoax, you’ll probably have a hard time getting many signatures on a petition to ban bread!
Still, it’s funny and it seems to make sense… because it deals strictly with facts. Again: correlation is not (necessarily) causation. Sometimes it’s not even close.
I’d planned to do this later, probably for Sideband #64, but in honor of my parents 64th wedding anniversary (2 parents, 64 years, okay!) this numerical rumination gets queue-bumped to now.
Just recently I wrote about 64-bit numbers and how 64 bits allows you to count to the (small, compared to where we’re going) number:
That’s 18 exabytes (or 18 giga-gigabyes). Just to put it into perspective, if we were counting seconds, it amounts to 584,942,417,355 years; more than 500 billion years! (That’s the American, short-scale billion.)
I want aliens to come to earth.
It’s going to be a very long time (if ever) that we go traipsing around the galaxy visiting others. If we do, of course we’ll be the aliens (which has made for some good SF stories and a recent cute film). Our tech is a long way from a galactic bus, so that’s one thing. Another thing is that we have no idea where to go. So far SETI hasn’t SEEN; for all we know we’re alone in the local universe.
You may have heard of the Drake Equation, which starts with the huge number of stars and calculates that even if a fraction of a fraction of a fraction (and so on, several times) of them have the conditions necessary, there are still many possible worlds with intelligent life.
Here’s another favorite from my collection. This is a teasing hoax that dates back to at least 1989. It’s aimed at people who don’t know much about chemistry or are actively afraid of anything that smacks of “chemistry” (or sometimes even science). You can read about it on Wikipedia, or you can visit the official site. (Yes, it’s a hoax with an official website.)
I’ve seen an episode of the Penn & Teller cable show, Bullshit, where they send people out with petitions about DHMO to see how many signatures they could get. Many people accept it as dangerous without really understanding it.
It speaks to an interesting combination of fear and willingness to trust (or not) information based on certain attributes!
As Homer Simpson so eloquently puts it, “D’oh!!”
It seems to be an iron-clad irony of writing that the number of proofreads required to find all errors in your writing is:
PR = N + 1
Where ‘N’ is the actual number performed. This rule appears to apply regardless of the actual value of ‘N’.
One of the things that strikes me about the idea of God is how universal that idea is. To the best of my knowledge, every society in every age has had some sort of spiritual core belief.
I used to state this as the assertion that every society believed in some sort of god or gods, but it was pointed out to me that Buddhists don’t actually have a god. They do have some metaphysical entities, and more importantly, Buddhism is certainly a belief in a metaphysical reality that transcends this one.
So the question is: if humans universally find themselves finding God(s), what does this mean?
A long, long time ago on a USENET far, far away, I was part of a debate that started with the idea that, even if we had disk drives with 64-bit addressing, people would still fill them up with videos, images and whatnot.
The idea grew from some of us old-timers reminiscing about our first brick-sized 5-meg hard drive and how we thought, “Gee, I’ll never fill that up!” (And look how that turned out; I have single image files that wouldn’t fit on that drive!)
The premise was that, even with seriously gigantic hard drives, we’d still manage to fill them and need more, more, more…
I’m a big fan of books and reading.
I have a rather large library that I’ve been dragging around for almost four decades. It grew by leaps and bounds in my younger days, but the growth rate has slowed in the last decade or so. (Slowed, but not stopped!)
One of the bigger parts of moving has been getting enough boxes to pack the books, packing the books, unpacking the books, and deciding what to do about book shelves.
This is an account of one of those perfect events when all the stars align, and things go your way. That doesn’t happen very often (at least for me), so it’s worth remembering. And recording.
So throw on a Bruce Springsteen album (yes, ‘album,’ damnit), grab a beer (or whatever) and join me in a little trip down Memorex Lane.
[cue wavy time fade effects…]
Happy Anniversary to my Mom & Dad!
They’ve been married for 64 years!!
Pretty amazing in this day and age!
«♥» «♥»
Thanks to them, I know that long-term true love is possible. (Not that I’ve found it (yet), mind you, but I know it is possible!)
So drink a toast to my ‘Rents!!
Way. To. Go!
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