Confusing your peers 101

Quote of the week:

"Mackey's axiom system is somewhat unsatisfactory though, since it assumes that the partially ordered set is actually given as the orthocomplemented closed subspace lattice of a separable Hilbert space."

For those of you who don't know what that means, memorise it and slip it into a conversation sometime.

For those of you who do: shame, shame, shame!

For those of you who encounter this line at your next cocktail party, the safe response is something like, "Yeah, that set is so unorthocomplemented!"

Cheers!

static

stat·ic
adj.
Having no motion; being at rest; quiescent.
Fixed; stationary.

When you flick to a channel without a nice, coherent signal on the television and you get a screen filled with constantly changing little black and white dots, why is it called static? Shouldn't it be called something other than the exact opposite of what it is?

Well, tonight I discovered the holy grail of static: static static. That's right: on channel 24 on my television is a random pattern of black and white dots that doesn't change. The pattern stays exactly the same, with none of the dots ever changing position in any way. It's quite the enigma, really. It looks like the little gremlin inside the tube who spatters the screen with white paint 30 times per second got tired and went to bed, too lazy to fulfill his essential duty to maintain the paradox. And now the paradox has collapsed. On channel 24.

random nuggets in the goldmine of life part 1

Today I met a man at a bus stop. His first words to me were 'You look a bit young to be a spineless corporate bastard.' The man was not hardened and embittered by a lifetime of experience. Rather, he was no older than 25. As it turns out, he was a freelance artist. He was quite flabbergasted and, I think, a little dissapointed to learn that I represented distinguished wines from all over the world, many of which are particularly recognised for their social and environmental commitments, and that I placed social responsibility very high on my list of priorities. Unfortunately, my bus arrived just then and interrupted what was erupting into a positively scintillating conversation.