Recall Susan's experience yesterday with a dying cat that turned out to be just supremely uninterested.

Maybe the cat just needed to be confused. </Monty Python>

Maybe the cat just needed to be confused.

Oh, studying Quantum Mechanics is perfect for that.

You can't always tell with regular cats

Yeah, but that's a physics cats. I mean, physics horses can be shaped as circles, physics air doesn't always resist anything going through it, physics particles are often described as completely free, and physics students are often described in questions (like the one I have to grade right now instead of playing online) as "deciding to check the law of gravity on themselves and therefore jumping from a 50-meters high building".

We let ourselves run around with a lot. Then we wave our hands a lot and say "from symmetry consideration" and "that's negligible" and "it's trivial to show that". Then we use these things to help talented people like lori to send rockets to Mars. And pretend it's obvious that it actually works.

Why would you want to replace fountains with cheap, ugly bleacher seats? Have you no soul? First off, fountains pretty. Second off, there are already plenty of cheap seats there. The highest ticket price in the entire ballpark is $27 for the seats by the dugout.

WTF?? This is one of those alternate universes where games never sell out and there are no obstructed views, isn't it? $27 in Fenway is a standing-room ticket and one hotdog.

Someday, far in the future, when the Royals don't suck and the tickets sell like hotcakes, the stadium owner will be very sad that he does not have more seats.

I should note that my master's thesis included a reference, in the dedication, to mr. flea and his colleagues, who (over beers, natch) offered to design me a computer model for the environmental processes I was studying (archaeology, Greece, erosion episodes, possible causes include destruction of terraces due to abandonment of land for farming and reversion to grazing...). They did indeed say, "First, we'll assume spherical goats..."

I am so wanting to hide from my work today. Hide hide hide.

"it's trivial to show that"

"Trivially obvious to the most casual observer" was one of my professors favorite phrase.

I cannot figure out how to denote possession in that sentence. Hypothetical omnipotent omnibenevolent gods I can handle; punctuation, nsm.

Sure it's impressive, but not very useful in a practical sense.

Unless you're in a Smallville fic.

I feel like I used to be able to carry on a conversation about other things.

I know, I can talk about lunch. I'm about to go get takeout Chinese.

Takeout Chinese sounds nice.

I'm having homemade potroast and raspberry yogurt.

I think "Warrior Anemones" would be an excellent band name.

with Hec on the "Who Cares?" bus.

I care! That's not my bus. I'm on the Sentient Tables Bus.

Is the Sentient Tables Bus *itself* sentient? And if not, why not?

Why create a universe? It's mostly empty space and the places that aren't empty are mostly pretty lousy places for life. Why hellish places like Venus? How about instead of a universe, just creating somebody to be nice and loving to?

OTOH, the stars, galaxies and planets are pretty, so maybe that's why God created them. And if God just created the Big Bang, then at least one galaxy would be required for the Earth to be created and life to evolve (as most of the Earth's atoms were created in other stars).

Well, think in terms of billions and billions of years (insert Carl Sagan-like gesturing) -- perhaps the Creator has a long-range plan that spans those billions and billions of years, and which requires the presence of Venus for other things to happen, say, 10 million years down the road. Without Venus, such-and-such thing couldn't happen, which would fuck the Creator's long-range plan.

It's sort of like (follow me, here) a seasons-long arc in a TV show, where something introduced in S1, episode 6, that seems completely unimportant and possibly stupid turns out to be essential for wrapping up S5. It's just that the viewer doesn't know, back in S1, that the phlebotnum will be relevant 4 seasons later.

That's my best guess at why the universe is full of shit we can't use.

Why is discussing these things so much more fun and interesting and feels-like-physics than grading?

Oh, yeah, because most things in the world look so much more fun and interesting than grading, when actually grading. Whining, for example, like I do right now.