Dave Barry – Page 3 – The Department of Lateral Thinking

A number of concerns…

Posted on July 5, 2019September 5, 2020 by George Gillson

The guy in the featured image is not me. Let’s get that straight right now. I don’t know who that guy is, but he looks worried. He could be worried about facial tics but probably not. Maybe he’s worried about his tie. I don’t know. More likely, if he’s from Earth, he could be worried about Smart Appliances. If he’s not worried about Smart Appliances, he probably should be.

Smart refrigerator thinking about ordering way more Unagi than you probably need

This refrigerator has an IP address. It’s probably smarter than you. And it’s probably best friends with Alexa. (Editor’s note: “Alexa” is a link to another LTD blog which deals with Alexa. You should check it out. P.S. LTD stands for Lateral Thinking Department.)

Anyways, this refrigerator allows you to share photos and calendars with the rest of your family. It also has three built-in cameras that take pictures of the goings-on inside of itself. And it mirrors your TV. It can probably keep track of exactly what foods are in there and when you’re running low on vitally important items like hot sauce and maybe Unagi (Japanese for eel). It’s probably in direct communication with your sock drawer. Or maybe your toilets. Or both. And your car. Anything is possible these days, not that I’m a Luddite or anything.

I just worry about all this connectivity. I also wish it would quit raining here in Calgary.

A great idea just occurred to me! Why don’t we just TALK to our families/members of our households instead of putting photos and calendars on the fridge? My son, for example, will often text us when he is inside the house. Why doesn’t he just surface from his lair/bedroom and talk to us in person? Or at least yell from upstairs: “Mom/Dad. I’m hungry! How do I find food?” I’m worried that in the future we will communicate mostly with our thumbs instead of our larynxes.

I’m also worried about the future of our hippocampi.

Our hippocampi reside in our brain. There’s one for the left side and one for the right. Like bookends. Sort of. They’re shaped like little seahorses. Among other things, they (the hippocampi) concern themselves with long term memory, keeping track of eel recipes and making mental maps of things like the streets of London, England. (If you happen to be a British cab driver.)

nattily-attired British cabbie — British cabbie displaying zero concern for his excellent tie

Apparently British cabbies have impressively-large hippocampi due to their need to construct large mental maps of the complex, tortured streets of London. Now British cabbies aside, your hippocampi would probably make a mental map of what’s in your fridge if you just let them. Your brain probably isn’t making any mental roadmaps, that’s for sure. You already outsourced that task to the nav system in your car. That’s my point. If we outsource all this stuff to our smart devices, our hippocampi will probably shrivel to the size of dessicated baby seahorses. And who wants dessicated baby seahorses in their brain?

Baby seahorse wondering how it will find food

All I’m saying is that if you don’t use it, you lose it. And I’m worried about this. (I also don’t want the fridge telling Alexa to order things like hot sauce. And shinguards. Even if I don’t have any shinguards in my fridge. Yet. (Editor’s note: “shinguards” is a link to another LTD blog which deals with the hazards of trimming the edges of your lawn.)

Plus, what’s going on in my fridge that I don’t know about? Nothing I hope. Why do I need pictures of the inside of my refrigerator??

None of this food is ambulatory, as far as I know. Or sentient. And as my Dad always used to say, “If you look for trouble hard enough, you’ll find it.” I have enough to worry about already. Now if I put a live octopus in my fridge, that’s an entirely different matter. (Editor’s note: “octopus” is a link to another LTD blog about the intelligence of octopi.)

If there was a live octopus in my fridge I would want to for sure keep an eye on it. Otherwise, next thing you know a truck would pull up on the driveway bearing $8,000 worth of saltwater aquarium equipment. And a case of shinguards. Just in case I’m planning to trim the edges of my lawn. Which I will do-if it ever stops raining.

Maybe that’s what that worried-looking guy is pondering: the weather. If he’s from Earth, then he should be worried about the weather. Things are warming up. That means more energy in the atmosphere. Which means more storms, more lightning, more floods, more heat waves, more fires, more hail, more coral bleaching, eel shortgages, etc.

But if he’s NOT from Earth, he’s STILL worried about the weather, but now it’s a question of scope. Now we’re talking about things like massive solar flares, gravity waves, asteroid strikes and kilonovas. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. I think The Gravity Waves is a stellar (!) name for a band.

Novas result from the explosion of relatively small stars. Supernovas result from the explosion of bigger stars. Kilonovas arise from the collision of neutron stars. When two neutron stars hook up, things get interesting. We think that kilonovas generate jets of pure heavy metals (think gold, iridium, osmium, etc) barrelling along at close to the speed of light. (Editor’s note: “heavy metals” is a link to another LTD blog which deals with dance competition medals and how they’re named.)

Now if we could intercept just a tiny bit of one of these jets I think it would be good for the National Deficit. But more likely, if one happened to be aimed directly at Earth it would make the Deathstar look like a pea-shooter. Goodbye Earth. Hello expanding cloud of ionized gas.

Kilonova emitting jets of expensive matter

But in all honesty, there’s not a whole heck of a lot we can do about the rest of the cosmos. I have to worry about Mickey. (Do I need to put another Editor’s Note in here? I hope not.) If it doesn’t stop raining soon though, I’m going to have to get Mickey some rain gear. I’m getting tired of toweling him off three times a day.

Border Collie in raincoat — Mickey feeling a bit sheepish but also wondering if there is anything good to eat in the fridge. Such as leftover eel.

Maybe I’ll see if there’s anything suitable at Hammacher Schlemmer. (Motto: We also sell Kilonova Survival Suits. Not to mention a vast assortment of gadgets intended to deal with maladies affecting every part of your body including your appendix and possibly your hippocampi.)

Next blog:

A complete inventory of Hammacher Schlemmer gadgets intended to deal with maladies affecting every part of your body including your appendix and possibly your hippocampi.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Applied Math And Other Topics

Posted on June 1, 2019June 1, 2019 by George Gillson

Math has a bad reputation and people often say it has no application to everyday life. I dispute this contention. I had several bad days recently. Math came in handy on one of them.

I was trimming the grass in my back yard recently with a string trimmer aka “Weedeater” aka edge trimmer when my mind suddenly wandered. (Quelle suprise.) Next thing you know I had slashed my left lower extremity.

Left lower extremity after mind-wandering

After I finished hopping around and cursing, I went in and cleaned the wound. Suddenly a thought occurred to me: “I’m an idiot.” Then another thought occurred to me, that I could actually use this. After all, every cloud has a silver lining. Right?

I counted the slashes and there were ten of them. I reasoned that in the time it took me to withdraw my leg from the crime scene, the trimmer had made ten rotations. Then I recalled from the depths of my mind somewhere that the reaction time in situations like this is around 200-250 milliseconds. Not that you care but a perfect example of this would be when you jerk your hand away from a hot object such as a lump of near-critical U235. And by the way, you should be more worried about the hefty dose of radiation you would also pick up in that situation. But that’s for another blog.

