Another Dark and Stormy Night?

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2009 results

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and phrases like “the great unwashed” and “the almighty dollar,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Here’s the winner of the detective category, in case the contest description isn’t enough of an inducement.

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

Oh, Sure. Take All of the Fun Out of It.

A Unified Quantum Theory of the Sexual Interaction

In the simplest theories of the sexual interaction, the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian describing all allowed forms of two-body coupling are identified with the conventional gender states, “Male” and “Female” denoted |M> and |F> in the Dirac bra-ket notation; note that the bra is superfluous in this context so, as usual, we dispense with it at the outset. Interactions between |M> and |F> states are assumed to be attractive while those between |M> and |M> or |F> and |F> are supposed either to be repulsive or, in some theories, entirely forbidden.

The treatment, however, is incomplete. There is no mention of the difficulty of describing an interaction in the dressed-state picture. Nor any analysis showing that M-F coupling with aligned spins may, with some probability, be equivalent to applying the creation operator (clearly, these are bosons), while in interactions with spins anti-aligned, this does not happen; both interactions usually occur with both particles in an excited state.

wavefunction

Our Top Men Are Working on It

The Onion: NASA Embarks On Epic Delay

Top officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration unveiled plans this week for a comprehensive, multibillion-dollar delay—the agency’s most ambitious postponement of cosmic exploration ever.

The unprecedented delay has reportedly brought together the nation’s foremost aerospace engineers, whose combined efforts have already added 18 months of rescheduled meetings to the daring mission