OFF TOPIC Keeping up with the times....

[Jones Beene]

The next message, not this one, should be more on-topic. It will be a mini-essay entitled "Beyond Cold Fusion and the Hydrino". But when trying to find some past research and related material, I came across this little bit of humor in my "drafts" box, which now has 378 unfinished thoughts in it (so adjust your spam filters accordingly).   The main premise of the on-topic next posting (not this off-topic one) is that CANR-LENR and the hydrino are dual aspects of a deceivingly complicated subject, which can be called a "simplex" (a subject which has been oversimplified so successfully in the past that we tend to minimalize its true complexity "on the next lower scale"). Ironically the subject is one which mainstream science thought they had totally mastered 50 years ago.That subject, of course, being the simplest, and at the same time, the most complicated of all matter - the hydrogen atom/molecule.   Ah... life is seldom as uncomplicated as we fervently desire it to be. Even now in 2004, I can't get my voice telephone fixed (its been "occasionally" but not always "out" for 2 weeks despite having DSL work perfectly). If it had just failed, they could fix it, but since it didn't fail, they can't fix it. Now that is the kind of logic that Harry Tuttle can appreciate.   And that is why humans were compelled to invent "nostalgia." It was a psychological imperative. But it is almost an act of supreme hubris for us human mental-midgets to think that something which comprises most of the known universe, hydrogen, could really be 'that' simple (Bohr atom, etc.). Oh sure, one has to get down to the minute details, down to a picometer geometry really, in order to appreciate the ever-unraveling complexity of hydrogen. Maybe the Lamb shift should have given us a hint as to what was in store, that Shrodinger was a gross-generalization. Even the great Dane himself, a product of another era, had little clue about the unraveling, which is just now beginning... but that is to be the subject of the second part of this posting. For now, some culture commentary.   Speaking of the formerly simple, now unraveling in its complexity, here is some slightly risqué humor to start off your day. It is a tribute to "nostalgia" but in the way that only your worst enemy would wish on you.   To paraphrase Neal Stephenson and other culture bloggers: It wasn't that long ago that in order to connect you brand-spanking new "major appliance" purchase (you remember the one - that amazingly advanced '386 PC which cost more than your Chevrolet, with less raw MIPs than your average teen now has to tote around his "itunes" on these days).... anyway to connect that awe-inspiring new device (now a door stop in your garage) to any outside source of information (sorry, this was before the WWW... we're talking a BBS, which probably had Usenet if you were lucky), you would be compelled to go through this bazzaro mating-ritual kind of thing, requiring you to pick up the phone, dial the other computer's number (often a long distance # ), listen for the first hint of an excruciatingly annoying dissonant rasping, and then quickly slam the handset down into the rubber cups of your very expensive new, big as a shoe-box, hi-tek modem (they practically give them away these days). At least the voice lines worked back then.   If your aim was accurate, this now-comic contraption would wrap one of its neoprene lips around the earpiece and the other succulent lip around the telephone's mouthpiece, consummating a kind of cyber-esques soixante-neuf, shuddering eventually, as it was suddenly possessed by the spirit of a distant cyber-lover, and begin to hammer out with incredible deliberation, a (usually) rather garbled messages in courier font, which no self-respecting IBM selectric would touch with a ten bite pole. After which, you could calculate that... with amortization, etc. the message cost you about $64 and change. But, of course, you had just scored the latest news about the upcoming '486 .... Ah.... in short, your had the "bug" way back then, in more ways than one... beyond even the Harry Tuttle variety, but you were at least glad to get a voyeuristic little bit of titillation from watching the modem sex-ritual, coz' you wife has frozen up her available sockets when you decided to blow the family surplus on the wrong kind of box, so brother, all you got left is them down-home "Core Dumped Blues"...   Well, my terminal's all locked up, can't get no Mail, can't recall the last time Gopher didn't fail ...Got stacks in my 'structs, arrays in my queues, ...Got the Segmentation violation: Core dumped blues.   Now, that is anti-nostalgia, or the way it actually was, not the way we might desire or wish it had been - in order that we could "wax nostalgic" when the brand new Dell does something similar, but several layers deeper in the works, so it is much more difficult to find the "bug" nowadays ).   Jones   Where is Harry Tuttle when we need him? ... still in the duct-work?