The Department of Lateral Thinking

The Good Good Pig

Posted on August 11, 2016December 11, 2017 by George Gillson

I’m going to talk about the beer/porcupine in this picture at some point, but the first thing I want to talk about today is teen romantic comedy cult classic movies. I’m not sure about the best order for all those adjectives, but I’m not going to dwell on it because we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. My favorite cult comedy is The Sure Thing, starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga, and directed by Rob Reiner.

By the way, I apologize for the long delay between this column and the last one; somewhere along the way, a big problem came up and the column was late because of it. Actually, the very same thing happened in The Sure Thing. Cusack’s character in that movie is Walter Gibson aka “Gibby”. Gibby is a freshman in college and one morning he’s late for English class. His prof asks him why he’s late and he says: “There was this big problem…and I’m late because of it.” I liked that excuse, because it’s so vague, so I use it from time to time, just to see if people are paying attention. I think it made Daphne Zuniga roll her eyes when Cusack used it, but at least it got him on her radar.

Speaking of big problems, there’s a class of math problems called Fermi Problems, named after Italian physicist and Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, who also invented Fermions. Note that if American physicist, Pulitzer Prize winner and anagramist Dave Barry was writing this column, he would be tempted to rearrange Fermions into “Firm nose”. I’m going to resist that temptation and just say that a Fermion is a type of elementary particle, which is a particle that falls out of the shoe of an elementary school student.

I’m not sure how the particle would get into the shoe of any elementary school student, since kids in elementary school these days basically have to remain immobile when they go out on the playground. Life was a lot more exciting when there was a decent probability that somebody would skin their knee, break an arm or Heaven forbid, get a sunburn once in awhile. Now, the worst thing that can happen at recess is that someone’s phone goes dead when he or she is playing Pokemon Go. (Pokemon Go can be rearranged to Monk Goop with an E left over, not that it matters.)

But back to Fermi Problems. A Fermi Problem is a problem in which you have to estimate something when you have limited data to work with. You have to arrive at your answer by making a series of assumptions and then stringing them all together.

Here’s a pretty typical Fermi Problem: How many border collies are there in Calgary?

And below is a scene from the 1926 teen cult physics movie Pogo Monk, directed by Rob Reiner, in which Enrico Fermi (played by Enrico Fermi) is trying to calculate what would happen to a border collie if it was shot into low Earth orbit at some angle θ relative to that line pointing to about 12:30, if that big circle was a clock.

To answer the Border Collie Fermi Problem (or any Fermi Problem for that matter), it helps if you know a lot of synonyms for the word “guess”. You’d probably start by taking a guess at the population of Calgary, then multiplying that by your conjecture about how many people in Calgary own a dog, then multiplying that answer by a presumption about how many dog owners have border collies, having assumed that most border collie owners only have one. One is plenty, by the way.

I reckon there are about a million people in Calgary so I’ll start off thinking that thirty percent of them own a dog; that’s 300,000 dogs. As mentioned, border collies are a handful, so I’ll say only two percent of dog owners have one. So my estimate is 6000 border collies in Calgary. That seems high, so then I whack myself on the side of the head and say “I’m an idiot”- at the same time hoping that no sepulchral echo-voice answers back “you’re an idiot”-which would be eerily like what happened in The Grinch, starring Jim Carrey and directed by Ron Howard.

In the photo below, Ron Howard is on the right.

I’m whacking my head because I realize that I actually need to ponder how many households there are in Calgary, and then work from that number. (Recognize that inside my main Fermi Problem there is this other Baby Fermi Problem-which is to estimate how many households there are in Calgary.) But I’m taking my medication regularly, so I’m able to move past this. I simply hypothesize that there are 250,000 households in Calgary given a million people; that takes me down to 1500 black and white, high-strung canines descended from Old Hemp, who got some air-time in the last column. Anyway, 1500 is an estimate I can live with, even if I stop taking my medication.

So now you know what a Fermi Problem is. But you’re still in the dark about when in tarnation you should write the word “three” and when you should write the digit “3”. This is a different type of problem, one that I threatened to talk about as I was finishing off the column about Superman’s Water Pik. Or was it Superman’s Memory Crystals? I forget which.

The person in this next photo is none other than E.B. White, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New Yorker, animal lover, children’s book author and also co-author of The Elements of Style. Just FYI, The Elements of Style is not a book about what not to wear. It’s a book about what not to write.

Various sources including White himself agree that you should spell out numerals when they denote numbers less than 100. This would include numerals like three, fifty-two and ninety-six. Therefore, a numeral like two thousand and sixteen should actually be written as 2016, AS LONG AS THAT NUMERAL DOESN`T START A SENTENCE.

So you should write “Two thousand border collies competed at the last All-Australian Sheep Herding Open held in 2015, in Iceland” but you shouldn’t write “2000 border collies were recently shot into low Earth orbit”, even if that’s true.

But what about the sentence: “2015 was a good year for Icelandic sheep-herders.” ?

That sentence is OK, because both E.B. White and the Associated Press Stylebook say you can start a sentence with a numeral when that numeral signifies a year.You also don’t have to stop and wonder why in hell the All-Australian Sheep Herding Open would be held in Iceland if you skirt around the whole issue like I did.

You can spend as much time as you want researching all this in more detail, and look up the distinction between a number and a numeral while you’re at it. Personally, I need to move on now to talk about a large pig named Christopher Hogwood.

“The Good Good Pig” is the biography of Christopher, who starts out as a runty piglet just like that other famous-but-fictional pig Wilbur. Whereas Wilbur was adopted by a small girl named Fern, Christopher was adopted by author, New Hampshire resident, and itinerant animal lover Sy Montgomery and her husband Howard. (Howard is also an author and also resides in New Hampshire, in case you were wondering.)

Christopher comes to enjoy an increasingly-intimate relationship with Sy, Howard and the Earth’s gravitational field, over the course of his fourteen peaceful years, eventually attaining an impressive weight of 752 pounds. And like Wilbur, Christopher eventually dies of natural causes, surrounded by many loving admirers, and lots of spiders.

If you already know who E.B. White is, I think you should read The Good Good Pig right away. If you have already read The Good Good Pig, I think you should read Charlotte’s Web right away. If you have already read Charlotte’s Web, you should re-read it. I cry at the end every time I read it, and my kids always make fun of me for it; I don’t care.

But let’s get back to Christopher. Sy Montgomery has this to say: “As Christopher’s girth increased, so did our doubts about who was in charge at our house. Not only was Chris destined to vastly outweigh us, but we faced a growing realization that our pig was dangerously, possibly diabolically, brilliant.” Frankly, I find the concept of a diabolically brilliant, 752-pound animal just a tad unsettling.

