More Pix For A Laugh

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

1. Does music express emotions or just elicit them? Read the next 200 pages to not find out.
- Welldogmycats

2. Girls take birth control. Girls then pee out unmetabolized estrogens from birth control. Pee goes to water treatment plant, estrogens not treated, male fish become female fish.
- Altzul

3. Nanoparticles are weird and I accidentally made a bomb and electrocuted myself.
-M33

4. People trying meditation for the first time get aroused.
- PainMatrix

5. When I get rid of this gene, it messes the brain up. A lot.
- NeuroscienceNerd

6. Computer AI systems can learn to operate a warp drive and automatically build an instructional system to train people how to do it. My dissertation is probably the only one in existence to reference the Star Trek technical manual.
- DrBiometrics

7. My experimental drug does NOT cure addiction.
- NotSoCleverPork

8. Making new magnets from old magnets because we're running out of magnets.
- IAmAHiggsBoson

9. Inpatients with schizophrenia are happier and socialize more in the context of a music listening group. It was obvious before we began the project and we learned nothing.
- Wouldyestap

10. Little things stick together. Here's a slightly easier way to calculate their stickiness.
- Born2bwire

11. There are amoebas living in volcanos, but I never captured Bigfoot on film (I tried).
- RNAPII

12. We can take random pieces of bacterial DNA from beaver poop and put them into other bacteria to discover new things, like how to break wood down into biofuels. Yes, I had to dissect dead beavers and handle their poop.
- Geneius

13. This protein looks like it might contribute to asthma. Oh, turns out it probably doesn't.
- Bear_Ear_Fritters

14. I crunch numbers using a supercomputer in the hopes of ensuring a fusion reactor in France doesn't get fried on the inside.
- PhysicsFornicator

15. Two proteins touch each other in a specific place in the developing heart. No idea if it's important for anything.
- Penguinpaige

16. I can make models of galaxies in a computer, but I can't explain why they don't act like real ones. Even if I bash them together or stir them around.
- McMillan_Astro

17. People sometimes think about animals as if they're people. People like those animals a little more than regular animals. Except when they don't. I can't believe they gave me a PhD.
- too_many_mangos

18. Sand washes away, don't build important stuff on it
- Zoidy

19. Why does a coffee stain looks the way it is, and how you can use it to make anti-laser glasses.
- Stockholm-Syndrom

20. You can make antimatter move in strange ways if you set your equipment up wrong.
- DrTBag

[bayonetbrant]

Saw that on FaceBook yesterday. Last one is my favorite

[Nefaro]

[LongBlade]

1. Does music express emotions or just elicit them? Read the next 200 pages to not find out.
- Welldogmycats

2. Girls take birth control. Girls then pee out unmetabolized estrogens from birth control. Pee goes to water treatment plant, estrogens not treated, male fish become female fish.
- Altzul

3. Nanoparticles are weird and I accidentally made a bomb and electrocuted myself.
-M33

4. People trying meditation for the first time get aroused.
- PainMatrix

5. When I get rid of this gene, it messes the brain up. A lot.
- NeuroscienceNerd

6. Computer AI systems can learn to operate a warp drive and automatically build an instructional system to train people how to do it. My dissertation is probably the only one in existence to reference the Star Trek technical manual.
- DrBiometrics

7. My experimental drug does NOT cure addiction.
- NotSoCleverPork

8. Making new magnets from old magnets because we're running out of magnets.
- IAmAHiggsBoson

9. Inpatients with schizophrenia are happier and socialize more in the context of a music listening group. It was obvious before we began the project and we learned nothing.
- Wouldyestap

10. Little things stick together. Here's a slightly easier way to calculate their stickiness.
- Born2bwire

11. There are amoebas living in volcanos, but I never captured Bigfoot on film (I tried).
- RNAPII

12. We can take random pieces of bacterial DNA from beaver poop and put them into other bacteria to discover new things, like how to break wood down into biofuels. Yes, I had to dissect dead beavers and handle their poop.
- Geneius

13. This protein looks like it might contribute to asthma. Oh, turns out it probably doesn't.
- Bear_Ear_Fritters

14. I crunch numbers using a supercomputer in the hopes of ensuring a fusion reactor in France doesn't get fried on the inside.
- PhysicsFornicator

15. Two proteins touch each other in a specific place in the developing heart. No idea if it's important for anything.
- Penguinpaige

16. I can make models of galaxies in a computer, but I can't explain why they don't act like real ones. Even if I bash them together or stir them around.
- McMillan_Astro

17. People sometimes think about animals as if they're people. People like those animals a little more than regular animals. Except when they don't. I can't believe they gave me a PhD.
- too_many_mangos

18. Sand washes away, don't build important stuff on it
- Zoidy

19. Why does a coffee stain looks the way it is, and how you can use it to make anti-laser glasses.
- Stockholm-Syndrom

20. You can make antimatter move in strange ways if you set your equipment up wrong.
- DrTBag

21. It should be illegal to take government money to study any of these.
- Stop-Wasting-Our-Money

[bayonetbrant]

Bison, AR, and some of the others will totally get this

[Staggerwing]

My shirt says 'Generic Ibuprofen 200', except it's repeated 5 times. My doctor says I wear it too often.

[Airborne Rifles]

Good ol' Motrin horse pills...

[besilarius]

Italians get no respect.

[JasonPratt]

3. Nanoparticles are weird and I accidentally made a bomb and electrocuted myself.
-M33

That is almost exactly the summary of my senior year science fair project. Except more boring because there's no way possible to make the device I was theorizing about, so I couldn't in fact electrocute myself.

Somehow I managed to place in the top 3 (again) that year. Despite the fact that, as you may have inferred from the abbreviated description, there was no experiment! I ran out of time due to procrastination/laziness, and invented a quantum time machine in theory the weekend before it was due.