Anyway, I dug up an on-line visual stimulus reaction-time tester and tested myself. It came up at 400 msec but per the site, you have to factor in the lag time introduced by your computer and the internet. Still, that time was good enough to put me at age 29 according to their nomogram, even though I’m rapidly approaching age 61. So I felt pretty good about that but I kept going.

Then I Googled (I guess that’s an official verb now) “average reaction time hot object” and it returned the reaction times for a variety of stimuli: visual, auditory, touch, dodging a falling 10-ton weight, etc. I figured my string-trimmer episode fell into the touch stimulus category so I went for 150 milliseconds (0.15 seconds) for the time it took me to jerk away from the trimmer.

So now I was able to estimate that in the time it took me to react, the trimmer completed 10 revolutions in 0.15 seconds. That’s 67 revolutions per second or about 4000 rpm. That’s about where you would upshift in a ’99 Civic, not that you care.

Then I looked up the RPMs for a trimmer (don’t you just LOVE Google?) and lo and behold it ranges from 3000 RPM or so at idle to 10000 RPM at full bore. I was running the trimmer above idle so I reckoned that my math was OK. (I probably need to work on the whole “Safety First” concept though.)

You can try this at home but don’t say I told you to do it. And maybe think about wearing shinguards when you trim your grass, and don’t remove the honkin’ big housing on your trimmer about two seconds after you get it out of the box, like I did. Just bear in mind that if you leave that housing in place, you won’t be able to do precision trimming. Everything has it’s price.

You might consider trimming your grass borders the old-fashioned way…

Another option to consider if you have lots of time on your hands and were born somewhere before 1960.

You could also say forget it and consider hiring someone to do your trimming as long as they bring their own equipment.

The other bad day I want to tell you about is the day that began when I walked my dog Mickey wearing the same T-shirt I had worn the day before and also the ratty old shorts I tore up when I tried to run my son off a luge course at Canada Olympic Park.

Anyway, when I got home from dog-walking I raced off to work and forgot to change. No one at work noticed, if that tells you anything. FYI, I did shower that morning before I donned my dog-walking outfit.

But it gets worse. Later on that same day I found myself trying to open one of the doors to the lab by holding an orange plastic folder up to the scanner. Nothing happened. Then I realized I should have been using my swiper.

Kirlian photography of my fingertips adorning one side of my swiper.

Ooops! Wrong side! This is the other side:

Me and my lovely wife Jeanette. Jeanette is on the left.

There, that’s better. Things went smoother after I got that sorted out.

Later that day I went to visit my son Drew, his wife Dominique and my grand-daughter Max.

Max thinking that a baby elephant would be handy to have around the house

Alexa features prominently in my son’s household. You know who Alexa is. She’s that helpful entity wired to Amazon. Alexa listens to your conversations and will obey your every command.

Drew: “Alexa, don’t listen to Max. We don’t need a baby elephant. Go to sleep.”

Alexa: “OK Drew. Don’t worry that I might still be listening or anything. Just saying.”

If she was real I think Alexa would look like this:

Alexa wearing advance neural interface and neck-skin tightener

Based on my earlier experiences that day and also recalling my misfortune with the edge trimmer, I started to think to myself how many ways things could go wrong if you let Alexa into your life. Because after Drew told Alexa to go to sleep I immediately began thinking to myself: “What if she really only PRETENDS to go to sleep and continues to listen to everything that goes on?” And also: “What if she can read minds?”

What could go wrong?

Lots of stuff. For example, next thing you know a truck could be pulling up in your driveway dropping off a bunch of items Alexa happens to think you might need, such as shinguards, a baby elephant complete with several bales of hay or worse yet-two sub-critical chunks of U235 and a neutron source, complete with instructions:

WARNING: DO NOT SANDWICH THE NEUTRON SOURCE BETWEEN THE CHUNKS OF U235 AND CLAMP THE WHOLE SHOOTING MATCH IN A VISE. THE BABY ELEPHANT WILL RAPIDLY BECOME THE LEAST OF YOUR CONCERNS…

Never trust anyone named Alexa. Just saying.

Keep an eye on your RPMs. And your shins.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

The Half-Life of Girl Guide Cookies

Posted on April 25, 2019 by George Gillson

I know, I know. A lot is going through your mind right now as a result of reading the header for this blog.

The first thing you’re thinking to yourself is this: “The Half-Life Of Girl Guide Cookies? That sounds like the title of a Literary Fiction novel to me.” The second thing that you’re thinking is: “What the heck IS literary fiction anyway?” The third thing you’re thinking is: “Why is the featured image for this blog a water molecule and not a picture of a couple of Girl Guide Cookies?” The fourth thing you’re thinking is: “How does he know what I’m thinking? Is he psychic? Or what?” The fifth and last thing you’re thinking is: “What’s a half-life?”

All these concerns will be answered in due course. Remember: patience is a virtue.

Here we go:

Your concern about “The Half-Life Of Girl Guide Cookies” sounding like the title for a Literary Fiction novel is well-founded. Literary Fiction novels typically have somewhat cryptic, unusual titles and I think “The Half-Life Of Girl Guide Cookies” fits right in there. See below for a short list of Literary Fiction novels:

The Shape Of Water

If, Then

All The Light We Cannot See Because We’re Wearing Super-Cool Designer Sunglasses

The Time Traveler’s Unpaid Parking Tickets

The Art Of House-Painting During A Polar Vortex

Charlotte’s Web Of Deception

Res Ipsum Loquitur

The Florida Man Game

The Weasel Keeper’s Linen Closet

Moby Dick

You asked what the heck Literary Fiction was. Good question! For everyone who was asleep during English class-or whatever it’s called these days- Literary Fiction is “a term that came into common usage in the early 1960s… principally used to distinguish serious fiction (a work that claims to hold literary merit), from Genre Fiction and Popular Fiction”.

As well as having unusual – OK obscure – titles, the covers of Literary Fiction novels tend to be “arty”, and the stories tend to be more serious than other fiction. The plots can be convoluted and slow-moving. Literary Fiction is also said to offer a deeper look at the human experience which includes posting on social media 16 to 18 hours a day and sleeping 6 to 8 hours at night, plus/minus naps. This is all just another way of saying that Literary Fiction can bore the crap out of you. In fact, an entire pack of marauding rabid wolverines was once lulled to sleep in seconds flat by listening to the first few paragraphs of Moby Dick being read aloud by the Literary Critic for the Tuktoyaktuk Literary Review.

So that’s Literary Fiction in a nutshell.

