Making of “War of the Worlds” *spoilers*

Guy A: Are you telling me that I can’t peel off your socks?

Guy B: I’m telling you that you can try.

Guy A: What you need to ask yourself is “do I feel lucky?”

Guy B: Does what you’re saying even make any sense? That’s what you need to ask yourself.

Guy A: I’m not going to ask you which of those questions I’m supposed to ask myself if that’s what you’re trying to get me to do.

Guy B: Why would I even care? You’re the one who keeps trying to pull off my socks.

Guy A: I’ve been asking. I want to make this perfectly clear, if I had started trying you’d know it!

Guy B: How would I know?

Guy A: Because you wouldn’t have any damn socks, Einstein!

Guy B: The name is Epstein, Einstein.

Guy A: Yes, I know, that’s why I called you Einstein.

Guy B: No, idiot, I was calling you Einstein.

Guy A: I’m not going to ask you why you think that makes sense, if that’s what you’re trying to get me to do.

Guy B: Why would I care what you ask?

Guy A: Well, because we’re best friends.

Guy B: What brought you to that conclusion?

Guy A: The way you hang on my every word. The way you told me to try and peel off your socks. The way you always answer my questions with a, what do you call those?

Guy B: A question?

Guy A: Yeah, just like that.

Guy B: Best of luck to you Einstein.

Guy A: He he, I got your socks!

Guy B: I don’t know what you’ve got, but I’m still wearing my socks.

Guy A: Wow, the aliens are all dying!

Guy B: I know, we deliberately made the story as different as possible...

Guy A: And, don’t forget, as boring as possible...

Guy B: Right, as different and as boring as possible, but we decided to keep the original ending.

Guy A: Brilliant.

Guy B: It was the cold.

Guy A: What?

Guy B: The cold, the common cold. That’s what killed them.

Guy A: But then why?

Guy B: Don’t ask, just believe.

Guy A: I’ve got your nose!

Guy B: Oh, shut up.

Not quite the story of my life...

I was the king of everything dusty and rank. They peeled me out of my soup can and dropped me off at the mall of death. I strode with the best of them. They called us Barbra Streisand. I never had time to learn why.

One day, me and some of the other Barbras impaled a hitchhiker to an oak door with an ice pick. The story didn’t get any airplay until the 11 o’clock news. The guy never saw a thing but he described us perfectly, “A pushy loud-mouthed chick who kept claiming I miss screamed her name.”

About 15 years later I wasn’t the big shot I used to be. I stopped at a convenience store and picked up one of those plastic looking, almost glowing food products. As I paid for my lunch I noticed an odd gleam in the eye of the guy at the register. By the time I was hacking down the the final chunk and fighting my gag reflex like a bulimic with short term memory loss, I realized the dude had slipped something in my ‘ham’ sandwich.

I was awakened by the smell of burning pancakes and the tickle of blood dripping down my legs, only to find myself stapled to the business end of a turkey baster.

It’s true what they say, “people who think they need a cheap-ass hoagy are the lunk-headedest people in the world.”

What the?

The boy said what the? in pretentious tones, the girl said what the? in and out of her mind. The glass was all what the? rose colored shards, and people slithered in the rain.

There was no call for tidiness. No one cares. No one Cleans. No one owns anything. Everything is just a bucket of twigs, actually, that’s not a very good metaphor, but you know what I mean. It’s like staple cross or something in a lung bucket.

Nancy Dreamface or girl with the eyebrows.

She walks over, well, she wades in the sun, but I can’t stop staring at her crowded mind.

Her thick, cool glasses glisten with dead whimsy, and her voice is like lead, soft, grey and heavy.

She stutters, sputters and chokes out all the evil.

Not like a weed. Like a duck.

The vomit dances off her polished lips.

I got credit for being a student so I payed her off.

The next day I woke up early and watched as they threw the whole forest in the trash.

The science of the uninteresting...

