The NecRomantics - Episode for 30/10/2006

And now we return to your regularly scheduled reality.

I'm a little miffed today. Two of my webcomics have ended (Doobl and Mac Hall). They might come back, they might not, but it's always a little sad when a series ends, whatever the reason.

I'm lamenting my personal fix of someone else's creativity, though. It's like I'm in slight withdrawal.

The NecRomantics - Hallowe'en Party Special

I have accomplished exactly two things today:

1. Cleaning up after yesterday's Hallowe'en Party.
2. This post.

We'll be back to the more usual format on Monday. See you in a couple...

The NecRomantics - Episode for 25/10/2006

It's still reading week, and I'm still being lazy. No editorial today.

I do however, want to point out that Jess Hanley's web comic is rapidly running out of characters. I'll be sad if it goes away, since I appreciate the humour there even if other don't. Jess: if you ever get redirected here: keep writing!

The NecRomantics - Episode for 23/10/2006

Hi folks, it's Reading Week, so to balance out the fact that I have huge metric (don't get me started on that again) buttloads of reading to do, I figured I'd give you less reading material in exchange.

There's some vague thermodynamic principle at work here, but I'll forego the explanation until next week. Meanwhile, enjoy today's strip in the 7 minutes today has left.

Or just look at it in 8 minutes on Tuesday why don'cha...

The NecRomantics - Episode for 20/10/2006

So you think you know your way around the universe?

Don't make me laugh, you don't know distance from doughnuts.

And hey, I found out today I don't either. The point came crashing home for me when for some reason in our philosophical foundations of Law class the teacher decided to explain what a meter is.

I mean, thats just, um... a hundred centimeters or so, right? Or ten decimeters, or a thousand millmeters. Yeah, and a thousand of those thousand gets us a kilometer... but the basic idea of a meter is really still self-referential.

So, let's go look it up in the books, shall we?

And so we see that an early definition is "the length of a pendulum with a period of one half-second".

Hm. So. Well, given that measuring a second is another major headache entirely (not to mention gravity varies at different points on the planet slightly), let's see if we can't quantify it some other way. How about: "one ten-millionth of the length of the Earth's meridian along a quadrant, that is the distance from the equator to the north pole".

Wait. How did they get that measurement in the first place if they couldn't quantify a meter to begin with? A really really REALLY long piece of string?

And...one ten-millionth? How random is that? Not to mention that it was figured out quite a while back that this measurement falls short about a fifth of a millimeter due to miscalculation of the flatness of the earth.

So about a century and a bit ago,in 1889, some bright soul decided to measure out an alloy block of platinum/iridium at the temperature where ice melts. But how did they measure it in the first place? And if you wanted to have your own measure would you have had to keep an alloy at freezing temperature and then let it get to the melting point so you could measure it?

Gah... so in the 1960's, someone really bright decided to measure distance as a function of wavelengths of light. And this is...um... because we know that light is measured in...nanometers. And this measurement of a meter came out to equal 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.

Yeah, I'm sure we've all got something at home to duplicate this experiment.

And in 1983, we redefined distance as a function of light and time: "The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second".

But this takes us back a few hundred years where we were trying to figure out what a second was. Is... You know what I mean.

Yuck.

And under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.

You know, I think I would have preferred it if someone... say, oh, a King or something, had just decided that the length of a meter was something like the length between his fingertip and the end of his thumb.

It's just as goddamn arbitrary and you avoid all those wasted years and billions of wasted effort.

Oh yeah, and you'd have to call it a "yard" and the Brits would get all insufferable about it because they'd be like "yeah, we thought of that first while you were swinging from pendulums in the stone age, you bloody colonists. See how much more sensible our system is? We can't keep all these milli- centi- deca- kilo- things straight. It's all Greek to us. Why can't you see how much easier it is to think it spans, cubits, fathoms, half-yards, fingers, nails and... I forget that last one... um... hardly ever use it... oh yes, INCHES."

And whoever thought up a decimal system anyway? It's unnatural. Twelve and Sixteen have way more factors and make for easier calculations anyday... blah-blah-God Bless the Queen - blah-blah... Fawlty Towers had it right... etc...etc...

Sorry.

I have an exam in 47 minutes and it's my fifth one in a week, with still one more to go. This was my brain taking a few minutes of holiday.

Thank you for your patience, we now return you to your regularly schedule reality in just a meter. Second. Whatever.

The NecRomantics - Episode for 18/10/2006

Blerg.

1 mid-term today.
1 mid-term Thursday.
1 mid-term Friday.
1 take home mid-term due later.

This week is an ugly week.

But, it could be worse.

I could have a goat.

The NecRomantics - Episode for 16/10/2006

Yes, it's that wonderful time of the year again.

Flu season in full swing.

As if fading daylight, allergies, midterms, and the start of the holiday retail season weren't enough...

Before you know it not only will you be deathly ill but it will hit you mid-season and you'll be knee-deep in TV reruns too.

It amazes me, the way we set up our urban environment to encourage rapid propagation of sickness. I worked in phone support, once upon a time in the not too distant past. Three hundred of us, switching stations daily, with no less than 2 other people using your station in a day. No open windows, no air circulation, squeezed in next to each other in little 5x5 foot cubicles.

To get to this bacterial breeding haven, you have to ride on the public transit system. As usual, the drivers are setting up for strike negotiations, which means fewer buses, and that means riding around in plague-infested sardine cans.

School's not much better, what with the overfilled classrooms. We're pretty much elbow to elbow here, and the only convenient thing is that when someone to my right sneezes on me I can reach to my left for a tissue and someone from behind me passes me the antibacterial handwash.

Yes, let's kill 99.99% of those germs so that those 0.001% that survive learn to like eating antibacterial handwash and come back for us later when we're trying to learn while covered in phlegm.

And speaking of phlegm-coverage: Daycare.

Daycare isn't about teaching children, it's a government subsidized virus mutation facility under direct control of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Why test out biological weapons on the enemy when you can just jot down notes while a pack of croupy preschoolers belt out the lyrics to "You Are My Sunshine" while spraying each other with spit more effectively than a riot cop with a hose cannon?

What hits me in the irony bone is that we greet each other with handshakes, and your hand is basically the filthiest external part of your body.

Every time you say "hello", you're inviting someone to share their own special hand-tailored version of yuck with you. You've no one to blame but yourself.

Historically speaking, you'd show your empty hand to someone to indicate to them that you weren't holding a weapon or some other stabbity thing and didn't mean them any harm. This worked fine until mankind developed clothing. I mean, naked hand-waving was fine and all as far as peacfeul intentions go, but that was a Golden Age thing and couldn't last forever.

Handshakes started happening around the time early man developed the long sleeve. Handshakes strike me as more of a basic primitive security shake-down rather than any display of amicability. You know, just in case something gets dislodged from inside your tunic and a polearm or morningstar falls onto the ground (hey, talk about embarrassing...)

Of course now that it's flu season, here we are displaying our peaceful intentions by transferring our arsenal of microscopic minions over to each person whose hand we shake. And it's mutual too, so the bacteria get to have a veritable family reunion. Forget daggers, every handclasp is an act of WAR!

It's enough to get you thinking that maybe the obsessive-compulsives are onto something with all that hand-washing.

Excuse me, I think I need to find somewhere very isolated and scrub myself down now...