What about the reason that the featured image has nothing to do with the title of this blog? Well that’s kind of like what happens in Literary Fiction novels. You sometimes don’t find out what the title of the book has to do with anything, until about page 324. And the book only has 325 pages. And sometimes you never find out. This was typical of the Pythons. If you happen to own the DVD collection of all the Monty Python TV episodes you know what I’m talking about. More often than not, the skit titles had little or nothing to do with what the skit was actually about. But this is what happens when you throw together a bunch of guys educated at places like Oxford and Cambridge. They start reading Literary Fiction and getting all deep and obscure on you.

You still haven’t remembered what a half-life is! I know this because I’m psychic. A half-life is the time it takes for half of something to disappear, either by radioactive decay, a chemical change into something else, evaporation, theft by light-fingered Borrowers, sheer carelessness or possibly mouse-nibbling.

Now that we’re clear on all this, I’m going to open my own literary window into another common human experience: cookies.

One day, three boxes of Girl Guide Cookies appeared in the lunchroom where I work. (I know what you’re thinking here. Yes, I actually work for a living.) The cookies were a gift from a mysterious unnamed benefactor. I’ll call her Tracy Marsden for the sake of argument.

Girl Guide aka Girl Scout cookies (chocolate on left)

I got to wondering how long it would take “Tracy’s” cookies to vanish. So in the interests of Science, and also Literary Merit, I popped into the lunchroom periodically after the cookies showed up and took note of how many cookies were still there at each check point. This is a graph of the number of cookies as a function of time:

You can see that the first thirty cookies de-materialized in about 70 minutes. So I guess you could say the half-life was 70 minutes. But if that’s true then at the end of another 70 minutes there should have been about 15 cookies left. After 210 minutes there would be 7.5 survivors huddled together. And 3.25 cookies would still be standing after 280 minutes. That didn’t happen: the remaining 30 cookies vamoosed in just another 78 minutes. Clearly these cookies were not made of Thorium or worse yet, Polonium. And there were no signs of Borrowers or mice. There was something at play here much more powerful than radioactivity, Borrowing or mouse-nibbling. I call it “furtive human guilt-snacking”.

I never saw anybody actually EAT a cookie, yet they ALL disappeared. This tells me that for two and a half hours people were loitering around near the lunchroom until the coast was clear and then furtively swooping in to eat cookies when no one was watching. This explains why the rate at which the cookies were disappearing increased after the first thirty cookies were engulfed: people started to panic.

This next graph is interesting:

It tells me that people have no strong preference for chocolate vs vanilla Girl Guide Cookies because both flavors disappeared at pretty much the same rate. This is maybe why each unopened box contains 10 chocolate and 10 vanilla cookies. But maybe I’m just over-thinking the problem here. It wouldn’t be the first time and it probably won’t be the last. I should probably just stick to building rule-based expert systems.

But this strange combination of cookies and rudimentary mathematics is making me hungry. I’m thinking maybe there are some Cuban Lunches lying around here somewhere. I think I’d better go eat them while nobody else is at home to watch me. Don’t tell Clive.

Famous novelist, car collector, general man-about-town and cookie fanatic Clive Cussler

Next blog: Why we shouldn’t trust Alexa and probably also what the heck is the Florida Man Game?

cuban lunch-the neutron star of chocolate bars

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

What To Expect When You’re Expecting…A Polar Vortex

Posted on March 4, 2019 by George Gillson

Like any good science journalist, I did some research for this blog which mostly included checking in with the good folks at The Department Of Large Rotating Masses of Frigid Air. They named it that, hoping that most of the people who wanted to know what a Polar Vortex was wouldn’t actually bother calling in because they would figure it out from the name and save themselves some trouble. That strategy didn’t always work:

“Hello, you are reaching on the Department of Large Rotating Masses Frigid Air. Should I be giving you the assistance?”

“Ummmm, yes. Can you tell me what a Polar Vortex is please?”

Yes! Very excellent! Polar Vortex is great name for rock band. Also is name for large rotating mass of frigid airs. Like toilet in sky, above Poles, but flushing air not water.

“Above Poland you mean?”

“No. Above Poles of Earth planet. The Vortex sometimes move down from North Pole or up from South Pole. People blame Trump. Vortex maybe stay put lots of months. This time maybe until 2020 US Presidential election. Or longer. Cause very cold weather: worse than Newfoundland or maybe even Siberia. Or Minnesota. Nobody in Winnipeg notice this. Maybe even cause Fifth Ice Age. Nobody know for sure. Also sometimes vortex is breaking in two pieces.”

“What happens then?”

“Nothing. Except maybe Climate Divorce lawyers make lots money.”

“Hmmmm. Well…Thank you… I guess.”

” Нет проблем .”

As I mentioned, the Vortexes come in a matched set, but you never hear much about the South Polar Vortex these days, or any other days for that matter. This is because the South Polar Vortex (SPV) stays put above Antarctica. Here’s why:

The nearest city, Ushuaia, is 700 miles away, at the bottom of Argentina, but there’s not a lot going on north of Ushuaia for another 1000 miles or so. And it’s a bit of a sea kayak trip from Antarctica to anywhere else: there’s at least three or four thousand miles of ocean to cross to get to either Australia or South Africa.

Australia is overrun with kangaroos these days and the people in South Africa are currently focused on Maye Musk CoverGirl commercials.

And if I missed anybody close to the South Pole they are probably too busy to care about massive atmospheric phenomena because they’re still obsessively watching Bradley Cooper and Stephani Germanotta sing “The Shallow” and posting comments like: “We’re talking about Rocket Raccoon and Lady Gaga here.”

My point is that it’s just not worth the South Polar Vortexe’s time to go walkabout, so it just stays put and sulks.

On the other hand, when the North Polar Vortex misbehaves-as it’s doing right now- half the population of the United States rush out in panic to buy new shovels, long underwear, cases of bottled water, Cuban Lunches, flamethrowers and copies of We Who Survived The Fifth Ice Age.

what happens if it starts snowing and doesn't stop?

The other half of the American population remain calm and find something else to do, such as decide to let their name stand for the 2020 US Presidential Election. NASA is even reporting that they have been receiving deep-space transmissions from alien beings inquiring about the possibility of emigrating to the United States in order to run for President. Trump is apparently talking about building a wall around the Earth to prevent this from happening.

I mentioned sea kayaking earlier. Speaking frankly here, there was a time when you wouldn’t catch me dead in a sea kayak anywhere in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. The Southern Ocean is infested with leopard seals and I was laboring under the misapprehension that they are voracious man-eating predators-on par with Great White Sharks and Komodo Dragons.

I was wrong. Turns out they’re inquisitive, friendly, rather large- OK, OK- huge sea mammals who just happen to look like terrifying prehistoric aquatic reptiles. For the most part, the leopard seals still haven’t figured out that humans are good to eat.

