Thursday, August 05, 2010

Is cuddly chemical an oxytocin?


‎"Is cuddly chemical an oxytocin?"

[room full of blank looks at work]

"It's a joke..."
"Uh huh"

"Quite a clever one, actually"
"What was it again?"

"Is cuddly chemical an oxytocin?"

[pause]

"I dunno, is it?"

"You see, chemicals are rarely cuddly, so the phrase is an oxymoron. Oxytocin is the hormone generated by cuddling and oxytocin sounds like oxymoron, so it works on two levels... Funny, eh?"
"Now that you put it like that... no"

"Just thought it up. Right now. Googled it to see if it's original and everything"
"Yes Simon"

"You didn't get it, did you?"
"What? Oh... Yes. One of your best, I felt. Right up there with, um, the last one. Whatever that was, I forget..."

[long pause]

"Bastards"

Monday, May 10, 2010

The meaning of life (pt2)...


[comment from facebook]

I'm actually being serious here - I really do suspect the purpose of life is to create black holes more efficiently than inorganic processes (ie gravity) can manage. That's why we live in a universe where the laws of physics are such as to encourage the development of intelligent life - it's evolution in action.

All we need to postulate is that black holes in any given universe contain other child universes that have inherited the physical laws of their parent universe with small random changes, and the rest follows from evolution.

My theory is that we live in a universe where the physical laws permit life to arise because it derives from a parent universe where black holes were created in large numbers by intelligent life. As we in turn will do in this universe... Ad infinitum.

The universes where the physical laws are such as not to permit life to arise will only have black holes (ie children) that are created by gravity, so they'll have far fewer of them than universes with life could achieve. So, standard evolution theory applies and the universes that have more children, ie those with intelligent life, will come to dominate reality.

Of course, this presupposes that intelligent life either figures this out and altruistically makes a point of creating black holes, or that there are other factors that would encourage life to create black holes. It may not therefore just be an accident that with our universe's physical laws the most efficient way to turn mass into energy is to drop it into a black hole, that may also have co-evolved to encourage sufficiently advanced civilisations to create and use them as power sources...

Thursday, May 06, 2010

The meaning of life...

[slightly revised from facebook]

It has been speculated by reputable physisisi-oh damn it! By scientists - they're easier to spell - that universes evolve by budding off new 'children' inside black holes, where each black hole contains a new universe with physical laws derived from the 'parent' universe but scrambled slightly.

From this it follows that we should expect physical laws to have evolved in the direction that favours the production of black holes, because the universes that generate more black holes have more children, and the child universes where the physical laws are biassed in the direction of generating more black holes will have even more children, and so on.

Therefore it seems to me that if intelligent life was to make a point of converting matter into black holes as efficiently as possible (that's efficiently as in making more holes rather than bigger holes - the smaller the better in fact) rather than leaving this to gravity and chance, then we would expect the physical laws of universes to evolve in the direction that favoured the development of such intelligent life.

We are here; QED... Now, get on with it. Grab those atoms and SQUEEZE!


Of course, if this is believed by aliens they could be out there already on a religeous crusade to turn everything into black holes, which might explain why there's so much dark matter in the universe. When the stars near us start going out it'll really be time to panic...

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Ooops


Due to circumstances beyond my control (I'm an idiot) I've been ignoring mail sent to my usual crem@desdes.com mail account for a while, this has now been rectified. Doh!

I changed email clients and screwed up a setting so it wasn't picking up mail for that account, and have been so busy that I hadn't noticed the reduction in penis enlargement, cheap viagra and nigerian spam...