by Garth Sundem
• I seek not to know the answers, but to understand the questions.
• Do not see yourself as the center of the universe, wise and good and beautiful. Seek, rather, wisdom, goodness, and beauty, that you may honor them everywhere.
• If you plant rice, rice will grow. If you plant fear, fear will grow.
• When you cease to strive to understand, then you will know without understanding.
• Become the calm, restful breeze that tames the violent sea.
• To suppress a truth is to give it force beyond endurance.
• When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.
IT'S THE GREAT CIRCLE (CHARLIE BROWN)
You probably thought the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. This is true, unless you are literally trying to get from point A to point B and said points happen to be in the literal world, which is a sphere (nearly). In this case, the shortest distance between two points is an arc, specifically an arc of the great circle defined by these two points. (Let's take a step back—great circle, n: a circle on the surface of a sphere, whose center is the center of the sphere; alternately, a circle that has the same circumference as the sphere on which it is drawn. Alternately—the circle that divides a sphere into two equal hemispheres. Thus the equator is a great circle, but other parallels are not.) This leads to the following counterintuitive flight paths:
• The shortest route from Houston to Calcutta travels over the North Pole.
• To get from Seattle to London, you fly over Baffin Island and south-central Greenland.
• To get from Melbourne, Australia, to São Paulo, Brazil, you fly nearly over the South Pole.
• Flying from New York City to Tokyo takes you over the Bering Strait.
THE BASICS OF GOLDEN AGE GEEK BRITCOM
Ah, British humor! How we love to bask in your wry, absurdist glow! How we long to stumble across your late-night rebroadcast marathons, deep in the recesses of triple-digit cable television! How we yearn to endlessly rewatch your short-attention-span skits, most of which follow the general format I am a toff but happen to not be wearing pants, until we can quote them verbatim while standing around the sidelines after being theatrically killed at a Society for Creative Anachronism reenactment battle!
• Blackadder. Edmund Blackad-der, played by Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean fame, is an English noble of declining fortunes who stumbles through some of the high-and low-lights of Brit history.
• Fawlty Towers. The title hotel is run by Basil Fawlty (played by John Cleese, who also cow-rote the series), a social climbing, miserly paranoiac. Legend has it the character was inspired by the proprietor of a hotel where the Monty Python cast once stayed while filming.
• Red Dwarf. Dave Lister is the universe's last remaining human being and is aided in his quest to pilot the title ship back to Earth by a hologram, a cat-like creature evolved from a pet named Frankenstein, the ship's (male) computer (named Holly), and a Series 4000 mechanoid robotic servant named Kryten. For extra geek points, you can read the books.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus. If you are reading this book, you are already familiar with MPFC, which produced sketches including “The Dead Parrot,” “The Lumberjack Song,” “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” “The Spanish Inquisition,” and “Nudge, Nudge.”
THE NECESSARY HOME SAFETY DEVICES
With global warming, the HIV/ AIDS crisis, the threat of terrorism, potential nuclear proliferation in extremist states, ongoing and ever-shifting pockets of genocide, natural disasters seemingly on the increase, and second thoughts about your choice of preschools for your three-year-old, it is hard enough to sleep without having to also worry about being robbed. Installing the following safety devices will allow you to sit atop your hoard like the unholy lovechild of Ayn Rand and the dragon Smaug, without needing to sleep with one eye open in order to protect your loot from the destitute and desperate proletariat (let them eat cake!):
• Acoustic sensors: highly sensitive microphones mounted in your walls (inappropriate for occupied homes or those with naturally high ambient noise).
• Infrared sensors: in addition to detecting warm bodies, an infrared sensor can also detect heat change due to fire and/or malfunctioning home appliances.
• Microwave sensors: these use Doppler radar, measuring the waves that normally bounce back from a wall or other home object. If something is moving within the sensor's field, the waves will return compressed or expanded (à la Doppler).
• Photoelectric sensors: a light is pointed at a sensor, which is tripped if the light beam is broken. The sneaky part is the light, which is commonly infrared and thus invisible to would-be intruders.
• Magnetic detection: though this sounds relatively cool, it actually refers to a metal-to-metal circuit that, if broken, triggers an alarm. These can be as basic as a connection inside your window locks or as complex as mesh screens built into your walls that detect thieves equipped with reciprocating saws and/or directed explosive charges.
• If you like, connect all these goodies to your computer, allowing you to remotely access your streamed video security footage and get break-in messages sent directly to your mobile phone (as if you weren't already compulsive enough about your inbox).