Yes, they will try to eat your camera, if you happen to be an underwater photographer, but so what? They will also try to teach you how to eat penguins if you hang around them long enough. It’s true. I swear on Jacques Cousteau’s favorite regulator that I’m not making this up.

Jacque Cousteau's favorite regulator — Jacques Cousteau, age 187, showing off his favorite regulator

Fearless wildlife photographer Paul Nicklen had this epic experience with a large female leopard seal:

“She started to bring me weak penguins, then dead penguins, then she showed me how to eat penguins. She would offer me partially consumed penguins.
She started to take penguins and actually push them into my camera. I think she thought the camera was my mouth, which is every photographer’s dream. This went on for four days. And then I think she realized that I was this useless predator in her ocean, probably going to starve to death and I think she became quite panicked… So, here I came to Antarctica, to photograph this potentially vicious animal, to have this predator, this top predator in Antarctica, take care of me, and nurture me, and feed me for four days straight.”

I don’t think that every photographer dreams that his or her camera is his or her mouth. I must have misread that sentence. I think Mr. Nicklen meant that every photographer dreams of discovering that animals which look like they could eat your head in one gulp actually just want to feed you penguins. Repeatedly.

Anyway, all that aside, I think that the penguin below is thinking to itself: “Why in the heck did I ever listen to Mom and Dad? I never wanted to be a dentist in the first place. I wanted to be a tap dancer.”

penguin inspecting mouth of leopard seal — Leopard seal patiently enduring annual dental exam

Sorry, I seem to have gotten a little off track here. We were talking about what people rush out to buy during a Polar Vortex shift and I mentioned Cuban Lunches. I know you’re still wondering about that.

The Cuban Lunch is a delicious, calorie-dense chocolate-and-peanut ingot which was invented in Winnipeg almost 100 years ago, and was manufactured and sold in Canada for decades. It became endangered in the 1990’s and was hunted to extinction around the year 2000 but was brought back to life just before Christmas 2018 by a woman named Crystal Regehr-Westergard who found one of the original Cuban Lunches encased in frozen maple syrup while walking her dog in a dense forest. Crystal managed to extract a small sample from it (the frozen Cuban Lunch), and recreated it as a treat for her elderly mother using advance culinary techniques including messing around in her kitchen a lot.

Crystal didn’t stop there, but went on to buy the trademark, find a factory willing to start making the iconic treats once more and start distributing them throughout Western Canada. She is now reputedly also working on a way to recreate the famous Mammoth Burger offered by A&W back in 1650 BCE, on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia.

I swear on Mme “First, spray everything with PAM” Jehane Benoit’s eyewear that I’m not making up more than 79% of what I just told you about Cuban Lunches .

Here is a picture of Crystal presenting her Mom with one of the no-longer-extinct Cuban Lunches, and to the left is a box of them in their natural state at the Safeway just a few blocks from my house.

I may keep a couple of thousand boxes of these on hand (twenty to a box) just in case it keeps snowing. You never know. The Fifth Ice Age could be just around the corner.

Those extra calories might come in handy.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

What Is This Woman Smiling About?

Posted on January 23, 2019January 23, 2019 by George Gillson

Lord knows I’m not an art critic, but I thought I would add my own take on why the Mona Lisa is smiling. Not that 80,000 other people throughout history, many of them art critics, haven’t already tried to answer that same question. Personally, I think that the Mona Lisa is smiling because she thinks I’m going to fail utterly at trying to write a blog that somehow includes shoebill cranes, sea cucumbers (Genus: Holothuria), and also a book. Ha, ha! Little does she realize…

Shoebill crane patiently waiting to eat one or possibly both of the other items in this collage although it would probably prefer to eat the sea cucumber

PG-13 version of another book that looks almost identical to this one.

sea cucmber — Sea cucumber resembling orange day-glo mop that is being electrocuted

I’ll start with the book. No sense starting with the shoebill. We’ll get to it in due course. I just realized that the book cover is almost the same color as the sea cucumber! Weird. Anyway, the book is basically about how to lead a better, more examined life. I found it very helpful.

One of the things the author suggests is that instead of striving to be right all the time and to be certain about everything, we should try to just be a little less wrong every day, and to embrace uncertainty. We should try to remain uncertain and hence less judgemental about the motives and actions of others; we should be uncertain about our values and should always attempt to reassess them; we should also be uncertain about whether or not I should have strung this last bit together with colons, or used something else. Commas maybe. Definitely not hyphens.

My point here is that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do. Take the shoebills for example. Where do they live? Are they friendly? They seem friendly. They look happy. ARE they happy? Are they related to cranes, storks, velociraptors? Something else? Why are they also known as whaleheads? Are they patient? Can they fly?

Received wisdom says that their large beaks or bills resemble large shoes-which is why they’re called shoebills-no suprise there. So whose shoes are we talking about? Paul Bunyan’s? Shaq O’Neal’s? Bozo the Clown’s? Great question.

I have to add Rosa Kleb’s shoes to that list though. She was the SMERSH agent in the movie From Russia With Love; she also tried to kill James Bond with a poison-tipped shoe dagger. By the way, SMERSH stands for Shoebills Mostly Eat Really Slimy Holothurians.

Don’t give me that blank look. I told you already that sea cucumbers belong to the genus Holothuria.

I’m pretty certain that shoebills would use that wicked spur on the tip of their beaks to spear the sea cucumbers before the spiky, edible sea creatures could inch away. I’m not certain that shoebills eat sea cucumbers though.

Rosa Kleb's shoe-dagger — You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose but don’t try picking your friend’s nose-or your nose for that matter-with this shoe

Sorry, I got a little sidetracked there. Back to the long list of uncertainties surrounding shoebills: What else might shoebills eat besides sea cucumbers? What kind of noises do shoebills make?

So many questions. Thankfully I have answers. Some of them are even true. Most of them are true. Maybe they’re all true. I’m not sure.

Shoebills live in marshes in various African countries. They are NOT friendly. They’re feisty and pugnacious as hell. They will go toe to toe with a crocodile if they have nothing better to do. Or fight with their nestmates if there are no crocodiles around.

As adults they’re pretty solitary. I don’t know if they’re happy creatures, but they always seem to be grinning in the photos and video clips I’ve seen. This could be misleading though. The average shoebill is likely thinking: “Hey buddy, I’m going to put you off guard by appearing to grin at you but secretly I’m just waiting to rip one of your ears off with my fearsome beak if you even THINK about calling me a whalehead.” They’re most closely related to pelicans and herons. Since all birds are descended from dinosaurs, I guess you can also say they’re sort of related to velociraptors.

shoebill that looks like a velociraptor — Do NOT call me a whalehead

Apparently shoebills are super-patient. They will lurk in tall marsh grass for hours on end, waiting to lunge out and rip the ear off a tourist or nab a tasty eel, a lungfish, a snake, a duck or maybe a poodle. (No loss there.)