In addition to his formidable brainpower, Christopher also developed a formidable appetite for beer. Howard gave him a swig of Rolling Rock one hot summer day in his (Christopher’s) piglet-hood, soundly reasoning: “After all, what is beer but liquid grain?” Christopher demonstrated the truth of that statement by polishing off the Rolling Rock, then a Corona and then a Genesee Cream Ale, burping loudly and then proceeding to gain another 700 or so pounds.

Later in life, he became friends with a Border Collie named Tess. (I swear on Ron Howard’s driver’s license that I am not making that up.) Christopher also joined A.A. and the Libertarian Party, in no particular order. The Libertarian tendency was verified by Dick Amidon, the Montgomery’s family friend, former chief of staff for the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and a Republican-turned-Libertarian.

Holding forth on Christopher’s political leanings, Dick said, “If there’s ever been an example of a Libertarian pig, that’s Christopher. He’s his own person; he doesn’t want overregulation-all the things that Libertarians look for. He’s a free spirit.”

Now after reading all this, many of you may be seized by a powerful urge to move to New Hampshire. If so, I suggest you get in touch with realtor Mark Warden, the owner of Porcupine Real Estate in Manchester, NH. Mr. Warden’s firm does about 90 percent of its business with Libertarians who want to move to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project. You can read the article entitled “Why Libertarians Are (Still) Plotting to Take Over New Hampshire” here:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/libertarians-new-hampshire-free-state

The picture depicts Mr. Warden standing in front of the New Hampshire State Capitol building. Or maybe it’s Thomas Jefferson. I forget. Anyway, in the article, Mr. Warden says, “A lot of my clients want to be self-sufficient—whether that’s living off the grid and growing their own food, wanting to shoot border collies into space, hunt on their own property, or being able to raise pigs and chickens without zoning laws interfering…We speak the same language.”

I think I made up that part about the border collies. And maybe the part about Thomas Jefferson. But you should still read Madison’s article after you finish packing and reading Charlotte’s Web.

I learned many interesting things about Libertarians from that article, such as the fact that they have adopted the porcupine (also known as the “quill pig”) as their mascot because it is “a peaceful creature that defends itself when attacked.” And according to Critter Control, who have been “protecting people, property and wildlife in New Hampshire since 1983” (http://nh.crittercontrol.com/services/porcupine/) there are lots of porcupines in New Hampshire.

I want to finish now, but before I go, I want to share with you a couple of pictures taken from the promo piece for Tom Hanks’ new movie: “Quill Pig at Large.”

The first picture depicts a New Hampshire porcupine, bearing a faint resemblance to Enrico Fermi, frowning with concentration and thinking seriously about emigrating to the Valley of 1000 Hills, Botha’s Hill, Kwazulu Natal, South Africa, home of the Porcupine Quill Micro Brewery and Deli.

The second photo (below) is an unretouched image of a heat exchanger situated on the wall of the Porcupine Quill Micro Brewery and Deli.

I have absolutely no idea why Tom Hanks thought you would want to see a picture of their heat exchanger, but I hear their food is fabulous.

The beer is good too.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Superman’s Memory Crystals

Posted on June 7, 2016May 6, 2018 by George Gillson

Seems to me that at the end of the last column about Octopuses, I threatened to devote this column to interesting facts about border collies. So let’s take that off the table right now: this column is probably not going to be about border collie facts, although I might segue to some border collie facts at some point. I haven’t decided yet.

But before I go any farther I want to say for the record that the only reason I watched all 220 episodes of Smallville was to humor a small boy who I’ll call Andrew (not his real name). Remember, when you’re talking about distance, use farther; when you not talking about distance, use further. Remember also that you use whom when there’s a preposition involved, such as in this sentence: ”Whom shall I give this last piece of piecaken to?” And when there’s no preposition involved, use who.

Anyway, “Andrew” and I watched Smallville, which everyone knows is the story of Clark Kent (not his real name) growing up in Smallville, after he plummeted to Earth in an escape pod. His parents Jor-El and Lara put the baby Kal-El in the escape pod because the star around which their home planet Krypton orbited was about to go nova. When Kal-El got to Earth he did a lot of stuff including getting a new name and getting an “A” in welding shop.

He also lifted tractors, rescued Lana Lang and Lois Lane and made it to school on time even when his alarm clock was set for 8:59 AM. (School started at 9:00 AM in Smallville.)

clark-kent-superspeed-smallville-11191776-300-448 — Almost late, but not quite!

When he wasn’t busy rescuing Lana Lang and Lois Lane, navigating his troubled relationship with his friend Lex Luthor (What’s with the LL’s anyway?), meeting his cousin Kara Zor-El aka Supergirl, and battling people from other dimensions, he would often retreat to his Fortress of Solitude and Teen Angst. (FOSATA for short.)

Now we normal teens had to make do with the bathroom, but Clark was fortunate enough to be able to retreat to his nifty hangout located somewhere above the Arctic Circle, when things got too intense between him and his adoptive parents Martha and Jonathan Kent. (Oddly enough, Jonathan Kent looked eerily like a guy I know named Darr-Ell Jones, but that’s another story.)

We never did find out whether the FOSATA had a bathroom, but what it did have was a veritable forest of these Memory Crystals, which contained all the accumulated wisdom of Krypton, plus holograms of Jor-el and Lara, plus a complete list of all 93 weird forms of Kryptonite Clark would eventually encounter, plus his Kryptonian Social Security number.

So these Kryptonian crystals, no doubt, were the inspiration for researchers at the University of Southampton Optical Research Centre (USORC for short), conveniently located in Southampton, England, to develop Earth versions. They devised a way to encode huge amounts of information in ultrapure, glassy silicon wafers, which have been touted to last “until the Sun burns out”. Remember that if I was talking about suns in particular no capitalization is required, but since I am talking about our sun, I use Sun. Just like if I were talking about the upcoming election for President of the United States (POTUS for short) I would say the Presidential Election, not presidential election. But I digress.

Now as we all know, data storage here on Earth, is an ongoing problem. Magnetized tape (cassettes, videotape, etc) only lasts about 50 years. Data stored on chips fares better but is still prone to corruption by radiation, alien electromagnetic pulses (EMPs for short) and high temperatures.

“Honey, where’s our terabyte drive?”

“Dang, I accidentally left it in the oven to keep it safe from alien EMPs. Bye-bye all six seasons of Downton Abbey.”

