Virtual Illusions

THIS IS AN ACTUAL LETTER FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE SMITHSONIAN…. Or so I’m told.

Paleoanthropology Division

Smithsonian Institute

207 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20078
Dear Sir:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “211-D,
layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull.” We have
given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to
inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents
“conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County
two million years ago.” Rather, it appears that what you have found is
the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has
small children, believes to be the “Malibu Barbie”. It is evident that
you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this
specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are
familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to
contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a
number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped
you off to its modern origin:

1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are
   typically fossilized bone.
2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic
   centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified
   proto-hominids.
3. The dentition pattern evident on the “skull” is more consistent
   with the common domesticated dog than it is with the “ravenous
   man-eating Pliocene clams” you speculate roamed the wetlands during
   that time. This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing
   hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution,
   but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without
   going into too much detail, let us say that:
   1. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has
      chewed on.
   2. Clams don’t have teeth.

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your
request to have the specimen carbon dated. This is partially due to
the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly
due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent
geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were
produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce
wildly inaccurate results. Sadly, we must also deny your request that
we approach the National Science Foundation’s Phylogeny Department
with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name
“Australopithecus spiff-arino.” Speaking personally, I, for one,
fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but
was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was
hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.

However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating
specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil,
it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of
work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that
our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the
display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the
Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will
happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your
back yard. We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital
that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing
the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing
you expand on your theories surrounding the “trans-positating
fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix” that makes the
excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered
take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman
automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe

Curator, Antiquities

Science, Urban Legends

Once upon a time (1/t), pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.

Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the grounds that it was insufficient, and made her way in amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Suddenly two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of direction, and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf, and she plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more, she found herself, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidean space.

She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As he numerically analyzed her, his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, and a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate improperly at once.

Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly approaching her with his power series expanding. She could see by his degenerate conic that he was up to no good.

“What a symmetric little polynomial you are,” he said. “I can see that your angles have lots of secs.”

“Oh sir,” she protested, “keep away from me. I haven’t got my brackets on.”

“Calm yourself, my dear”, said our suave operator. “Your fears are purely imaginary.”

“I, i,” she thought. “Perhaps he’s homogeneous.”

“What order are you?” the brute demanded.

“Seventeen,” replied Polly.

“I suppose you’ve never been operated on?”

“Of course not,” Polly cried indignantly. “I’m absolutely convergent.”

“Come, come,” said Curly. “Let’s go off to a decimal place, and I’ll take you to the limit!”

“Never!” gasped Polly.

“Abscissa!” he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the head with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly’s radius squared itself. Polly’s loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed Runge-Kutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he satisfied her hypothesis, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that night her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. As the months went by, Polly’s denominator increased monotonically. Finally she went to l’Hospital and generated a small but pathological function which left little surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.

The moral of the story is, “If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.”

Science

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of
   living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects
   and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer, which only
   Santa has seen.
2. There are 2 billion children (under 18) in the world. But since Santa
   doesn’t appear to handle Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish children, that
   reduces the work load to 15% of the total - 378 million or so. At an
   average rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One
   presumes there’s at least one good child in each.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with thanks to time zones and
   the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west. This works out
   to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian
   household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop
   out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, istribute the
   remaining gifts under the tree, eat the snacks, get back up the chimney,
   get back in the sleigh, and move on to the next house. Assuming that each
   of these 91.8 million homes are distributed evenly (which we know to be
   false but for the sake of these calculations we will accept) we are now
   talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75 ½ million miles,
   not counting bathroom stops. This means that Santa’s sleigh is traveling at
   650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For comparison, the
   fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe moves at a poky 27.4 MPS;
   the average reindeer runs at 15 MPH.
4. The sleighs payload adds another interesting element. Assuming that each
   child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (2 pounds), the sleigh
   is carrying 321,300 tons not counting Santa, who is inexorably described as
   overweight. On land, confessional reindeer can pull no more than 300
   pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point one) could pull TEN
   TIMES the usual amount, we can not do the job with 8 or even 9, we need
   214,000 reindeer. This increases the weight, not even counting the sleigh,
   to 353,430 tons. Again for comparison this is 4 times the weight of the
   Queen Elizabeth 2.
5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
   resistance. This will heat the reindeer in the same manner as a spacecraft
   re-entering the earths atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb
   14.2 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will
   burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the next pair of
   reindeer, and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire
   team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousands of a second. Santa,
   meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times the
   force of gravity. A 300 pound Santa would be pinned to the back of his
   sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
6. Conclusion: There was a Santa, but he’s dead now.