They make some great noises. For example, their mating call is a series of loud pops that sounds like a machine gun. Some describe it as terrifying. I don’t think it’s particularly terrifying; somehow I don’t think they mate very often though. Not sure why.

They can fly with a series of slow flaps interspersed with gliding. They can grow to be as tall as Danny DeVito. This one kind of reminds me of the Mona Lisa:

They also like to do yoga:

shoebill doing yoga — Shoebill trying to get in touch with inner velociraptor

I want one…I think. It would probably clean out the rabbits that are racing all over our neighbourhood this winter. I might check in with Mark Manson first though. He gives pretty good advice.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

4th Annual Lateral Thinking Department Christmas Gift Guide

Posted on December 18, 2018 by George Gillson

I got sidetracked on the chinchillas yesterday and realized: “Holy Kadoda! There are only seven more shopping days until Christmas! I need to put out the Annual Lateral Thinking Department Christmas Gift Guide!” So without further ado, here it is:

Whale Earwax Plug

I swear on Herman Melville’s beard that whale earwax is a real thing. I’m quoting here from the site that I link out to down below: “a plug can grow up to 10 inches long, and looks like a cross between a goat’s horn and the world’s nastiest candle.” I don’t know where you can buy it but apparently museums all over the world have stashes of whale earwax cones. Try the Smithsonian to start. They apparently have pallets and pallets of whale earwax and they’re not going to hang on to it forever. I know for sure that Amazon doesn’t carry it (yet). Try again next year.

cone of whale earwax — Glistening plug of whale earwax looking a lot like a cross between a goat’s horn and the World’s nastiest candle.

What is it good for? It’s a great gift to give to a Clinical Chemist, Medical Biochemist, Whale Researcher, Butcher, Baker or Candlestick Maker. Seriously, researchers have measured the yearly variation in the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in earwax samples from an assortment of whales. They can correlate these levels to changes in the intensity of whaling over the last 120 years give or take a decade or two. They can also tell when any given whale goes into puberty. Maybe you could try that on your kids, if you have any. Or you could just note when they (the kids) turn into horribly unrecognizeable humanoids.

B Vitamin and Enzyme Supplements For Your Dog

Is your dog gobbling rabbit poop voraciously? Get him or her some B vitamins and an enzyme supplement instead.

Rabbit poops are loaded with B vitamins and enzymes. That might explain why my dog Mickey has gotten into the habit of voraciously gobbling the rabbit poop which is littered everywhere in our neighbourhood since fences were put up to keep out the coyotes, not that I’m bitter. He must have had a deficiency of some sort. He seems to be doing fine now, except that his ears grew two inches this past year.

Wine Glass That Holds 27 Ounces aka A Whole Bottle

Hic! This is a great gift. I forget where you buy them. Try Amazon. Urp. Or Liver Transplants R Us.

full bottle wine glass — Full-bottle wine glass. Comes with free book of forearm-strengthening exercises.

Electric Nasal Irrigation Device

Three guesses where you can get this thing. I’m not one for simply parroting the copy from other sources (exception Testicle Navigators) but I couldn’t resist:

“This is the world’s only nasal irrigation system that uses gentle powered suction to relieve sinus congestion without medication. During a typical 20-30 second treatment, the cordless irrigator’s battery-powered motor pulls saline rinse from its upper tank through one nostril, then out the other, after which it (the nostril?) collects in the bottom tank. In the process, the rinse flushes sinus-clogging pollen, chinchilla dust, mucous and small metal parts, instantly clearing nasal passages for easier breathing—it can even help reduce snoring. Mostly because the person you give it to will immediately run screaming out of the house in a fit of sheer terror.”

sinus decongester — What exactly powers this thing? Thought? Americium? Cosmic rays?

Bio-Bricks

Have you ever wondered whether it’s possible to turn sand and urine into building bricks? Turns out it’s possible. Egyptologists have finally decoded an ancient recipe developed by the ancient Egyptians, who as we know, were surrounded by sand. The recipe had nothing to do with bricks. It was actually a recipe for Shoebill Stork Fricassee. The Egyptologists promptly threw up in their mouths and forgot about that recipe entirely.

Meanwhile students at the University of Cape Town figured out another recipe to make building materials from nothing more than urine, sand and bacteria. Apparently the bacteria ferment the urine and make a sort of glue which sticks the sand together as it cures.

This is actually a terrible gift suggestion because these bricks aren’t currently available.

But speaking of current, some solid materials generate electricity when they are compressed. This is called piezoelectricity. If these bricks turn out to be able to make electricity, I guess it will be called peezoelectricity. Just saying.

bricks made from urine — Peezoelectric bricks?

Dyson Air Multiplier Fan

I included the Dyson Air Multiplier as a grand finale because it was designed using complex airflow simulations which can be graphically displayed. This one below sort of looks like a jellyfish. But a really excellent jellyfish, as far as I’m concerned.

And here is a picture of an actual Dyson Air Multiplier. It’s so powerful that it is sucking the hands of its inventor, James Dyson, into the vortex ring.

Don’t show this column to anybody who is into fluid mechanics. (Yes, air is a fluid.) They will just snort and say: “The guy that wrote this is an idiot. That is not a vortex ring.” And they would be right.

There is a vortex but it’s in the base. The air gets sucked into the base and jetted out through a slot in the ring. At 55 mph. And the reason that the whole shebang is called an air multiplier is that it shoots out more air than is sucked in the bottom. About 15 times more. Did I mention that it comes out at 55 mph?

The Air Multiplier has two flaws though. Well three, really. First of all there’s that 55-miles-per-hour wind blasting into your face. Then there’s the cost: expensive. And the noise. Supposedly it sounds like a jet engine taking off. If you get one for anybody, give them some hearing protection too.

I hear whale earwax works pretty well.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

The Worst Sounds In The World: Part I

Posted on October 31, 2018September 7, 2020 by George Gillson

Things have been pretty crazy here at The Department of Any Second Now I Expect Flaming Remnants Of A Rocket Engine To Come Screaming Down Out Of The Stratosphere And Land On My Head Or Worse Yet, My Tesla. Not surprisingly then, like everything else in my life these days, this column is late. Flaming rocket engine debris aside however, I’ve been feeling the need to fill you in on the worst sounds in the world, because I think I’ve heard a pretty fair number of them.

I came up with my own classification for these sounds and drawing from a pretty much bottomless wellspring of creativity, here is my classification: Type I and Type II.

