Dinner Conversation Gone Below the Belt: Busting a Drupe
Enslaved by Zero
“You haven’t done enough Math-type stuff lately,” you say?
How about this:
Being Tuesday, let’s look at dividing by zero, and what it does to a Facit ESA-01 mechanical calculator. Neat (and a fine impression of a car I had in College that ate lifters as a steady diet), but what does this have to do with Tuesday? I mean aside from the fact that the resale value of that car I mentioned was precisely zero dollars.
Consider that Tuesday in many languages has connection to Mars, which, having exactly zero oceans, it has zero elevation with regard to sea level.
More? Consider that it was Merton Davies who selected a line along the crater Airy-0 a the Prime Meridian 0.0° longitude as the reference point for determining geospatial coordinates on the red planet. Davies was born on September 13, 1917, which was the 286th day of the year. Two minus eight gives us negative six, and adding six to that gives us… Zero.
All things are delicately interconnected, kids.
No, It Wouldn’t Be Cool OR Plausible

History All Aglow

Little-known fact about Christmas Eve, via Brian’s “Lost History and Other Shit They Can’t Be Bothered to Teach You in School and Stuff Secret Bunker of Knowledge”.
Today’s installment: “All Things Are Delicately Interconnected Via Rubbers.”
Pining for his never-to-be love interest on this day back in 1933, Albert Einstein pens a letter to the woman he’s become smitten with, one Marie Curie from his New Jersey study as his wife prepares their usual evening treat, a fifth of wood alcohol and an eight ball chaser. Unbeknownst to Mrs. E, her husband is about to make history once again; this time in the field of photography.
After snapping the world’s first selfie (on the world’s first instant film camera, no less; the man was a fucking pioneer), he inscribes the photo with the words “Me equals meat squared,” and sends the image off to his crush.
Her second husband at the time, Stanley Czeirnitkovielskiweicz intercepts the pornographic portrait, and proceeds to poison his wife – whom he incorrectly perceives as being unfaithful – by utilizing a glow-in-the-dark condom that night, which he fashions from lambskin coated with radium-laced, self-luminous paint.
While the prudish history books of old may tell of her death being the result of she and her first husband Pierre staring for hours at a glowing batch of radium extracted from pitchblende, the cold reality was that it was a warm, glowing rod that sealed her fate years later via a photograph of a very disturbed (and naked) German, thus sparking the Polish-German war of 1934. As we all know, the war cam to an end with the Treaty of Lubin, wherein private manufacture of condoms was outlawed, and as a blanket punishment for the Polish people in general (based unfairly by virtue of his last name alone – Stanley was actually a Korean immigrant living under an assumed name), the Polack joke, once considered taboo, was to become the go-to icebreaker of choice in all pubs across Europe.
Richard Feynman Helped Me Find My Way
Richard Feynman, when asked in an interview about his ability to talk easily with scientists in other fields (versus, say a playwright) if perhaps this natural comfort was because he read the “scientific magazines”, Feynman responded by saying “we don’t have to have magazines or gossip; we think originally. We think of a new idea.”
For about 30 seconds after hearing that, I felt that I shared a place… a brief moment of kinship and understanding with one of the greatest minds to ever inhabit the Earth. He summed up in less than twenty words EXACTLY what I feel about designers wasting time discussing what car was featured in what magazine, and trying to draw any inspiration from what was happening in the three months since it was printed… Not to mention the years of build time preceding that, or even the years of refinement into the idea that sparked a cool build or just a part of one.
Fucking awesome.
It may not mean anything to you, but to me it was like having a light go on, and now I can see right where it all needs to go with regard to my career.