But glass lasts a long time, even longer than Styrofoam, but even Styrofoam isn’t going to last billions of years, which is why the USORC scientists focused on etching trillions of bits in the depths of ultrapure, glassy silicon wafers, using a femtosecond laser.

In the words of ORC professor (not an orc) Peter Kalansky: “It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information (editor’s note: aren’t documents information?) and store it in space for future generations. This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization, including the 2016 Presidential debates, and all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten. Plus, we’re really into femtosecond lasers.”

(A femtosecond laser emits really short pulses, a lot shorter than the time it takes “Andrew” (mentioned earlier) to pick up his socks after he’s been asked 200 times. )

The technology hasn’t been commercialized yet, but so far the researchers have preserved noble documents including the King James Bible, the Magna Carta, Isaac Newton’s “Opticks” treatise (about optics, oddly enough) and all six seasons of Downton Abbey.

So all this immediately got me putting together a list of things I want to see preserved in these wafers:

How to make perfect hard-boiled eggs which you can peel without the annoying “Membrane Problem”. This is a non-trivial problem, by the way. So far my favorite method is The Cold Start, where you carefully place cold eggs into boiling water, then turn the heat down to “the barest simmer” and cook for 13 minutes. Not 12 minutes or 14 minutes: 13 minutes. If you have a better way, let me know.
How to sort the laundry so your wife doesn’t get on your case: “NEXT TIME, that needs to washed on the delicate setting, in the tears of a virgin gathered under a full moon, Honey.”
How to plumb your in-floor heating so that you don’t burn out two hot water tanks in five years, not that I’m bitter.
The Octopus Garden Cocktail: take 3 parts gin; add 1 part dry vermouth; shake with ice; strain; garnish with a baby octopus and a black olive; apologize to PETOBO (short for People for the Ethical Treatment of Baby Octopuses)
How to make Dyson vacuum cleaners: For those of you with overt or latent OCD tendencies, Dyson vacuum cleaners are the greatest invention since fire, or maybe Lululemon yoga wear.
Segue Alert!! How to get the stains out of your carpet after you feed your Border Collie a wide variety of foods including shrimp, bacon, steak and chicken: Also not a trivial problem. Use some kind of oxidizing agent plus Dawn dish detergent.
Second Segue Alert!! Border Collies in General: Did you know that all modern border collies (note the non-use of capitals!) are descended from Old Hemp b. 1893. “Chaser” holds the world record for vocabulary: 1000 words including: “Stop looking at me with that wired, intense stare. It’s creepy.” And don’t forget “Striker” who can open a non-electric car door in 11.4 seconds. Also a world record, and a strong reminder of the old adage: never turn your back on the ocean.
The old adage: Never turn your back on the ocean.
Extreme German Unicycling or How to ride a unicycle down something you wouldn’t even walk down: I can ride a unicycle, but this guy is basically insane, plus I’m dying to know what he’s saying on the video clip.
This joke: Q: What do you call a part-time band leader? A: A semiconductor!

Clearly, I need more, and better, material for my list. If you have suggestions, send them to me and I’ll eventually send them to USORC, who will eventually send them to Elon Musk, who will eventually send them into space along with a kick-ass recipe for potato salad, Martian-style. (This gives me a great idea for a movie, by the way.)

Meanwhile, I’m going to drink a cocktail, spark up my Dyson, vacuum up some fluff and then I might re-watch Smallville: Episode 220. You know, it’s the one where Clark finally gets his pilot’s license…plus a hefty fine from the Federal Aviation Administration. (FAA for short)

Next column: When to spell out a number, and when to just use the number itself.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Octopus Update

Posted on April 5, 2016December 11, 2017 by George Gillson

I know a lot of you are wondering the same thing I have been wondering lately: exactly what are all the octopuses doing on the ocean floor when we’re not keeping an eye on them? I’m happy to report that after extensive research by agents of The Department of Keeping Tabs on Octopuses, it’s safe to say that they are doing plenty of interesting stuff. It’s actually pretty hard to know where to start.

Octopus means “Eight footed” in Greek, so if you’re going to talk about more than one octopus, Greek convention dictates that you use “octopuses” as the plural. Some people prefer “octopi” or “octopodes”, but to me, octopi sounds like a dessert, and octopode sounds either like some kind of worm or maybe a radio tube. So I’m using octopuses. And my mother was Greek. By the way, octopuses have arms, not tentacles. Tentacles only have one sucker. Each octopus arm has around 250 independent suckers. Each sucker is roughly as intelligent as a small border collie.

Octopuses are smart creatures, generally regarded as the most intelligent of all invertebrates even when you include politicians. They are master problem solvers, escape artists and camouflage experts. Rumor has it that octopuses are even being trained as special operatives by the U.S. Military, due to their unique abilities and powerful brains.

There are myriads of coconut shells lying around in many places on the ocean floor, mostly near places where there are coconut palms, oddly enough, and some octopuses have used this to their advantage. The octopus pictured below is comfortably ensconced in its coconut-shell house, already looking a lot like Casper the Friendly Ghost but still thinking hard about what it’s going to wear for Hallowe’en.

But there’s more.

Julian Finn, an octopus researcher in Melbourne, Australia, was probably one of the first to report that members of at least one species of octopus have learned to carry two coconut shells around, scuttling about with an awkward gait known as “stilt walking”.

The following is a link to a clip of an octopus in field training as a Navy SEAL (Slimy Eerie Aquatic Leptosome) displaying its ability to seamlessly segue from stilt-walking to defensive maneuvering under enemy fire: Octopus Stilt-Walking

If you can’t be bothered to watch the clip, here’s a capsule summary: a veined octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) lumbers along the seafloor, minding its own business and lugging its coconut shells. Suddenly it stops, hops into one of the shells, pulls the other shell over top itself like a helmet, then rolls off down an incline.

Why did it do this? No one knows. Maybe it was late for supper. And since you asked, supper for an octopus consists mostly of shellfish, which it consumes by “drilling a hole in the shell and slurping out the soft parts.” I’m not sure how an octopus drills a hole though.

Male Octopus: “Honey, I just broke another drill bit. I’m going to hop into my coconut-shell vehicle and roll over to Underwater Tool Den for a new one. Don’t wait up.”

Female Octopus (aka “Hen”): OK. If you wake me up I’m going to peck you mercilessly.

The only thing wrong with that scenario is that octopuses are solitary creatures who only get together to mate. Sadly, not long after they mate, they both die. No wonder they’re solitary.

But sometimes the male’s demise is, for lack of a better word, untimely. People are studying this for a living. I know, because I found a paper which includes a positively riveting account of a hapless male octopus who was attacked, suffocated, had its ink-sac punctured and was ultimately cannibalized by a hen after mating with her 13 times in 3.5 hours. (That male probably had it coming.) It’s a great paper which includes some beautiful color photos featuring coral, octopuses and ink-clouds.