This wasn't because the teachers were ignorant either. They called me in for a specific discussion of it, where I blatantly and ashamedly confessed that obviously there was no experiment. At first I thought they were calling me in to upbraid me for someone of my talent submitting a presentation that gave the tiniest possible crap when dozens of other kids had worked their asses off, so I was super-scared and embarrassed.

Eventually I realized what they really wanted to know was whether I had plagiarized it. No, obviously I had done the utter minimal possible work, with I think maybe one reference citation because this was long, long before the internet and I hadn't been able to find any other physics book coming close to the idea in the two local libraries I had access to before the project was duel. I was extremely honest about it, and then I got more embarrassed and kind-of-more scared when I realized they were seriously considering giving me first place.

Mind. Boggled.

I repeatedly pointed out THIS WASN'T EVEN AN EXPERIMENT! Literally every other kid in every year had a better claim to first place than I did; some of their projects even looked way better (though on that I had done the best I could given the time remaining.)

I talked them down to third place, I guess.  :P

I mean, I appreciated the compliment, but even then... 

A few years later in college, I learned there really was a time-travel theory based on adjusting the relative amplitude (for want of a better term, I had called it frequency but that was the wrong metaphor) of subatomic particles: as I theorized, every bit of energy in the universe vibrates at a particular amplitude (again for want of a better word) like a bell rung by the Big Bang, and that vibration is decreasing at a constant rate, as a sort of secondary entropy, so anyone wanting to time travel just has to figure out how to increase or decrease the amplitude of that vibration, like making a sound louder or softer.

As I explained, however, the process would be completely dangerous because it wouldn't involve spatial travel at all, and the Earth never passes through the same spatial position twice: the supercluster our galaxy is in, is constantly speeding away from other superclusters (more or less); our galactic cluster is doing the same thing in its own internal gravitational relations; our galaxy is doing the same thing in regard to its cluster relations; our star is orbiting the galactic center; our planet is orbiting our star; and there are rotational and tilt differences (and epicenter progressions) even when the planet completes a yearly orbit. Even a few seconds of time travel in either temporal direction would leave the object popping back into existence (very probably creating a large explosion from displaced material if not fusing with it) hundreds or thousands of feet in the air at several miles distance, if not worse.

So the results for actually doing it would be as accidentally dangerous as making a bomb and electrocuting myself. ;)

I used all this, in a simplified version (discounting most of the effects so that it could still 'work' for traveling at yearly 'points' of an orbit), for my first (and to date only) screenplay, DARC, where two brothers testing out a saucer-shaped time machine (one that can't move under its own power, though) get caught up in the life and battles of Jeanne d'Arc. 


Anyway. The judges at the district level properly ignored my entry.  ::)

[JasonPratt]

Coincidentally, the year after I sent my screenplay the rounds of agents and such, no less than two historical d'Arc movies were filmed and released, one to theater (Luc Besson's The Messenger), the other straight to TV. Both happened to use elements I included in my work, minus the time travel plot of course, although that's likely due to just sharing common historical source material.

The main book I used, and checked with the publisher about whether the rights were available (they were), was The True History of the Maid of Orleans, which I had somehow run across in the university library, in which the author argued from released documents about the trial of Jeanne d'Arc that she had actually been a bastard sister (so to speak) of the reigning Dauphin, backed by the Countess of Monaco as her close relative to come to power and take a place in French royalty. But then after turning the ongoing war in favor of France, Jeanne had insisted on starting up a new crusade into the Holy Land which no one (among the nobility) wanted to be involved in. So to prevent her from launching a public crusade, she had been betrayed into the hands of the Burgandy faction; but that was a setup, too, because the Countess of Monaco had sufficient allies on the council that tried her for blasphemy, to easily get her off. The plan was to quickly convict her of blasphemy, pretend to burn her at the stake, and then marry her off in secret to a minor noble, because the line of descent in French royalty traces through the female (the point on which Henry V had previously invaded France in the first place), and she was legitimately capable of bearing an heir to the throne.

All the political plans were nearly ruined because Jeanne was far more awesomely competent than virtually everyone around her anticipated -- including at defending herself legally while under arrest. Instead of a quick trial she kept them stalled for six months, until they had to trick her into signing a minor confession for time served, and then switched it out for a burning confession. They still got her flipped for another woman (kept drugged and hooded), whom they burned instead, and (on this theory) finally convinced her to shut up and keep quiet (and make babies like a good heiress ;) ), perhaps on the idea that everyone would believe she was only a crazy woman pretending to be Jeanne d'Arc. The author thought he had found her gravestone.

As a historical theory I thought it sounded pretty well researched; and I incorporated some of the conspiracy parts (not all of them, but for example nodding to the side-theory that the reason Gilles de Rais went on to become the infamous wife murderer Bluebeard was due to a crush he had developed on Jeanne during the campaigning) while porting in a number of other factoid details, some naturally retweaked for simplifying the story a bit. Every named character in the screenplay was either directly historical, or in the case of the two main villains composites of historical characters; and practically every thing Jeanne says or does (except in private with the guys, and some of that, too) is taken from one or another historical account.

In the end, I'm actually glad the film never got made. While it would have been fun, it was revisionist enough that I would have felt like I was being inadvertently disrespectful to the real people involved, especially her, even though I did my best to show her as someone constantly transcending everyone's attempts to use her as a tool for their purposes (even the guys, who just want to make sure they haven't messed up history and so can safely go home without a butterfly effect).

I may post the screenplay eventually for amusement value, though. 

[Windigo]

You are way over achieving/thinking there JP. Here, let me have a beer for you tonight on my deck... Cheers!

[bayonetbrant]

[bayonetbrant]

[Barthheart]

 

[mirth]