UNDERSTANDING THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE DEBACLE
To the lay consumer, the term subprime sounds like a good thing (“Wow, if prime rate is what banks charge their best borrowers, then subprime should be even better!”). It's not. In fact, it is worse and sometimes much worse. Subprime loans are those extended to iffy borrowers at rates high enough to justify the risk. “Sure,” banks say, “some of these iffy borrowers will default, but the extra money we get from charging 14.99 percent interest on this home equity account will make up for these few defaulting cases.” Unfortunately for banks, their haste to extend sketchy credit coincided with the bursting of the housing bubble, which meant that all of a sudden banks were left holding loans worth more than the collateral and also that many, many more borrowers than banks had predicted proved unable to meet their loan payments. Prices in the housing market, flooded with foreclosures, desperate sellers, and builders who failed to foresee the end of the boom years, further slumped.
If the crisis had been limited to banks and borrowers, this might not have been such a big deal. But many banks bundled these iffy loans and passed along the debt to third-party investors via Mortgage Backed Securities (MBSes, which are proving similar in risk and potential detrimental effects to the ROUSes of The Princess Bride). Basically, big financial companies bought the debt from banks and offered them as investment opportunities to people looking to ride the bubble ever upward. As borrowers defaulted, the monthly payments to these MBSes dried up, and the financial institutions were left “holding their asses,” as the phrase goes.
Oops.
Also going down with the ship were the firewall companies designed to mitigate this risk (dealers in collateralized debt obligations and structured investment vehicles), which were simply overwhelmed by the ever growing snowball of badness that landed in the middle of their celebratory housing-bubble cum stock-market-bubble cake.
Of course, the response of the credit markets (after high-decibel profanity and/or jumping from Wall Street windows) was to stanch the bleeding. The availability of credit dried up. This is bad for everybody, because credit is how deals get done; without it, would-be homebuyers as well as businesses considering mergers, acquisitions, and expansion are hamstrung. Usually with housing prices down, homeowners would jump at the opportunity for a deal, but without available loans, there is no jumping (except from the aforementioned windows).
The morals of the story: greed trumps sense, and when a wolf (or predatory lending institution) offers you a cookie, beware.
FOUR PAIRS OF VELCRO SHOES AVAILABLE NEW FOR BELOW $34.99
• Izod Men's Bravura: a sporty leather slipper with stylish Velcro Z-closure. Perfect for the home office or trips to
the mailbox in your boxers.
• Rockport Ellery Velcro Men's Walking Shoes: like the Izod but with traditional two-strap Velcro closure, with octopus tentacle sucker traction pattern.
• Dexter Men's Bowling Shoe: be the envy of your league.
• Propet Men's Walker: according to the manufacturer, these shoes offer “that ‘broken-in’ feeling as soon as you take them out of the box.”
DEVELOPMENTAL MILESTONES
You know your child is a genius. Your child's grandparents know he/she is a genius. So why do the other parents in your playgroup shoot you sideways looks when little Ricky continues to eat rocks at twenty-four months? Provided below is a chart that will only make things worse. Read this at your own risk and then discount everything therein, continuing in the belief that your child is perfect.
DAVID COPPERFIELD'S ATTEMPT TO DISCOURAGE THE HUDDLED MASSES
In 1983, who didn't enjoy a good form-fitting, robotic silver jacket, open to a dramatic V at the neck? As seen in his YouTube video showing the disappearance of the Statue of Liberty, certainly David Copperfield cannot be counted among the style dissenters. In this video, Copperfield raises a curtain between a live audience and the Statue of Liberty, and seconds later the curtain drops to reveal searchlights passing through the space where the statue recently sat. The trick, created by Jim Steinmeyer, has not been offi-cially explained, but in his book Bigger Secrets, William Pound-stone opines that Copperfield's illusion required a rotating seating area, which pointed the audience to a manufactured “empty zone” at sea, or that the audience was composed of paid actors looking at a much smaller model of the statue. The true secret may never be revealed (insert crooked eyebrow here).
ODE TO NPR
A snapshot of one Sunday's NPR programming: satellite images of nitrogen emissions that allow us to infer a region's dominant religion based on decreased emissions on the Friday, Saturday, or Sunday holy day (Weekend Edition); scientists in New Zealand working to remove the methane-causing bacteria in cows and sheep (Climate Connections); an appearance by the Ultimate Fighting champion Chuck “the Iceman” Lidell on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me; the background music of All Things Considered provided by Jaco Pas-torius, Sonny Rollins, Taj Mahal, and Sex Mob.
Oh NPR! Anywhere, anytime if in need of geekery, we must only scan the clusters around 89.1, 102.1, or 106.9 for your endearing mixture of highbrow hilarity, quirky science, political insight, news, interviews, geek eye by the sports guy (Frank Deford), and social commentary (with traffic reports, weather, and the überalluring voice of Terry Gross, to boot!).
We don't even begrudge the fund drives, which allow geeks to alleviate our liberal elitist guilt with an act of giving that neatly mimics the cleansing of the soul offered by answering a Falwellian/ Robertsonian/Grahamsian/ Swaggartian call for cash. The extent of our addiction is revealed when, instead of switching the station, we choose to listen to the familiar voices of our NPR commentators desperately describing the waning minutes of a funds-match opportunity.