I don’t know about you, but I happen to think that all this business with the coconut shells demonstrates a pretty fair degree of intelligence. Man didn’t invent the automobile until the last 150 years or so, but octopuses have probably been rolling around the ocean floor in their shell vehicles since their debut in the Carboniferous Period more than 300 million years ago. (By the way, the Carboniferous Period is that epoch in Earth’s history when nobody was worrying much about carbon dioxide.)

But intelligent creatures are easily bored, so if you stick an octopus in a tank, you need to give it some stuff to diddle with, otherwise it will probably try to escape. You have to basically weld the lid on to the tank because an octopus can fit through a pretty small hole, as shown in this faintly disturbing video clip: Octopus oozing through a small opening

If it can’t escape, a bored octopus might resort to amusing itself by chewing on things such as one of its arms. (Don’t worry; the arm will grow back.) This sounds suspiciously like my border collie, Mickey. He too, is easily bored and will amuse himself by selecting one toy out of his vast array and worrying at it until all the stuffing comes out. So far he still has all his appendages though. From time to time, when I’m bored, I amuse myself by wondering what would happen if you crossed an octopus with a border collie.

When I was trolling the Web for octopus facts, I got to thinking about how people decide how many interesting facts they will post about any given topic. The first few sites I went to listed an even number of octopus facts. So I thought hmmm…octopuses have eight arms and eight is an even number. Maybe I’m on to something here…But then I started running across sites that listed prime, or at least odd numbers of octopus facts: 11, 15, 35. So much for my theory.

The only thing I can safely conclude is that there are a lot of octopus-fact sites out there, and most of these sites reference a book by Katherine Harmon Courage called: Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea. I have a copy but I haven’t read it yet. I think you should get one. Then you won’t have to rely on me for your octopus information.

Speaking of information, one site I went to noted that octopuses are “limited in their ability to gather information” due to their short lifetimes. That’s probably a good thing. Who knows what one would do if it had more information. Run for President maybe?

There’s a lot more I could get into, such as the copper content of their (blue) blood, their ink, their hectocotyli (don’t ask) and last but not least, the “Dumbo Octopus”.

I’m running out of space, so I’m going to close with a few simple dictums for would-be octopus owners:

Never give your octopus access to any books; especially not ones about making weapons.
Don’t put a shark you happen to be fond of together with an octopus. A big octopus can break the spine of a shark.
It’s OK to have other pets in the house if you have an octopus. I read about an octopus in Thunder Bay, Ontario that was friends with a dog. Whenever the dog pressed its nose to the tank, the octopus would come up to the glass and change colour: black where the dog’s nose touched the glass, and brown to match the rest of the dog.
By the way, if you own a border collie, consider getting an octopus to keep it company. If you have an octopus but no border collie, I might lend Mickey to you.
Consider letting your octopus run in the 2020 Presidential election. We could do worse.

Next column: Interesting facts about border collies

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Gravity Waves

Posted on February 16, 2016March 12, 2024 by George Gillson

There’s something that’s been on my mind for quite a while now but I just couldn’t seem to get inspired to write about it. In addition to seeming like I couldn’t get inspired, I actually couldn’t get inspired. And if I had gotten inspired, I would have written this already, wouldn’t I? Just saying.

All that changed recently when the detection of gravity waves was announced. I don’t know if it has already occurred to you, but it occurred to me, that The Gravity Waves actually sounds like a great name for a band. (Well maybe not great, but at least sort of quirky.) Again, just saying.

In order to get to the thing that has been on my mind for a long time, I first need to talk about gravity. But now I can’t bring up gravity without giving gravity waves a nod. But I can’t talk about gravity waves without giving spacetime a nod. So let’s start there.

Until Hermann Minkowski came along and gave the matter serious thought, we had this idea that space and time were two different things, like Bernie Saunders and Hilary Clinton. In 1908, he (Minkowski, not Bernie Saunders) came up with the notion that the best way to look at the Universe is with a 4-dimensional coordinate system called spacetime, consisting of three spatial dimensions and a time dimension thrown in for good measure.

Spacetime is great because it helps us do the math to understand why objects that move really fast look smaller, and don’t age as fast as slower-moving objects. This could explain why Jane Fonda doesn’t look like she is 78 years old; she’s probably spent some time zipping around at close to the speed of light.

Anyway, after Minkowski held forth about spacetime, Einstein went on to postulate that cataclysmic gravitational events like the collision of two black holes, the explosion of stars or the vigorous grappling of sumo wrestlers, can generate waves that propagate at the speed of light through spacetime, warping it as they go.

The predicted magnitude of the warping is pretty tiny though, on the order of 1 attometer or 10^—18m, which is, by the way, roughly about the distance a 14-year old boy moves when he is asked to clean up the kitchen.

Einstein thought that gravity waves would be too weak to detect, but for decades since the early 1900’s, scientists at many facilities including The Department of Measuring Really Tiny Things and Drinking A Lot of Coffee, have been relentlessly trying to prove their existence. And finally, the good people at the United States-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO for short) have succeeded!

By the way, an interferometer is a sophisticated instrument that is capable of measuring the attometer-sized changes in the distances that two laser beams travel as they bounce back and forth inside it, interfering with each other.

Laser Beam #1: Stop that!

Laser Beam #2: Owww. That really hurt.

Laser Beam #1: Owww back. Keep your E-field to yourself.

Laser Beam #2: Keep your M-field out of my grill.

Laser Beam #1: You’re bossy.

This next picture shows two LIGO physicists thinking about going for their 30^thcoffee of the day while they wait for the next gravity wave to come smoking in.

The detection of gravity waves is big news, because not only does it confirm that Einstein was top-notch in the thinking-about-arcane-stuff-department, it also allows us to see farther back in time than we ever could before, it deepens our understanding of gravity and it may even help us to formulate the long sought-after physics Theory of Everything. (Unfortunately, it probably won’t help me figure out the rules I’m supposed to be following when sorting laundry.)

But all this talk about gravity finally gets me to the thing that has been bothering me for a long time. Actually, it’s two related things.

The first thing is how John Carter (the adventurous brainchild of Edgar Rice Burroughs) was able to leap multiple city blocks 40-feet in the air within an hour or so of arriving on Mars.

The second thing is how the apparent size of The Hulk changes dramatically depending on what Hulk movie you happen to be watching, and even within any given movie.