I decided a long time ago that there are certain types of sounds that just don’t sit well with the human nervous system, or probably any kind of nervous system, for that matter. These would be my Type I sounds. My prototype for Type I is the sound of a metal lawn rake scraping across a stone patio.

When I was a kid, we had two gigantic chestnut trees flanking a large flagstone patio, and I had to rake the chestnut leaves off that patio. And that was just the beginning, or the ending depending on how you want to look at it. I also had to rake the little blossoms in the spring, followed by the little green chestnuts that were jettisoned later in the spring, followed by the big chestnuts early in the fall (and their stems!), followed by the leaves in late fall. Not that I’m bitter.

Anyway, for some reason, the sound of that rake scraping on the stone would go right into my brain, down my spinal cord and turn me into a quivering mass of jelly.

It's Too Loud — A Mom listening to her 10-year old ask her for the 1800th time if he has to rake the patio

Turns out that in 2012, neuroscientists at the University of Newcastle came to a scientific conclusion about what I call Type I sounds. They found that there was a direct correlation between the degree of unpleasantness of various sounds heard by test subjects-most of them human- and the extent of the reaction of the amygdalas and auditory cortexes of the test subjects. These amygdalas and cortexes were conveniently located in the brains of the subjects. (I was going to use amygdalae and cortices but I thought that would sound too pompous.) The amygdala has something to do with emotion. For example, you feel sheepish or maybe depressed if you mispronounce “amygdala” in a job interview.

Long story short, the neuroscientists determined that these sounds were in the range of 2000 to 5000 Hz. Hz stands for Hertz in honor of Heinrich Rudolph Hertz, the founder of Hertz Car Rental, since you asked.

Heinrich_Rudolf_Hertz — Former bicyclist-turned-internal combustion engine afficionado Heinrich Hertz

Actually, I’m lying. Heinrich Rudolph Hertz proved that electromagnetic waves exist. He also invented dry cleaning. But note that Hz is synonymous with CPS or cycles per second, a unit of frequency also used to measure how many bicycles were sold after the invention of two-wheeled bicycles by German inventor Karl von Drais, in 1817. CPS could also stand for Clogged Pore Society but this is unlikely.

Karl von Drais — A feisty-looking Baron Karl taking his new contraption for a walk, before the invention of trekking poles

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. These neuroscientists aren’t actually sure what’s so special about that range of frequencies. Dr. Kumar, who was one of the researchers, explains: “This is the frequency range where our ears are most sensitive. Although there’s still much debate as to why our ears are most sensitive in this range, it does include sounds of screams which we find intrinsically unpleasant.”

Here is the list of their top ten Type I sounds (out of a total of 74 sounds):

Knife on a bottle
Fork on a glass
Chalk on a blackboard
Ruler on a bottle
Nails on a blackboard
Female scream
Anglegrinder
Brakes on a cycle squealing
Baby crying
Electric drill

I don’t know if they checked out my “rake on flagstones” sound. They definitely should’ve. I also wonder what kind of baby was crying. A baby velociraptor maybe? Sadly though, I don’t have any other Type I sounds of my own to add to their list.

Wait! Wait! Wait! Yes I do. The Vuvuzela.

Any of you who hail from South Africa know that the Vuvuzela is also known by its Twsana name Lepatala, which means “extremely annoying plastic horn which makes a noise like a goose honking into a megaphone while it is being strangled”.

The Vuvuzela is so annoying that it has been banned by almost every civilization in the Galaxy, along with that music tape-loop played by ice cream trucks that frequent the streets of Calgary. That tape-loop caused me to seriously consider buying a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. Instead I bought a Vuvuzela and began blowing it in the ear of the driver of the truck when it came through our neighborhood every day of summer, ten times a day. Not that I’m any more bitter about this than I am about the leaves. Note: I might be lying about some of this. But not all of it. Also note: summer only lasts about three days in Calgary, on average.

Enough about Type I sounds! What about Type II sounds?

Type II sounds are the type of sounds that immediately signal that something really bad is happening, or just happened. A typical example would be when you and your cousin are scuffling vigorously in his bedroom long after the two of you are supposed to be sound asleep. A container of baby powder might be involved. Suddenly a thunderous crash erupts, caused by one of you kicking the dresser. To your uncle, that thunderous crash is definitely a Type II sound. He comes barrelling upstairs, throws open the door and bellows, “What in hell was that noise?”

One of you meekly asks, “What noise?”

The other postulates: “Mice?”

Your uncle tells you to go to bed, enumerating what will happen if he hears that noise again. This might include being skinned alive and boiled in oil, or worse yet, having to sleep in separate bedrooms. He stomps downstairs where muffled laughter ensues from all the adults.

cousins — A boy scanning the horizon for flaming rocket engine debris while his cousin looks on with interest

So I think we’re clear on the difference between Type I and Type II sounds. Type I sounds are Neurological/Hardwired and Type II sounds are Situational/Generally Ominous.

But this column is starting to run a little long, so go eat some of your kids Hallowe’en candy and stay tuned for Part II.

Why are you still reading? Go! And don’t even think about getting into the baby powder the next time you sleep over at cousin’s house. Your uncle (or your aunt) hid it (the baby powder) already. Along with the knives, the forks, both anglegrinders and the chalkboard.

Next column: The Worst Sounds In The World: Part II

References

J Acoust Soc Am. 2008 Dec;124(6):3810-7.doi:10.1121/1.3006380. Mapping unpleasantness of sounds to their auditory representation. Kumar S, Forster HM, Bailey P, Griffiths TD.

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Cryptozoology Part II: If You Were Going To Trade Your Dog In For Something Else, What Are Your Options?

Posted on June 10, 2018 by George Gillson

When we last met, I was going on about whether or not you should trade your dog in for something else on the basis of your getting tired of toweling it off all the time, especially when it’s wet. Options included another type of dog with or without water-repellent fur, or maybe a member of an entirely different species.

If you are opting to go with a different species, I’m going to give you some suggestions.

Here goes:

1) Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs (or maybe some other kind of smallish pig):

The footage that follows was taken right outside my office window. I’m almost positive that this video captures a pot-bellied pig dutifully following its owner back to the car. But it might be a dog. It’s definitely not a Sasquatch aka Bigfoot even though the video is very reminiscent of your typical Sasquatch aka Bigfoot video: grainy, indistinct, over-before-you-know-it.

I personally think that stubby little tail is almost a dead giveaway.

Be forewarned: by all accounts pot-bellied pigs make for challenging pets. They’re affectionate, smart, demanding; they get into everything; they’re headstrong; they can make a mess if left untended. Wait a sec! That sounds an awful lot like a toddler! Maybe you should grow one of those instead.

