Riposte!

“Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha – THRUST!”

Jennifer whips out her $1.25 quarter-staff pen and writes tit for tat, an excellent twist to the physical theories as women

Electrodynamics is your first real boyfriend, and all your friends swear he’s quite the catch: well-educated, ambitious, clean-cut, amusing, great chemistry, plus you love his mom. Alas, he is Mr. Traditional Family Values, and you are still going through your experimental “finding yourself” phase — frankly, you’re just not ready to settle down. Sure, opposites attract and make the sparks fly, but there has to be some complementary areas, too. You think he cares too much about what other people think. Your electro-shock blue Mohawk and multiple body piercings pretty much take you out of the running for Long-Term Potential, given his conservatism and career ambitions. When your differences become too great, you chalk it up to life lessons learned and move on to greener pastures.

I suspected that Thermodynamics is the guy you’re never really into, that helps you move into a new apartment/dorm, even while you’re dating Electrodynamics or Special Relativity, but by the time Quantum comes along, he realizes it’s hopeless. In later years, he becomes statistical mechanics, and you confirm you were right to have never gotten seriously involved.

It's Like, Symmetry, Dude!

Hubble Kaleidoscope Finds Evidence Of Space Looking All Crazy

“With their unprecedented resolution, the latest images from the new kaleidoscope reveal that space, once thought to be isotropic, is actually continuously expanding, unfolding, and rearranging in a series of freaky patterns,” said astronomer Douglas Stetler, head of the Space Kaleidoscope Science Institute in Baltimore. “It’s an exciting time for the field of astrokaleidoscopics, or anyone interested in the vast, wacked-out nature of space.”

[…]

Despite excitement over the discovery that space is all crazy-looking, a number of legislators have threatened to cut funding for NASA’s kaleidoscopic program. An outspoken critic of the agency, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said she hopes NASA scientists don’t just use the kaleidoscope a few times and then lose interest and never touch it again, like they did with the Brookhaven Neutrino Spirograph, Fermilab’s Particle Slingshot, and the Very Large Slip ‘n Slide Array in New Mexico.

However, it should be noted that they still continue to play around with the boxes those devices came in.

Units, Units, Who's Got the Units?

Via Symmetry Breaking, I discover the link to Sensible Units, which uses a unique definition of sensible. Type in a distance, and you might get the equivalent in AA batteries end-to-end or Alaskan moose antler spans. Or find a weight in equivalent average housecats.

Then there is the List of unusual units of measurement

It in includes the Sagan, which I used not long a ago, unaware it had already been codified in Wikipedia. There are more mainstream units, such as the barn and the shake.

And then we have the List of humorous units of measurement, including the Smoot mention in the Symmetry Breaking post, and the Helen, a unit of beauty (a milliHelen being the beauty needed to launch a single ship).

Negative values have also been observed—these, of course, are measured by the number of ships sunk or the number of clocks stopped. An alternative interpretation of 1 negative Helen is the amount of negative beauty (i.e. ugliness) that can launch one thousand ships the other way.

I question a few of these. I would think that happiness would be measured in clams rather than puppies, because of the need to quantify not only the warmness and dryness (wet dogs bring forth little happiness) but the calibrations for breed of the dog. I can see arguments breaking out, because a standard Lab generates more happiness than a Schnauzer — lots more — according to my research.

And speaking of dogs, the unit for illness is missing, and how sick you are would be measured in dogs. Health, or rather fitness, would be in fiddles. Insanity (madness) would be in Hatters. Nervousness would be in rocking chairs, calibrated with a standard long-tailed cat in a standard room. Smoothness would have the units of silk. Stubbornness measured in mules, while gentleness is measured in lambs. Uselessness, which surprisingly is quantized, in tits on some standard bull.

I think there are some standards labs that need to get cracking. At 0.6 greased lightnings, if not faster.