I reckoned that the John Carter issue probably had something to do with the decreased gravity on Mars. And I really didn’t know what to make of the Hulk issue. Local variations in the strength of the Earth’s gravitational field maybe? (OK, I’m reaching here.) But you know what? A bunch of other people have been scratching their heads about these exact same issues! Weird, huh?

At this site ( Kevin Carr weighs in )an astute chap by the name of Kevin Carr weighed in on John Carter:

“Some have said that John Carter was the first action hero and possibly the first superhero. After all, he certainly acted like one, leaping across the Martian desert. These feats of leg strength began when he first arrives on Mars, learning to walk on a new planet. Once he gets his Mars legs, John Carter is able to jump like the athletic love child of Superman and Michael Jordan. It starts with long bounds, but soon he is able to vertically leap over people, Martians, and even several city blocks about half-way through the film.”

Rice Burroughs himself chalked this up to reduced gravity and thinner air on Mars. For sure the air (mostly CO₂) is quite a bit thinner over there, but gravity is still only about 1/3 as strong as what it is on Earth, and I don’t see anyone leaping even one city block here in Calgary, much less anywhere else on Earth, so I remain puzzled. Maybe John Carter was eating a lot of potatoes. (see “The Martian”).

Or maybe he just became very buffed by walking his Martian dog. It’s a big dog.

This brings me to The Hulk aka Bruce Banner. Like I said, I’m not the only one noodling over this whole business of exactly how big Bruce gets when he needs to save Earth from Aliens or can’t find a pair of matching socks or whatever.

On the site What is the canonical size of The Hulk someone asked this rather long question:

“I’ve noticed that in the recent Hulk movies his size varies from movie to movie. I’ve heard, but don’t know for a fact that the size of the Hulk seemed to change during the 2003 Eric Bana Hulk movie. In the Ed Norton version he seems to be 2-3 stories tall. But in the more recent Avengers movie I’d say he was more like 2-3 meters. I can see why he is made smaller in this movie, since he was going to go toe-to-toe with Thor. So, is there a size that is ever mentioned in the comics? Or do the comics leave room for his size to change to fit the situation?”

(Just in case you’re wondering, canonical means: “a natural unique representation of an object, or a preferred notation for some object” as well as “authorized, recognized, accepted.”)

Marvel.com says Hulk can be anywhere from 6’6″ to 8’, depending on what color he is and how mad he happens to be. I thought Hulk only came in one color (green) but apparently not. And I swear that in one movie I saw, Hulk was 2- or 3-stories tall. Turns out that I just need to go back to film school. Someone with the Twitter handle Krillgar clarified things for all of us, me included:

“He wasn’t 2-3 stories tall. In the scene where he jumps out of the covered bridge at the school, they’re using a low angle looking up from the ground right at his feet. If he was 2 or 3 stories tall, his head would have been scraping the ceiling of the soda plant in Brazil. He was probably around 7’6″ – 8′ tall in The Incredible Hulk.”

So it’s all just camera angles. I should have thought of that. But I guess that settles the Hulk issue! And it’s important because there are a lot of Hulk movies.

You know, I was originally going to come at this John Carter/Hulk stuff from the angle of genetics, and whether great athletes are born or are simply the product of intense training/teleportation/10,000 hours, etc. But I’ll leave that for another time when I talk about some of these new sports like Footrug, Aqua Cricket and Gravity Wave Surfing.

Maybe the quickest way to get to the bottom of the John Carter issue once and for all is to just go to Mars myself. It looks like that will actually be possible in the relatively near future, because in case you didn’t know, Elon Musk and his brilliant, hard-working crew at SpaceX (headquarters conveniently located at 1 Rocket Road, Hawthorne, California) are drinking inhuman amounts of coffee, racing their Teslas, and feverishly laboring to do just that: get Mankind to other planets, Mars being first on their list.

If anyone has gravity figured out, I’ll bet SpaceX does.

I hear they’re hiring, so I’m just going to shoot (!) my resume on down to Hawthorne, CA.

As soon as I finish waxing my gravity wave surfboard.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Food Mashups and Other Topics

Posted on December 28, 2015December 11, 2017 by George Gillson

For some reason, I want to spend some time today writing about food mashups. I also want to mention a new form of matter called spin-liquid. I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to segue from food mashups to spin liquid yet, but like Roy McAvoy said in Tin Cup: “When a defining moment comes along you define the moment or the moment defines you.” So here goes…

Alert readers know that a mashup is “a mixture or fusion of disparate elements”. So for example you could record together a bunch of different music tracks and wind up with something that sounds like five cats, a parrot and a bunch of empty tin cans loose in a dryer set to “De-wrinkle”.

You could build a house mashup by starting with a dwelling for your pet turtle but then keep adding bits on to the original project as you keep trading up to successively larger pets, as outlined in “Why I Built Fallingwater” by Frank Lloyd Wright.

As you can see in the photo below, we have a turtle house grafted on to a duck pen commingled with a rabbit hutch fused to a cat enclosure wedded with a dog kennel. The nanny goat is trying to convince the boy to become the next occupant but something goes wrong, and instead the goat ends up living in the final structure along with a horse, an elephant (not shown) and a sperm whale (not shown). Or maybe it was a right whale. Or maybe I have the right whale but the wrong anecdote.

Anyway, enough of that nonsense. With the holiday season upon us, it’s time for some other nonsense about food mashups. I forgot about food mashups for a long time after first learning about the Turducken years ago. As we all know, the Turducken is a deboned chicken stuffed inside a deboned duck tucked inside a deboned turkey. Sort of like nesting Russian Dolls that you can eat. According to one article I read, Turducken were popularized by noted chef Paul Prudhomme. Note that here I am using Turducken to denote both the singular and plural cases. I could probably have used Turduckens for the plural case, now that you mention it.

I was astounded (well maybe not that astounded) to find out that this notion of an infinite (well maybe not infinite, but pretty darned long) series of cooked birds nestled inside progressively larger cooked birds extends back through time all the way to the early Romans who, by the way, are also credited with the invention of Tums.

So anyway my point is that of late, I hadn’t been spending a lot of time thinking about food mashups in general or Turducki in particular. (Or is it Turducken? Turduckens? I’m still not clear on this point.) Then I heard about Piecakens, courtesy of noted Toronto chef, Arden Longmuir.

Outwardly, the typical piecaken looks like your basic frosted cake, but if you take the trouble to do a terahertz scan of the thing, you will discover that there are one or more pies sequestered inside the “cake”. If you don`t have a terahertz scanner you can just cut it open and reach the same conclusion.(A terahertz scanner is that thing at the airport that can show people what you look like in the nude.)