The Snacks Addendum
By My Roommate

I believe that the above analysis glosses over the key fact: the
snacks. Why do we leave snacks for Santa? Why does he need them? Assuming
the 91.8 million homes identified as his target area and assuming a payload
of 3 cookies and a glass of milk he is consuming 390 calories per household
(assuming 3 chips deluxe cookies and 2% milk) which somes out to a Christmas
Eve chaloric intake of 35.8 billion callories in just over a day. According
to back of a box of Chips Deluxe (suspicuosly made by little elves in trees
I might add) the average human daily intake is 2000 calories. This comes
out to roughly 13 million times more chalories than the average human. Now
remember that chalories are human fuel, we turn them into energy. I propose
that Santa is actually a human (or not so human) generator. And that he not
only powers the “sleigh” (the raindeer are only there for marketing reasons,
you know animals and babies and such) but also the force field that keeps
everyone intact.
…and to all a good night!

Holiday, Science

“The light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun, and the light of the
Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days.” — Isiah 30,26

Thus heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and
in addition seven times seven (49 times) as much as the Earth does from the
Sun, or some 50 times in all. With this data, we can compute the temperature of
Heaven. The radiation reaching Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat
lost by this same radiation is just equal to the heat generated by the
radiation it receives. In short, Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as does the
Earth.

Using the Stefan-Boltzman law, which predicts that the radiation emitted by an
object is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature, we can compute
that the absolute temperature of the Earth is 27 C (300K).

The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed, but it must be less than
110 C (383K), the temperature at which brimstone or sulphur changes into a gas.
According to Revelations 21,8 “The fearful and unbelieving … shall have their
part in a the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone”. A lake of molten
brimstone means that its temperature must be below the boiling point, which is
110 C, as above this point it would be a vapour, not a lake.

We have, then, the tempearature of Heaven at 134 C (408K). The temperature of
Hell is less than 110 C. Therefore Heaven is hotter than Hell.

[I recieved the below letter in response to this bit. Since I am loathe
to change text I didn't write I've included the letter so you get the two
perspectives. -ed]

I really liked this story. So much so that I decided to check the math and,
you’ll be pleased to know, if you do apply the Stephen-Boltzmann law to
ISAIAH 30:26, Heaven really WOULD BE hotter than Hell. It really amuses
the quantum chemist inside of me (who is just struggling to get out :-).
I just wanted to point out a few problems with your web-page version,
however… There are a few problems with the data numbers you’ve quoted
in the story, which sort of detract from its total impact. I hope you don’t
mind. Would love to see it fixed up as it is very funny.

First problem: you can’t compute the Temperature of the Earth from the
Stefan-Boltzmann Equation if you’re using Isaiah 30:26; you can only
calculate the Temperature of Heaven in comparison to Earth’s. The S-B
Equation would be set up as (Heaven T divided by Earth T)^4 = 50.
Then you have to ASSUME that the rough average absolute T of the Earth,
during a brightly lit day, is 300 Kelvin (26.8 C). Plug in the 300 K
into the equation and solve for Heaven’s temperature, which gives you
798 K (525 C). That’s quite hot.

Two: The melting point of brimstone or sulfur is 388 K (115 C) and the
boiling point of sulfur is 718 K (445 C). The lake of fire and brimstone
would have to be within this range, so Hell’s average temperature would be
somewhere between 115 - 445 C. We have, therefore, that Heaven at 525 C
is hotter than Hell even at 445 C.

I had fun with this; thanks. Hope you find more science jokes for me to
sink my gums into

Cheers

Donna Fox

Religion, Science

A true story. A thermodynamics professor had written
a take home exam for his graduate students. It had
one question:

Is hell exothermic or endothermic?
Support your answer with a proof.

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs
using Boyle’s Law or some variant. One student,
however wrote the following:

First, we postulate that if souls exist, then
they must have some mass.

If they do, then a mole of souls can also have
a mass. So, at what rate are souls moving into
hell and at what rate are souls leaving? I think
that we can safely assume that once a soul gets
to hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls
are leaving.