Have you heard about the new cheesy ad campaign to get funding for quantum research? It’s called Quantum Encryption or Quantum Cryptography. Sure, QE and QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) have been around in the form of a high budget grade school science project for years, but only recently has it become a major marketing campaign for Quantum Everything.

Sure, better encryption is interesting, actually it isn’t, but it’s more interesting than worse encryption. So, being the closest to practical branch of the quantum yawn-fest, it is most likely to gain acceptance in the target demo; people who have money and want to keep secrets. This conveniently includes many world governments which actually have a “license” to print money.

So what is QE? It is the simplest, most linear, most pedantic, most restricted, least quantumy branch of supposed quantum application. It is essentially based on moving a photon from one place to another. The idea is that if you look at it, it is altered, if it is altered there is a warning, if there is a warning encryption can be changed, if encryption is changed it naturally follows that data is protected.

Ideally your quantum key consisting of photons would contain no duplicates, if there were duplicates, then someone could eavesdrop and take all your data. This is where it is demonstrated that viewing a thing changes that thing. Now, when dealing with entanglement and other things (that we may never need to deal with), this is a slightly less dull concept, but when dealing with QE is it really that complicated? You’ve already done the math...

Sure, viewing a single photon changes a photon. You get the photon. If Janie has an apple (in a bag) and she gives you an apple (in a bag) then you have an apple to look at, and the apple is no longer in its (recent) state of unlimited possibility. It follows that if that apple was intercepted by Jimmy and you see Janie walking toward you with an empty bag, you will change your apple delivery system or start using theft-resistant apples. That’s a practical application of QE.

Unfortunately, QE has not reached this level yet because Janie often produces identical apples, one of which can easily be intercepted by Jimmy without you knowing. The state of apple clone #1 was not changed from its intended course, and the state of apple #2 was never an issue. Now Jimmy can sit and stare at all your duplicate apples and really get to know them.

What is the solution? QE recommends a stopgap: Produce multiple dummy apples to confuse Jimmy. As he reaches out to grab Janie’s (seemingly) randomly thrown apples he can’t be absolutely sure that he’s getting a duplicate apple or a randomly generated apple. We are only a few years away from implementation of this technology.

I’m not saying any of this to deny the validity of Quantum Anything, I admire the use of addition and subtraction by these great scientists.

Quantum cryptography is often referred to as consisting of *both* classical and quantum techniques. If some of the researchers developing this “science” are implementing any quantum techniques, I don’t see why, because they don’t need to in order to carry this label. In fact, if they continue to rely on classical physics as they do now, it will make it to market sooner, they will get more brand recognition, the sheep will believe that it is really quantum science. Of course, they could just put out the Quantum Toaster and claim that it incorporates mysteries of string theory to get your toast done perfectly ... until looking at it changes it. It will be a big hit!

I accidentally signed a new band...

I didn’t even know I had a record label and now I am representing a new band. None of them can sing or play instruments. We just lock them in a room and let them bang on things. You can hear their sonic poo at myspace.com/aluminumsiding

A trickle of consciousness...

My ear is bleeding the tonal inversions leading to the deafness of a lie that absorbs my heart-aches and engulfs my derided hanky of oblivions tuna sandwich tuner who trained the sparks that are packed thickly in my head that leads plenty to the forests of intrusion that pickle the minds of the undertouched by belief and thickness of substance and fear while fading into electric harmonious ranting inappropriateness of happenstance with torque envisionating with deeply intrusive lacerational inept intrepitude that divides the wordsmiths into sections of beaconed and undercooked debeakened lazy-mounded irrationals with tentforks glistening for implementational frequentalizing without realizing that the millionator is a non-denominator of sequence and substance sandwiched between the discussions entombed in the infrequently revoiced jugglings of the mind-monkey that plucks licks and rips the paperweights that adorn my heart strings of tender meat then tumble into an eternal framework of comic parlance.

I wrote this for 8th grade english...