Piecakens usually offer up between 40,000 and 60,000 calories per slice, enough to satisfy the average fully-grown Kraken for several days. You`ll recall that Krakens are giant sea monsters said to inhabit the coastal waters of Norway and Greenland.

People think that piecakens are a relatively new phenomenon, but like the Turducken, the concept can actually be traced far back in time, zooming past the Romans and going all the way to the early Jurassic Era. (I may be lying about this last bit, as there were no terahertz scanners in the Jurassic Era.)

Actually, a coffee table book author by the name of Charles Phoenix says that in 2007 he invented a type of piecaken called a cherpumple, which is a mashup of cherry, apple and pumpkin pies. He’s not sure if he’s the first person to have had the notion to stick a pie inside a cake, but he reckons he is the first person to have made Internet headlines by doing so. But regardless of their origin, foods like the piecaken and its evil twin sister the cherpumple are everywhere these days. The piecaken even won a spot on Kelly and Michael just after Thanksgiving 2015; Kelly wisely chewed on a brochure picturing a piecaken, sparing herself 73 extra hours on the treadmill.

But it turns out that for sheer ingenuity, the Inuit of Greenland and Canada are eating the collective lunches of Kelly Ripa, the ancient Romans and all the denizens of the early Jurassic Era, terahertz scanners or no. But almost no one is eating the lunches of the Inuit when they are serving a traditional winter food called Kiviak.

Kiviak is made by gutting a seal and stuffing the blubber-lined carcass with hundreds of Little Auks (Alle alle), which are tiny starling-sized seabirds (also known as Dovekies). I swear on Dave Barry`s driver`s license that I am not making any of this up.

The first thing you are probably asking yourself is why don`t the Inuit use Great Auks? Well Great Auks are too big for one, and secondly there aren’t any Great Auks left because they were all eaten by the Kraken. (Or is it the Krakens? I’m still not clear on this point.)

Anyway, the auk-stuffed carcass is sewn up and left to ferment under a pile of rocks for up to 18 months. Below we are seeing an actual seal carcass, looking a lot like the pod of some kind of large Alien insect, being slit open in readiness for lunch. I swear on Sigourney Weaver`s driver`s license that I am not making up so much as a single syllable of any of this, either.

According to foodie Marissa Brassfield, the seal’s fat acts as a tenderizer and preservative; this enables people to eat the birds raw, bones and all. Apparently it is even common practice to bite off the tiny bird’s heads and then suck out the juices, which are chock-full of nutrients. Kiviak apparently tastes like some kind of ripe cheese and since it is quite pungent, it is eaten outdoors, typically about 500 miles offshore. Even Krakens won’t touch it with a hundred-foot tentacle.

Kiviak is considered a special treat to celebrate weddings, birthdays, Christmas and other special occasions such as the discovery of spin-liquid, which was announced late this year by physics professor Takashi Imai at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, located about 2900 kM southwest of Nuuk, the capital city of Greenland.

Spin-liquid, existing in theory for more than forty years, was recently confirmed in crystalline matter chilled to -272 °C and subjected to magnetic fields 60,000 times stronger than Earth`s. Under these conditions the electrons refuse to line up in opposite-spin pairs, and remain in an unresolved, or “liquid” state. I don`t know about you, but if someone tried to chill me to -272 °C and subject me to a ferocious magnetic field I would probably be a little ornery too.

Currently there are no practical applications for this new material, but I`m going to give it some thought as soon as I finish the last –buuurp-helping of this new food mashup I just dreamed up: strands of red licorice threaded through corn dogs baked in banana peels and garnished with Worcestershire sauce.

Just remember; you read it here first.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Material World

Posted on November 9, 2015December 11, 2017 by George Gillson

These past couple of millennia, many people have been thinking that here on Earth we are way too attached to the material plane of existence. Consider the sheer panic you experience when you can’t find your wallet or glasses, and the corresponding relief you feel when you touch your hair and say what the hell is my wallet doing in my hair?

Even worse, what about when you’re on Mars, minding your own business when suddenly you’re seized by a feeling of overwhelming vertigo: OMG, where’d I park the MAV? (MAV stands for Mars Ascent Vehicle aka spaceship.) But then just as suddenly, a sense of peace washes over you as you realize: what the heck. It’s just a spaceship. I’m getting way too attached to the material plane of existence.

That helps you to get a grip and remember that you parked the MAV in the second crater to the north, not the fifteenth crater to the southwest. So it’s all good.

And hey, things could be a lot worse. You could have a piece of an antenna protruding from your thorax, your crewmates could have ditched you, taking the MAV with them, and you could be stuck on Mars for the next two years with nothing to eat but potatoes.

Anyway, my point here is that this feeling of missing something that’s actually not missing is pretty common, and maybe it has something to do with being over-attached to the material plane of existence and maybe it doesn’t.

But consider this:

You, talking to your sister on your cellphone: “So, Sis, then the Marine says to the State Trooper, ‘Was I speeding Ossifer?’ to which the State Trooper replies, ‘Why do you have an unconscious raccoon on the floor of your vehicle?’ ”

Your sister: “That’s hilarious! Can you text me that link?”

You: “Sure. I’ll do it right now.”

You reach for your cellphone and for a moment, a wave of unadulterated terror sweeps over you when you can’t find it. But then you realize that you’re actually talking into it as you search. There’s a medical term for this phenomenon called: Dude You’re Way Too Attached to Your Cellphone.

There’s another everyday cellphone-related occurrence called Phantom Vibration Syndrome in which you experience the illusion that your phone is vibrating when it’s actually minding its own business, continually broadcasting your location, pulse rate and shoe size to agents of The Department of There’s Alot of Stuff Going On That You Don’t Know About So Just Don’t Ask OK?. There’s a fairly complicated explanation of how the illusion works, involving your microbiome, time travel and a few other concepts, but the long and short of it is that you’re way too attached to your cellphone. At least your peripheral nervous system is.

And speaking of being attached to material things, here’s yet another everyday example: Once again you’re sitting there on Mars, eating your breakfast of potatoes. Or maybe it’s lunch. Or dinner. Or a snack. Or another snack. Anyway, you’re sitting there thinking about the starch you’re downing, and how your blood sugar is rising, and that in turn your insulin is rising and that you have another 583 days of eating potatoes to contemplate when suddenly you’re seized by an almost otherworldly (!) sensation of loss, and you think to yourself:

“Insulin? Insulin? OMG, where’s my pancreas??”

But then a sense of calm returns when you say to yourself No! Wait. What was I thinking? It’s one of my internal organs!