As for souls entering hell, lets look at the
different religions that exist in the world today.
Some of these religions state that if you are not
a member of their religion, you will go to hell.
Since there are more than one of these religions
and people do not belong to more than one religion,
we can project that all people and all souls go to
hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can
expect the number of souls in hell to increase
exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change in volume in
hell. Boyle’s Law states that in order for the
temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same,
the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs
to stay constant.

So, if hell is expanding at a slower rate than
the rate at which souls enter hell, then the
temperature and pressure in hell will increase
until all hell breaks loose.

Of course, if hell is expanding at a rate faster
than the increase of souls in hell, than the
temperature and pressure will drop until hell
freezes over.

So which is it? If we accept the postulate given me by Therese Banyan
during Freshman year concerning cold days in hell, and take into account
the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with
her, then #2 cannot be true, and hell is thus proven to be exothermic.”

It was not revealed what grade the student got.

Religion, Science, Urban Legends

Valles Marineris (MPI) - A spokesthing for Mars Air Force denounced as false rumors that an alien space craft crashed in the desert, outside of Ares Vallis on Friday. Appearing at a press conference today, General Rgrmrmy The Lesser, stated that “the object was, in fact, a harmless high-altitude weather balloon, not an alien spacecraft”.

The story broke late Friday night when a major stationed at nearby Ares Vallis Air Force Base contacted the Valles Marineris Daily Record with a story about a strange, balloon-shaped object which allegedly came down in the nearby desert, “bouncing” several times before coming to a stop, “deflating in a sudden explosion of alien gases”. Minutes later, General Rgrmrmy The Lesser contacted the Daily Record telepathically to contradict the earlier report.

General Rgrmrmy The Lesser stated that hysterical stories of a detachable vehicle roaming across the Martian desert were blatant fiction, provoked by incidences involving swamp gas. But the general public has been slow to accept the Air Force’s explanation of recent events, preferring to speculate on the “other-worldly” nature of the crash debris. Conspiracy theorists have condemned Rgrmrmy’s statements as evidence of “an obvious government cover-up”, pointing out that Mars has no swamps.

Science

1. The AMC Spacer
2. Uncle Boris’s Last Chance Galactic Truck Stop & Fireworks Stand
3. I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-A-Space-Station
4. Skylab for Dummies
5. Emergency Vodka Storage Unit #6
6. Absolut NightMir
7. The New, Improved People’s Deathtrap 2000 (”Now with leaks!”)
8. Space Toast Coast-to-Coast
9. The S.S. Minnowsky
10. The Black Cat, Walking Under a Ladder, Broken Mirror, Spilled
    Salt, Friday the 13th Space Module

11. Kaputnik
12. Cattlecar Galactica
13. Spacey Spice
14. The Amazing Orbiting Barge O’ Death
15. Deepshit Nine

Science, Technology

“A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo, and when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole keeps improving by the regular culling of the weakest members.

In much the same way, the human brain can operate only as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, we all know, kills off brain cells, but naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker cells, constantly making the brain a faster and more efficient machine.

The results of this in-depth epidemiological study verifies and validates the causal link between all-weekend parties and academic performance. It also explains why, after a few short years of leaving university and getting married, most alumni cannot keep up with the performance of the new graduates. Only those few that stick to the strict regimen of voracious alcoholic consumption can maintain the intellectual levels that they achieved during their university years.

So, this is a call to arms. As our country is losing its edge we should not shudder in our homes. Get back into the bars! Quaff that pint! Your company and country need you to be at your peak, and you shouldn’t deny yourself the career that you could have. Be all that you can be.”

Science

The Top Ten Changes at NASA to accommodate 76 year old John Glenn’s
return to space aboard the Shuttle

1. All important devices now operated by the “Clapper”.
2. The Shuttle’s thermostat set at 80 degrees.
3. Standard Astronaut issue; the “Pendant”…”Help I’m floating and
   I can’t get down!”.

4. “Early Bird” specials from Morrison’s Cafeteria included on the
   menu.

5. One monitor specifically designated for “Matlock”.
6. Roger Whittaker tapes played at nap-time.
7. Top speed of the Shuttle set at 25 miles per hour.
8. Bumber sticker: “Ask me about my grandchildren”.
9. Space pants now go up to the armpits.
10. Left-blinker left on for the entire mission.

Science