We were supposed to write an essay about the three biggest problems that our society faces and cap it off with a solution. I think our “teacher” was trying to get a Nobel Peace Prize without putting forth any effort. I knew that I was the only kid in my class with a shot at solving all the worlds problems by writing essays, so I needed to think carefully about my presentation. I only have the first draft which is very close to the final, but the teacher threw away the final draft (darn). Doesn’t matter though, neither was very good, which was the point. Anyway, I just found this and it saves me the trouble of thinking about and writing anything on the blog today. I made these few words cover two whole pages. Less words = less chance of a plagiarized Nobel Prize.

“Three Big Prob’s”

There are a number of problems facing America and its people today, among these are fakes, cheaters and skunks.

The first, fakes are a whole group of dopes and jerks. I have only one solution to this problem, to put them in jail for thirty days.

The second big problem is the cheater. The cheater likes to bet and only loses the low stakes. The solution to the cheater is to place all stakes low.

The third and last problem is the skunk. Skunks are very unclean and they stink most of the time. The solution to the skunks is a thick walled live trap that you can take the skunks to the snake pit in.

To conclude, we can see that these problems are not alike in the least. And the most sure answer to these problems is a nuclear war.

Epilogue: Needless to say my teacher never stole my idea and pawned it off as his own, also, he never won a Nobel Prize. And as you can see, the world has degenerated rather than improved. That’s what I call success!

The science of the unexplainable...

Einstein was a qualifier, he qualified almost everything he said. He even put “true” and “truth” in quotes much of the time as a little reminder that the truth had to be taken in context of the specific experiment and methods used. Thus relativity is a pretty good term for science that is relative.

Einstein also qualified his qualifiers, that’s why we need to understand the differences between Special and General Relativity. Many believe that Einstein thought the theory of Relativity was the end-all be-all solution to all of the mysteries of the universe. Nobody but an idiot would actually say such a thing, Einstein certainly presented many questions that he knew he could never fully answer.

It has been years now since I have seriously slowed down on my science reading. Just because I am not as educated as I could be doesn’t mean that I am totally lost in conversations regarding new science, however, I do have a general sense of reality about me which makes me skeptical of many ideas that pop up from time to time.

I need to point out though, that many things are perceived as incorrect because the person telling about them is uninformed or unintelligent. Things can also be perceived as incorrect because they are unexplainable. There may be a logical outcome, but the methods as to how the outcome is produced are not relatable in numbers, words, colors, sensations, impulses, vibrations or audible, visible or even tangible communications of any kind. So the question a reasonable person would have to ask themselves is if an intellectual endeavor is of any value if the knowledge gained is either, unusable, incomprehensible or unexplainable. For example, I would have to ask myself, “Now that the experiment and knowledge gained are reduced to an existentialist self-enrichment exercise, is it really worth all this effort?” My general answer would be “no”, my special answer would be “yes”.

Einstein is often quoted as saying, “God does not play dice with the universe”, but Einstein would probably have agreed that God does play God with the universe. In which case he would expect that there would be observations made that would either contradict common understanding or be beyond understanding. Most scientists would still feel a compulsion (as did Einstein) to know the reasons behind an observed phenomenon. Personally, I would love to know the answers to all the mysteries of the universe, but knowing the unexplainable realities I already know leaves me with a desire to communicate some small part of what I know, even if it is said, or typed, or scrawled, or drawn, or screamed, or splattered or painted in a way that no one can truly comprehend. As for science, I still keep up with small things, most of which aren’t science as much as they are bite-sized morsels of pseudo-science whimsy.

Now, I have to say that quantum anything eventually leads to this crossroads, “Do I wish to know something incomprehensible or unexplainable (even unknowable)?” I am intrigued, but everything I want to know about this branch of sometimes science I will have to find out for myself, because even when the answers are ready they are often senseless or useless.

Generally, when a big question comes up that I know would take many years just for the grants and a lifetime to experiment, I’m happy just to say, “God plays God with the universe”. I’m sure I’ll pick up all the information that I need as I go along.