There’s also a medical term for this and it’s called Reading Way Too Much Stuff About Paleo Diets. Or maybe it’s that other medical term: Martian Women Don’t Eat Potatoes But Even If They Did, They Wouldn’t Get Fat.

Last but not least, there’s that weird thing that happens when you’re standing on your treadmill at work and you start poking icons on the screen of your desktop computer and then wonder why nothing is happening. Or you’re punching numbers into your cellphone and wondering why nothing is registering on your desktop screen.

Of course there’s a medical term for this and it’s called Not Every Computer In The World Is Made By Apple, And That’s Your Cellphone Not Your Keyboard, Numbskull. No seriously. There is a bona fide medical term for futilely poking your desktop screen and it’s called Touchscreen Illusion Syndrome. You would think that these medical writers could be a tad more creative when they’re naming these syndromes. But that’s not my point.

My point is that I’m running out of descriptors (sheer panic , overwhelming vertigo, unadulterated terror, otherworldly (!) sensation of loss) to express the distress we all feel when we can’t find our stuff. It’s starting to make me a bit edgy. I don’t know if there’s a name for getting panicky thinking about getting panicky, but before we know it, we’re all going to be wandering around wondering if we’re way too attached to the material plane of existence, patting our pockets to make sure our cellphones are still there, muttering Edward Lear poetry and worrying about our insulin.

I think everybody needs to just sit down and have another French Fry. And another. And another…

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Craggy Island Calculus Problem

Posted on November 5, 2015December 11, 2017 by George Gillson

For the sake of argument, say that you happen to be standing on the edge of a beach off the coast of Ireland, directly facing a little island called Craggy Island. Fans of the British television series “Father Ted” will be getting excited at this point, since Father Ted and his fellow renegade priests were exiled to Craggy Island due to some unspecified but nevertheless unsavory behaviour. But more on that some other time.

Where was I? Oh yes! For some inexplicable reason, you have been seized by a powerful urge to kayak to the island, but you don’t know how far away it is. Assume you’ve never seen “Jaws”. How could you determine the length of your impending voyage?

Personally speaking, I would just call the Craggy Island Department of Tourism and Limpets (1-877-LIMPETS), and ask them how far it is to their island. But maybe there’s no answer when you call and maybe you just don’t like taking the easy way out. So now what?

Well…if you happen to know how fast the lighthouse beacon is rotating, and if you happen to know how fast the beam is sweeping toward you when it hits the (eerily-straight) shore 1/2 kM north of where you’re standing, you could say to yourself: “This sounds like a related-rate problem! I might be able to use Calculus to solve it!”

Since you have nothing better to do, you resist the urge to start paddling, so you fly home and spend the next few nights covering page after page with chicken scratch, basically re-deriving Calculus from first principles, since you haven’t taken it for 38 years or so. (The picture which should pop into your head at this point is that of a large beetle flipped over onto its carapace in front of a blackboard, feebly waving a piece of chalk clutched in its foreclaw.)

Finally, your son (who oddly enough happens to be taking Calculus at school) takes pity on you after witnessing your struggle and says, “Dad, why don’t you just Google it?”

Since you were born well before Al Gore invented the Internet, you look at him with a dumbfounded expression and reply, “What the heck would I Google?”

He regards you with a sorrowful expression and says,

“I dunno. Google is pretty clever. Try typing: ‘Calculus Lighthouse Problem.’ ”

You dutifully follow this directive and to your undying amazement, this search phrase returns a long string of hits, and one of them even refers to Craggy Island!

From there it’s just a short hop to a YouTube video clip (Calculus tutorial) made by an endearing fellow named Bart Snapp who solves your exact problem right before your very eyes! You really should watch this clip, mostly because I took the trouble to transcribe the intro almost word-for-word, but also because you will find yourself swept away by Bart’s patently obvious love of teaching in general, and Calculus in particular, and also because this guy is great at reading out loud. I quote:

“Hello there! Now we’re going to do a problem (waves hands energetically) about a beacon in the ocean, also known as a lighthouse of sorts. But we’re going to call it a beacon. All right?

“All right! Let’s see the problem! (Reads problem enthusiastically and eloquently.)

“All right. So we have our problem and now we have to… (he pauses for dramatic effect)…Draw a picture! (Bart starts sketching rapidly on a whiteboard)

“All right. So we have a, we have the shore here, and the shore’s supposed to be straight. (Draws more-or-less straight line)

“Well. Well that’s straight enough I guess. Here’s point A. (Draws the beacon on a line perpendicular to point A, and presses on)…the beacon has some light that is shining and let’s see…(adds some more notations like dϴ/dt and dx/dt to his diagram).

“What else?…Aha!

“And the water…This is all supposed to be water here. (Draws blue squiggles.) That’s great.”

And really, it is great because at that point you see that the beacon, the place where you’re standing directly opposite the lighthouse, and the point where the beam hits the shore 1/2 kM north of you, form a triangle, and you can relate the rotational speed of the beacon (in radians/sec of course) to the sweep rate of the beam along the shore, through trigonometry!

From there it’s only a matter of a couple more days of calculations until you figure out the lighthouse is 1 kM straight out from where you’re standing. You can easily handle a 1 kM paddle but then you find out that the last person who tried it was eaten by sharks. What should you do?

The first thing you should do is ask yourself whether this whole eaten-by-ravenous-sharks while-attempting-to-paddle-to-Craggy Island thing is true or is it an urban legend? And does Craggy Island even exist, or is it the product of the imagination of a couple of half-baked Irish writers named Arthur Matthews and Graham Linehan?

This is important because urban legends are everywhere these days, thanks to Al Gore, and you just can’t be too careful. Consider the story I read recently about an intoxicated Marine in the state of Kansas who was arrested after a failed attempt to foil his car ignition interlock by having a raccoon breathe into it.

Right away you have to be suspicious that this is an urban legend because there are no raccoons (or Marines for that matter) in the state of Kansas. Actually, I’m lying. I made up the Kansas part, and if you consult Google, you will discover that Kansas is literally teeming with raccoons. I quote from the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism website: “Highly intelligent and adaptable, the raccoon (Procyon lotor) is one of our most abundant furbearers. “ But all that aside, your first clue that the story is b.s. is that everyone knows Marines don’t drink.

Anyway, the point is that you have to be careful not to waste your time on drivel like the story of The Raccoon and The Breathalyzer. Instead I want you to recall The Owl and The Pussycat, a poem by British artist, illustrator, musician, cookbook author and all-around oddball Edward Lear (1812-1888) and then check out the poem I just wrote.