It’s probably faster and easier for you to get a pig than to grow a toddler. But what if you like to surf? Lots of people do: especially people who live near water. Do you live near water? If you do, I just this minute realized that your dog is probably wet quite a bit of the time already, so this whole wet dog thing may be a non-issue for you. You might want to stop reading now.

But if not, rest assured that there’s a good chance that you will be able to take your new pig surfing. Some pigs love to surf! They are probably the descendants of wild pigs who learned to surf after migrating to Hawaii from thousands of miles away (with the assistance of Testicle Navigators, of course!)

pigs on beach — Feral Hawaiian surfing pigs patiently awaiting next set

man and small pig on surf board — Hawaiian surfing pig teaching human being to surf

surfing border collie — Border collie who spontaneously began surfing after observing feral pigs

2) Goats:

Now as we all know, surfing can be a fairly high adrenaline pastime. So some people might prefer to trade their dog for an animal that is content to engage in a more chill activity, such as yoga. If you are one of those people, a baby goat is just what you need, as shown by this simple equation:

Wet Dog + Baby Goat + Yoga = Baby Goat Yoga – Wet Dog

Yes, you heard me correctly! Yoga with baby goats is a thing. A big, trending thing, actually. Nobody knows for sure where Goat Yoga started but roughly twenty states are currently fighting over bragging rights for the title of Goat Yoga State. (Actually, I’m lying. Goat Yoga started in New Hampshire.)

Incidentally, Goat Yoga State can be rearranged to spell: A Saggy Teat, Too. (Ed. Note: Dave Barry totally pioneered the technique of rearranging phrases to spell other phrases which more-or-less make sense. I shamelessly adopted his literary device.)

I also threw in a comma that wasn’t in Goat Yoga State. Just saying.

The baby goats don’t actually do the yoga. They basically mill around in adorable baby-goat fashion amongst the people. The people do the yoga. There is a lot of goat-cuddling involved. And nibbling. The goats nibble on various body parts within range as well as any clothing they can manage to sink their teeth into, including Lululemon™ activewear.

The absolute best thing about Goat Yoga though, is the comments that people are posting alongside the Goat Yoga video clips. Especially the following comment (and its reply) found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvj6voiH5S0

Arielle Masters, who clearly has an inquiring mind, asked this question:

This isn’t an April Fool’s joke? It’s very cute – but do they ever pee on the people doing yoga?

Ethan Moreau, who is clearly your basic smart-ass guy, shot back:

Arielle Masters yes they do but they don’t mind. They also poop on them too. However the smell of the poop is very therapeutic for them. So they just leave it. Sometimes the guests poop on the floor with the goats.

This just goes to show you the trouble that can arise when you use pronouns in a way that leaves thing open to interpretation. Who doesn’t mind? The goats or the people? Do the goats poop on the people or do the people poop on the goats? It’s unclear. Exactly who is deriving therapeutic benefit from the smell of the poop? Again, unclear.

By the way, a big plus if you’re considering swapping out your dog for a goat is that once again, if you like to surf, chances are that your goat will too!

goat standing on surf board — Surfing goat sporting stolen organic Lululemon™ PFD

That brings our tally of creatures who like to surf up to three. I’m sure there are more. So I’m going to do an experiment right now. I’m going to bet that somewhere out there is a photo of some kind of Cryptid on a surfboard. Then I’m going to see if I can find that photo.

Five minutes later…

I’m back! Sure as Jack’s your uncle, there IS such a photo. Like all Cryptid images, it’s kind of grainy and indistinct. We’re not really sure what we’re seeing.

surfing crow — Grainy, indistinct photo of what might be Bigfoot catching a wave and silently mocking a kayaking Cryptozoologist in front of him

3) Cryptids:

There are probably dozens of Cryptids that would make great pets. Assuming you could catch one. Like this thing in the gutter right outside my office window. I don’t have the first clue what it is. Large Guinea Pig? Rabbit? Hell, it might even be a sandbag, for all I know. It’s hard to say because the image is kind of grainy and indistinct. Can it surf? I don’t know.

rabbit on sidewalk — Possible Cryptid taking five in the gutter outside my office

I could go on about Cryptids but I won’t because then we might get sidetracked into other unsolved mysteries/possible conspiracies such as: Area 51, 9-11, why so many US state names start with the letter “M” and how more than twenty-five washable breast pads (also called nursing pads) could simply vanish out of a washing machine into thin air, leaving the other laundry items unscathed.

A lot of these mysteries are completely ridiculous, yet some of them are strangely compelling. When I googled “breast pads vanishing from washing machine” I found a UK site with inputs from other people with the same issue! There’s just nothing new under the sun, apparently.

Meanwhile, keep your dog. Just go buy some more towels. And pick up some more breast pads while you’re at it, in case you followed my suggestion to grow a toddler. I found some excellent ones. They’re made from organic materials including bamboo. Guess what? They’re called Bamboobies! And the company that makes them is called Bamboobies!

This world truly is a weird and wonderful place. And the Bamboobies logo is equally wonderful:

Bamboobies also make yoga nursing bras. I’m not kidding. They do.

I’ll bet the goats will love them.

Next column: The Worst Sound In The World.

assembly diagram for a piece of IKEA furniture

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Robots vs Sweden

Posted on May 8, 2018May 8, 2018 by George Gillson

An article ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago about some researchers in Singapore who set out to build a robot that could conquer “one of the hardest human tasks”. Part of the article headline won’t be a surprise to you since I already told you the general idea. But the other part of the headline was a surprise to me. Maybe I should just quit dissembling though and reveal the headline:

Robot Conquers One of the Hardest Human Tasks: Assembling IKEA Furniture

I wasn’t too sure who thought that assembling IKEA furniture was one of humanities hardest tasks: the New York Times, or the researchers in Singapore. I know there are lots of people who aren’t crazy about assembling IKEA furniture, but I don’t think it’s very high on the list of challenging tasks for humans, so I forged ahead and did my own survey of ten people chosen at random, asking them what they thought the hardest human task was. These are the answers I got:

1) Building a stargate

2) Repairing a space telescope

3) Underwater welding

two divers welding a pipe underwater — Divers on another planet, welding a submerged stargate on a May 24th long weekend and earning serious overtime pay

4) Climbing a mountain in the nude.

5) Unicycling down a mountain: maybe the same one you just climbed in the nude.

6) Teaching a cat to read music AND play piano

cat playing piano — Cat attempting to learn the song “Memory” from “Cats” Broadway musical

7) Toilet training a cat

8) Training two cats to use the toilet simultaneously

9) Training a cat to plunge a toilet

cat holding a toilet plunger — Apprentice toilet-plunging cat

10) Trying to understand what would possess a cat to insert itself into a paper tube

cat wrapped in a paper tube — Cat trying to be inconspicuous until its owners go to bed so it can pilfer sausages accidentally left out on the counter

I don’t know what’s up with all these cat responses. Somehow I guess I just randomly encountered an inordinate number of people who happen to like cats. I don’t blame these people one iota. Cats are hilarious. Maybe I asked the wrong people. I dunno. In my defense, I was in a pet store at the time. But I also want to point out the distinct lack of people in my survey who said anything about IKEA furniture.