(Technically, Car Talk, This American Life, Fair Game, and other geek standbys of this author's Sunday programming on KCRW Santa Monica are provided by PRI, not NPR—but still, you say tomayto, I say tomahto.)
A TIMELINE IN PICTURES: BADLY BROKEN ARM
Courtesy of Charlie Bosmore.
ANOTHER LOOK AT PSEUDOSCIENCES
• A crystal filters and otherwise transforms light. Why not also the vibrations, chrakas, and electromagnetic fields of the human body? Crystal healing was common in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, India, and China, as well as among the Inuit.
• Trees need water to survive, and root systems will expand into water-rich areas to supply trees with this water. If you were holding a representative of this root system—say a Y-shaped branch—you would undoubtedly feel its natural pull toward water. If you honed your skills, you could follow this pull to underground water sources, using the procedure known as dowsing.
• Quantum physics tests the edge of our mind's grasp of reality. Scientists tout the possibility of teleportation, time travel, and existing in two states at once; so, too, does Vedantic Hinduism. Thus, quantum physics proves the validity of the Veda (Deepak Chopra: “Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence, and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong”).
• Newton tried it. So did Plato. Pope John XXII, too. Likewise Tycho Brahe, Ernest Rutherford, and Roger Bacon. In fiction, Dante and Gargamel were obsessed by it. Of these, only Rutherford succeeded—in 1919, he turned nitrogen into oxygen. Unfortunately, even Rutherford's results fell short of the transformation of lead to gold these alchemists desired.
THE QUOTABLE X-FILES
MULDER: Sometimes the only sane answer to an insane world is insanity.
MULDER: After three hours I asked him to summon up the soul of Jimi Hendrix and requested “All Along the Watchtower.” You know, the guy's been dead twenty years, but he still hasn't lost his edge.
SCULLY: Your contact, while interesting in the context of science fiction, was, at least in my memory, recounting a poorly-veiled synopsis of an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
MULDER: Sometimes the need to mess with their heads outweighs the millstone of humiliation.
SCULLY: Oh, brain sucking parasites.
MULDER: Do you realize how hard it is to fake your own death? Only one person has pulled it off—Elvis.
MULDER: It's a conspiracy wrapped in a plot inside a government agenda.
THE ANSWER TO THE ULTIMATE QUESTION OF LIFE, PART I
To the existentialists—Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, et al.—there is no God and thus no absolute judge of morality or reality, and humans are free to make their own (i.e., while you look at a round, red fruit and say tomato, I might say focaccia; and while a God-influenced society might consider murder a crime or sin, existentialism-influenced figures like Dostoyevsky's fictional Ras-kolnikov do not … necessarily). This leads to the existential crisis of suddenly finding oneself alone and without purpose in a big, impersonal world.
The answer, say the existentialists, is to accept your isolation in this world and to revel in the fact of your own existence. This can be easier said than done. Especially when existentialists disallow the crutches of religion (remember, there is no God), science (just another way to put the world in artificially clean boxes), and even rationality (Sartre called rationality “bad faith” and emphasized the world's fundamental irrationality).
THE ANSWER TO THE ULTIMATE QUESTION OF LIFE, PART II
42.
THE 0.15 OF A TOPIC: THE ANSWER TO THE ULTIMATE QUESTION OF LIFE, PART III
6.3.
BRAINS, BRAINS!
You wouldn't be much without your brain; however, you would also be less likely to attract zombies. Admittedly, this is a difficult trade-off.
Presumably there is something special about the human brain, as zombies are rarely seen lusting after or consuming the brains of lesser species. While we can only guess what this special something might be, in the chart below you can see many differences between the human brain and those of said lesser species.*
* of = olfactory, op = optic, cr = cerebral hemisphere, cb = cerebellum, m = medulla oblongata
HOW TO PROGRAM UNIVERSAL REMOTE CONTROLS
• RCA: Turn on the component you want to control. Press this component's button on your remote control (the ON-OFF button will turn on). Press and hold the component button with the ON-OFF button, which will turn off and then back on, at which point you can release both buttons. Press and release the PLAY button until the component turns off. Press and release the REVERSE button until the component turns on. Press the STOP button to save your code.
• GE: Search online for your component's three-digit code. Turn on the component you want to control. Press and hold the remote's CODE SEARCH button until the indicator light turns on, at which point you may release
the button. Press and release the desired component's button. Enter the component's three-digit program code.
• Jensen: Search online for your component's three-digit code. Turn on the component you want to control. Press and hold the remote's DEVICE key until the indicator light turns on. Release the device key and immediately enter the three-digit component code. Press the POWER key to check your work.
• Sony: Search online for your component's two-digit program code. Simultaneously press the remote's OFF and MUTE buttons. Press the indicator button for your desired component. Enter the two-digit program code and press the ENTER button.
