Monthly Archives: December 2014

BoF III: Keybeards and Bagpopes:

S Writes:
“But see, if they play the pipes near other people, they’ll be arrested.”
“Arrested? By whom?”
“… by the Scottish bagpipe police?”
“Piffle! No such thing! In fact, there is a Scottish bagpipe brigade whose job it is to ensure that the pipes are played often and loudly. They must conform to the exacting standards set forth by the…”
(at this point, B blows up my pantleg, and I pause.)
“… Bagpope.”

“The Bag Pope?”

“Imagine the mass! Every parishioner plays the pipes, and the church has to be burned to the ground after every service.”
“Wait, why? Does it seep into the stones?”
“IT IS RUINED.”

BoF II: Some one-liners from 2014

(Along with some selected* comments.)

“Chaotic Justified. That’s my alignment. -S”
J: “Do you tab indent every third line?”
Me: “It’s more that I tab indent a number of spaces equal to the strange attractor?”

“Church bells: A peal to authority.”
Me: “Perhaps more specifically: ‘Church Bell Arguments’.”
Me: “http://mzonline.com/bin/view/Python/ChurchBellsSketch/”

Almost a Koan:
“Is Evening Performance when you balance something on top of an evening?”
M: “or light the evening on fire and spin it around”
K: “Every response merely encourages him!”

“New idea: Name one of the rooms in your home ‘Metonymy’.”
S: “That’s where we’ll store the literary theory!”
K: “Based on the amount of my mortgage that I’ve paid off, I figure that I own whichever room of my house that I am currently occupying.”
K: “I get metonymy and synechdoche mixed up.”
L: “The only example I can remember from highschool english re: metonymy is breadwinner. Does the aforementioned room provide earnings and sustenance for the rest of the domicile?”

“Sometimes unceasing horrible noise is its own reward.”
J: “That would explain your presence in bands in high school. Har har.”

*Generally from those who were playing along. If you have issues with my editing, tell me! 😀

BoF I: “The Zero-Body Problem”

The zero-body problem:
29 October 2010 at 18:58

“It might be noted here, for the benefit of those interested in exact solutions, that there is an alternative formulation of the many-body problem, i.e., how many bodies are required before we have a problem? G.E. Brown points out that this can be answered by a look at history. In eighteenth-century Newtonian mechanics, the three-body problem was insoluble. With the birth of general relativity around 1910 and quantum electrodynamics in 1930, the two- and one-body problems became insoluble. And within modern quantum field theory, the problem of zero bodies (vacuum) is insoluble. So, if we are out after exact solutions, no bodies at all is already too many!” — Richard D. Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1845884&cid=34068552