Anyway, for whatever reason, these researchers over in Singapore decided to build a robot that could assemble a piece of IKEA furniture, specifically the STEFAN chair, reasoning that this would use many human skills such as: planning, reading instructions, ignoring instructions, subsequently messing around for thirty minutes until your wife says “Just read the damned instructions would you?”, overdriving the fasteners and damaging the furniture pieces, swearing, and throwing the pieces around or possibly throwing something else such as a unicycle.

Actually, the group in Singapore are not the first group to construct a robot that can assemble IKEA furniture. Back in 2013, a team at MIT built an “IKEAbot” that was able to assemble the LACK table. Note that the LACK table is so-named because it lacks complexity: it has only five pieces. Four of them are screw-in legs. A baby hamster could assemble a LACK table. Or maybe a baby octopus.

This reminds me. Did you ever wonder how they name IKEA furniture? I did. I even wrote about it back in 1989, in my first year of Med School. It was in the class newspaper: The Chronic Enquirer. I think it was one of the first humor columns I ever wrote. (I use the archaic term “humor column” because blogs hadn’t been invented yet. Remember that the World Wide Web had just come out of Labour and Delivery in 1989.)

I probably should have quit while I was ahead. But I didn’t.

Therefore, here’s that column, inside jokes and all:

Star Wars characters holding IKEA moose at gunpoint — Typical good, clean, Swedish shenanigans at IKEA furniture-naming fest: October 28, 1988

Higgs boson decaying into hadron jets and electrons

zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Grand Unified Theory of Dance Competition Medals

Posted on May 4, 2018November 20, 2020 by George Gillson

Shortly after they colonized Earth and devised the Theory Of How To Sort Laundry Without Anyone You Happen To Be Married To Getting On Your Case, Quantum Physicists busily set about trying to devise a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) which would merge the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions into one single force. The notion behind this was that if the GUT could then be coupled with the gravitational interaction (aka gravity), this would produce a Theory Of Everything or TOE for short. These two acronyms could then be rearranged into another acronym: GET OUT, as in: “Get Outta this galaxy! That is one badass theory.”

richard feynman standing in front of a blackboard — Quantum Physicist Richard Feynman with a somewhat different haircut than the one he had in the photo on his Los Alamos ID card

But decades later, the TOE still eludes them.

What happened? Well unfortunately, along with a large number of regular human beings, the Quantum Physicists got sidetracked once their kids started taking dance classes.

Anybody who has kids in dance knows that it’s a cutthroat and hectic business come competition season. Your kid might be in as many as six different dance competitions throughout the months of April, May and possibly part of June. And if you have more than one kid in dance, the complexity of driving them all over the place and watching all the various dance numbers rapidly becomes overwhelming. Even to Quantum Physicists.

densely packed handwritten quantum physics equations — Typical logistics planning for dance competition season

Then there are the awards. Each competition seems to have a different hierarchy of medals that are handed out. To save time, I’m just going to focus on the medals for the highest awards. In one competition, first place would be a Gold medal. Makes sense, right? Gold was probably good enough for the Greeks when the Olympic Games started 2,784 years ago. And it’s still used for first place in today’s Olympics.

But in another competition, the highest award might be Platinum. And in yet another one, Titanium is the highest award. It’s so confusing, especially when you start looking at the Periodic Table.

Recall that the Periodic Table organizes the elements into rows and columns according to the structure and size of the atoms. The atomic number reflects the size of the nucleus: bigger atomic number, bigger nucleus. Simple, right? So there’s no way that Titanium, coming in way down at atomic number 22, should take precedence over Platinum (atomic number 78) or Gold (atomic number 79).

That’s my point. See how easily I got sucked in? The same thing happened to the Quantum Physicists! They spent too much time trying to figure out the transportation schedules for dance competition season. And when they got done with that, they started trying to devise a Grand Unified Theory of Hierarchification of Dance Medals. So they forgot all about the TOE.

But back to Titanium et al. You can barely give Titanium away. It sells for like $12/kg whereas you are going to fork over almost $30,000 for a kilo of Platinum and over $40,000 for a kilo of Gold. So again, Titanium loses on atomic number AND price. The only thing it really has going for it is corrosion resistance and a high strength-to-density ratio. Big deal.

I feel like Titanium should be banished from the podium. There are lots of other elements that could take its place, like Osmium (atomic number 76) and Iridium (atomic number 77). They’re not making as much Osmium and Iridium as they used to, so as is the case for Platinum and Gold, you and your bank account will be parting ways to the tune of $35,000 to $45,000/kg if you want to score some Osmium and Iridium. And don’t even get me started on Rhodium. Its price can spike up to several hundred thousand dollars per kilogram. I swear on Warren Buffet’s money clip that I’m not making that up.

And there’s always good old Ununennium (aka Eka-Francium). Ununennium, at atomic number 119, hangs out way, way up there in the Periodic Table, on the Island of Stability, where all the Chartered Accountants first settled when they came to Earth. (The Quantum Physicists settled in LA.) Trouble is, Ununennium costs several billion dollars per atom so that would make for some pretty small medals. Plus who can pronounce it?

Dance Competition Judge: “And the High Unending Award goes to…Sorry I mean High Unununennui Award…Whoops! There I go again! The High Underwearennium Award…Crap! One more time. The High Ununennium Award for Lyrical Dance goes to entry number 187: Badass Theory!

Audience: Wild applause and odd biphasic hooting sounds.

Really, at the end of the day, most metals (including Silver!) look similar: silvery, greyish or greyish-blue.

crystals of platinum metal — Platinum crystals

beautiful osmium crystal formation — Weird-looking thing made of pure osmium

Even Theodore Gray, author of the best-seller: The Elements would admit that most of the metallic elements look alike. I think he even says that somewhere, maybe page 123, but don’t quote me.

photo of the cover of Theodore Gray's book: THe Elements — Don’t get me wrong. This is an excellent book. If you’re into Chemistry. Not that I’m biased

Maybe I’m overthinking this whole thing. Maybe no one besides me cares how the blazes a dance competition chooses to name its medals. The kids in dance work darned hard. They deserve those awards no matter what metal they’re named after.

The Quantum Physicists need to get back to work devising a TOE.

Bad-ass Theory might be an OK name for a band.

I obviously need to get a life. And I will, as soon as I check whether hierarchification is even a word. I feel like it should be.

Next column: Robot successfully performs one of the hardest human tasks

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