Category Archives: Periodic Table

Artichoke

We all remember the legend of the naming of the artichoke. How Artemis was choked by baby Jesus, and from her eyeballs sprang the plant we in English call artichoke, and in Swahili is called Thumbelina’s Thistle.

On the thermodynamics of conscientiousness

It was too late for a clever retort.
It was too late for a clever retort.

Take it as a given that the Harried Ainu have more words for entropy than we have words for the Hairy Ainiu.

And given that if they spoke as clearly as do you and I, they wouldn’t have such a miserable existence, 

Then let me recite one episode from the transcripts collected by D. , one of the first western theologists to try to straighten out the heathens. 

We were pennies from heaven on our honeymoon. I put a drop in the tank at Leadville. A dollar on the horses in Black Diamond. I almost caught Morton’s halitosis as I was getting too big for my britches.

Was the season of the crickets in the hard drive.

All together

Avoiding shocks. Use fibre or bakelite pliers to remove cartridge fuses.

Have you put it all together yet? 

Who was scuba diving in a Hindu temple when Edgar Rice Burrows poked to the surface? She was deeply into the Maharishi, if we can say so without irony.

And the phase of the moon at the time of the incident, taking into account the third degree of precession but ignoring relativistic effects?

Evidence points to a singular culprit orbiting a culpable singularity. Of which there are multitudes.

Unless you have something profound to say, you should just say it. If you have something profound, register the copyright and collect the residuals before you utter a word. Once bitten, twice shy.

Thebes to the Seventh Power

Seven times the seven came to the first gate and failed to penetrate. They were getting nowhere fast. Then each of the seven consulted seven wise men, who offered seven solutions each and every one. 

Bearing them all in mind, the seven bore down on their next excursion and beat the gate. The first gate. 

Seven times the seven came to the second gate and failed to penetrate.

Dark energy

His defense rests upon the assumption that dark energy boxes in a higher weight than light. Under these circumstances, what could be expected other than malfeasance decoherence subsistence subduction and what have you? These are the times that try men’s souls, and the soils of women.

Snidely and the forty whiplashes

Andreas

Andreas

Gravity refused to be quantized, thereby creating 4-dimensional space. It’s in its nature.

So mused the monkey who modeled the collapse of a pair of neutron stars after measuring their gravitational waves, oscillating less than the diameter of a proton. It’s all in the book.

From the collapse comes gold. And the other heavy elements. We praise the gods for heavy elements, for without the heavy elements, we wouldn’t have rocks. The parts warehouse would be barren as bottom’s baby, as old Hubbard is said to have reported to the dean of ineptitudes.

I’m trying to kick the habit, whispered the cardinal to the priest. Well within earshot of Mother Superior.

The salt of the earth

One for all and the devil take the hindmost
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Three men in a tub, and who do you think they were?
The four fathers of the church and the relics of their foreskins
Five maids a-milking in their silk stockings
Six ways to skin a cat, as the loggers used to say.
Seven brides for seven brothers all too big for their britches
One dreamt she was possessed of the devil.
The day finally came that the hypothesis proved out.

Gödel met Zermelo

Gödel met Zermelo in Bad Elster in 1931. Olga Taussky-Todd, who was at the same meeting, wrote, “The trouble with Zermelo was that he felt he had already achieved Gödel’s most admired result himself.” His work “Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory” (1940) is a classic of modern mathematics. Towards the end of his life Gödel became convinced that he was being poisoned and, refusing to eat to avoid being poisoned, starved himself to death. Zermelo usually stated his axioms and theorems in words rather than symbols.

Phosphate

Near the factory where she worked was a shed covering a subterranean passage leading to the phosphate pub, where they served a drink of carbonated water, fruit syrup, and a little phosphoric acid.