“Be careful fighting gravity. If you win, it’s a long way down.”
All those tropes of people being pulled away into space ala’ “Black Hole Sun” never seem to realize that long before that could happen first the atmosphere and oceans would be sucked away in supersonic hurricanes and five-mile high tsunamis; and then the Earth would be wracked by magnitude 20 earthquakes.
“Another group of mathematicians is working to put an upper bound on the number, although everyone keeps begging them to stop.”
Perhaps, once the number is discovered, we could learn to look at it safely, by viewing small portions or a weakened version of it, like the children in Different Kinds of Darkness or the people in Monty Python’s The Funniest Joke in the World.
Thanks for reminding me of the name of that story.
Beat me to it. Beware the Parrot
It’s a great story! But it wasn’t until I started writing the comment did I realize that it is actually quite similar to The Funniest Joke in the World. One of the translators accidentally saw two words and had to be hospitalized for weeks…
Old one from Mad Magazine:
I’ve always wondered if The Funniest Joke in the World was inspired by Henry Kuttner’s story Nothing but Gingerbread Left.
Now that’s a deep cut. I’d never heard of it. Will have to give it a read.
It’s terrific. Left his poor wife and seventeen (I’d best not continue)
“A person with two watches is never sure what time it is, especially if I got them one of the watches.”
Why does the lumber industry do that? I gather that due to swelling/shrinkage you’re never going to get anything made of wood to have perfect dimensions; but why get it wrong from the start?
There’s a history here: Nominal Versus Actual: A History of the 2x4 - Harvard Design Magazine
There are actually rulers called “shrink rules” which do kind of what Munroe proposes, except they are marked larger, not smaller, than the nominal dimensions that their labeling claims. I think they’re mostly used in ceramic and casting work, to account for the shrinkage of the work during drying and firing.
“The draw-by-repetition rule does a good job of keeping players from sliding a tile back and forth repeatedly, but the tiles definitely introduce some weird en passant and castling edge cases.”
That actually looks like something someone might propose, or more generally variable-geometry playing fields.
First thought was: what if the left and right edges wrapped around? And sure enough, it’s been proposed:
The size given is the size immediately after cutting from the tree trunk. After cutting the wood has to be dried out before it’s usable. There is always some shrinkage during the drying.
My understanding is that its not just shrinkage, but also wood lost by planning the boards smooth.
Pretty sure the choice of name for that killer BLIT is intentional…