With apologies to all the people of Britain, except Prince Charles:

The Owl and the Pussycat did some maths, with the aid of Barton Snapp
They related dtheta to dx (by dt) but they found themselves in a trap
They set forth for the Isle but in a short while, the water began to boil
Attacked by a shark, in the cold and the dark, off shuffled their mortal coil(s).

Well, it’s time to shut this thing down. I’m going to heat up a plate of leftover limpets and then get ready for my paddle to Craggy Island first thing in the morning. But just one nagging thought remains:

I think I’m going to need a bigger boat.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Toilet Seat Lore

Posted on September 24, 2015January 25, 2021 by George Gillson

Well, it looks like I’m cranking these things out somewhat less often than I’d like to, but echoing the immortal words of John Cusack explaining to his prof why he was late to class in The Sure Thing (1985): “Well you see there was this problem and I’m late because of it.”

The problem is that a few weeks ago we woke up one morning and decided to adopt a seven year old border collie named Mickey. Everything you read about border collies says they need to have a job, so Mickey’s job is to play fetch 23 hours a day and look at me reproachfully the rest of the time.

So between Mickey and the treadmill, there’s not a lot of spare time these days. Plus, I didn’t have anything worth writing about until last week when we had visitors from head office, aka The Mothership. For the sake of argument, I’ll call one of the visitors Lisa Kearns (not her real name). “Lisa” was relaying to one of the people I share an office with what a great stay she had had in the Hotel Elan (otherwise known as the Hotel Elan), “a unique, business-friendly boutique hotel in Calgary, located uptown just off vibrant 17th Avenue SW.”

I wasn’t sure what a boutique hotel is so I Googled it.

A boutique hotel is “a small stylish hotel, typically situated in a fashionable urban location.” I read a few more entries and found a pearl of wisdom from Kobrun Vidisdottir, of Reykjavík, Iceland.

According to her, a boutique hotel is “an accommodation that makes their guests feel happy and contented while staying there, makes them feel extraordinary, makes them to realize that they should revert soon and makes them to recognize that this hotel is worth discussing with others.”

I followed most of what Kobrun was trying to say, but I got stuck at the part where she started talking about reverting. Reverting to what? Her maiden name? Windows 7? Human form? Then I figured out she meant return soon. Which reminds me, I should return to the theme of this column, which is supposed to be about toilets. But remind me to tell you a little bit more about Reykjavík in a minute.

Anyway, “Lisa” was going on about the heated and lighted toilet seat in her hotel room, which in her words “changed my life.” I asked her if her life routinely involved sitting on ice-cold toilet seats and she said no, the heated seat was just a particularly pleasant experience. Plus the underside of the seat was ringed with LEDs, which emitted a pleasing blue light.

Now this is important because everyone knows that if you wake up in the middle of the night and turn on a yellow or orange light, it will immediately shut down your melatonin. Everyone also knows that the last thing you want to do is sit on an ice-cold toilet seat and shut down your melatonin when all you really want to do is take a pee and go back to sleep. But I guess it’s this kind of thing that separates a normal hotel from a boutique hotel. It’s still sort of surreal though, like going to the bathroom in 2176 AD.

Speaking of going to the bathroom in 2176 AD, Calgary happens to have a few choice, futuristic, public washrooms strategically located about the city. I had the chance to use one a few years ago, but to refresh my memory about the entire experience, I paid a visit to one near my house, at the Tuscany LRT station. (My house is not at the Tuscany LRT station; the futuristic public washroom is at the Tuscany LRT station.)

For starters, it’s pretty futuristic-looking. You approach the door, push a button, the door slides open and you find yourself in a little room with a lot of stainless steel including a stainless-steel toilet, with no toilet seat.

You push another button (“Toilet Seat”) which triggers a bunch of disturbing mechanical noises. A panel in the wall slides open and a toilet seat deploys from behind the panel, spraying liquid in the process. (I am not making any of this up.) You half-expect that some robot arms with metallic claws will appear, seize your eyelids and pry them open, like in “A Clockwork Orange.” A mellifluous robotic voice guides you through the whole process, accompanied by a stirring rendition of “The Ride of the Valkryies.” (kidding)

You go to the bathroom, and if you can’t figure out how to flush, there are instructions to help. Once you wash your hands, the toilet seat folds back into its nook, the panel slides back down and you’re good to go. (I thought you went.)

But say you’re still sitting down or just remaining immobile for some reason (shock probably). The mellifluous robotic voice comes back on and tells you that you have about 20 seconds until the cubicle door opens, unless you start moving around soon. If you don’t move around, the voice starts counting down. Seriously.

I actually filmed this whole thing and you can check it out here:

(Futuristic Public Washroom video clip)

My son Ty got quite panicky once, when the mellifluous robotic voice announced the countdown while he was still working on Step 2 or whatever. He leaped up from his perch and began waving his arms madly, until he gained the precious seconds he needed to finish his business.

The whole setup is just so weird that I fully expected to emerge from that washroom to find myself catapulted two or three centuries past 2176 AD and face to face with a Dalek or else “Robot” from Lost in Space. “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!”

There is another high-end toilet (intended for household use although I’m sure a boutique hotel somewhere has one), which automatically deploys a menacing-looking probe from somewhere in the bowels (pun intended) of the toilet bowl. The probe emits a gentle spray of water which you direct with a complicated remote control. But since I can barely use my TV remote, I probably won’t buy one of those washing probe-equipped commodes, even if I could afford one. I’m saving up for a time machine.

Last but not least, if you happen to have to go potty in O’Hare Airport in Chicago, brace yourself. When you’re in the cubicle, you press a button on an apparatus situated on the back of the toilet. You hear mechanical noises and then a protective plastic sleeve shoots out and envelopes the toilet seat. You do what you went in for, then get up and after more mechanical whirring noises, the sleeve disappears into the apparatus behind the toilet seat.

My only question is: what happens to the sleeve you sat on? Do they just toss it, or is it sent back around for the next unsuspecting victim? I know, I probably shouldn’t worry about these things, but I just can’t help it. Call me a Luddite, but I just think things are getting way too complicated here in 2015.

I think I’ll move to Reykjavík. Quoting here from Randburg.com (whatever that is) about the downtown area: “The old city center is atmospheric and relaxed. Many excellent cafes, bars and restaurants are located there and there are also many shops, including stores specializing in traditional souvenirs and stocking a good selection of merchandise, including crafts, replicas of Viking artifacts, ceramics, jewelry, playing cards, books, calendars, sheepskin products – and Iceland’s famous wool products. “

Sounds great. I’m fresh out of Viking artifacts, so I’ll definitely check it out. But I bet the toilet seats are freezing.

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