Magneto, Margaret Thatcher and Robot Moths

More answers to your questions from the blog that sets out to explain everything in the universe, and other universes too if there’s time left over at the end.

@clangerfan1 asked: Can you explain the correct "hug greeting protocol" when meeting people for the first time?

It’s not really a question of protocol - what you are dealing with are the laws of physics. Two people meeting, like any two bodies with mass, will be drawn together. If unchecked this takes the form of a hug, or if it’s late at night in Glasgow Queen Street Station, a head butt. And yet many encounters result in neither outcome. In her efforts to explain this phenomenon the pioneering bio-physicist Irma Maskald-Fingermaus discovered the sub-atomic particles of awkwardness emitted by people on social occasions, particles which we know today as “hesitons”. Typically one person emitting a single hesiton is enough to delay but not prevent an embrace, but should the first hesiton induce the emission of a second hesiton in the other person, then the two hesitons will repel each other, and cause the emission of further particles creating what bio-physicists call a “negatively-charged atmosphere” containing enough awkwardness to prevent anything but the most stand-offish of handshakes.  A good example of just such a charged atmosphere would be all of Britain.

Jeffrey S. If Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady, could Magneto have defeated her?

Actually you are in luck because working in the tradition of that fine art-house classic Alien vs. Predator, I have just finished my screenplay for X-Men vs. Ex-PM. It features the power-crazed antics of the implacable supervillain locked in battle with Magneto, and culminates in a climactic sequence where Magneto throws the entirety of British heavy industry at Thatcher. She successfully destroys it in mid-air and is about to obliterate Magneto forever with a no-nonsense speech about how he doesn’t know the price of butter when Geoffrey Howe’s resignation triggers a leadership ballot and Thatcher implodes. Not suitable for miners.

Nance What is the best method for removing a red wine stain from a white cashmere sweater?

Use scissors to cut carefully around the edge of the stain and then whenever you wear the sweater mutter grumpily about giant robot moths.

@clangerfan1 Why do lightbulbs only burn out when you turn them on (making you jump with their little "bang") instead of dying quietly in the night?

This was a deliberate design feature of old-style lightbulbs and its intention was to increase national creativity by upping the number of lightbulb-related epiphanies, or "lightbulb moments". For example Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle…” was inspired by the startled jump he did at the sudden burning-out of a bulb in the Swansea Public Library, causing him to spill his pint. There's concern in poetic circles that the modern shift to longer-lasting low-energy bulbs may reduce serendipitous verse output as it becomes harder and harder to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Grazlewacky Why does gravity seem to go in a generally downwards direction?


While gravity does indeed go straight down in Greenwich, London the further away you get from what is known as  “Greenwich Mean Down” the more gravity shifts, tilting sideways further and further until by the time you get to Australia gravity is going in exactly the opposite direction, and a dropped object will fall up, accelerating higher and higher until it hits the ground. This is because any dropped object falls directly towards the centre of the planet, an arrangement that was the result of a system devised by the Admiralty Board in 1758 to help Royal Navy sailors find where the Earth was during heavy nights out.

That’s all there’s internet for this week, but do keep the questions coming or there’s a danger some of the universe may never be explained.

How American Spelling Happened, and Gravity Meters

More answers to your questions from the blog that attempts to find meaning in the myriad complexities of human experience without the aid of a big bottle of gin. And sometimes with...

Nance Why do Americans drop the “u” when they spell words like neighbour, colour, and humour, but leave it in other words like contour and velour?


The American Declaration of Independence (or as it was known in Britain “Fine, See If We Care”) was followed by immensely difficult years for the newly-formed US government. Up to that point the erstwhile colonies had imported all letters of the alphabet from Britain, but in an attempt to undermine the prestige and name of the newly-formed USA in 1776 the British banned all trans-Atlantic trade in the letter U. The Americans were determined to keep the U in pride of place in their new nation’s name and so made sacrifices elsewhere, salvaging non-essential “u”s from words like “honour”, “harbour” and “elephaunt” (a usage that eventually became adopted back in Britain too) to keep the new national sobriquet intact.  As the blockade continued patriotic mums became “moms” and farmers exchanged their ploughs for plows while ukulele players took up the banjo. Eventually however the masses complained of this hand-to-moth existence, and there was even talk of a second revoltion so that by winter 1789 the Fonding Fathers had to face up to the possibility of becoming a Nited States of America. But as grim preparations were made tomake do without the letter U altogether and George Washington prepared a sombre State of the Onion address a French schooner, L’Ululation, carrying several tons of fresh letter “u”s wrapped in the finest contoured velour broke the British blockade of the ports.  The Americans fell on the vowel-rich cargo and the letter flooded back into the New World. But the years of shortage had left their scars and American spelling was never the same again.

Truf Why does my mother get hiccups from vodka, but doesn't get them from whisky?


It may be that your mother drinks vodka, but doesn’t drink whisky.

Nance What is the correct civic response to make when an alarm from a parked car in front of my house goes off at 2 am and lasts for more than 30 minutes?

As is so often the case, it’s all about boundaries. The car wants attention, but you also have to think about your needs. Try going out to the car and telling it gently but firmly that night time is a time for being quiet. By all means tell the car you love it, but don’t try to pick it up, just make sure it’s safe and go quietly back into the house. Do this every fifteen minutes or so and eventually the car will learn to settle itself or its battery will run out.

suk_pannu I'm paying hand over fist for my electricity, but I seem to be getting magnetism and gravity for free. Can you confirm the government has no plans to privatise other fundamental particles or forces?

In the name of our fragile planet, reconsider your attitude! Electricity charges are an essential way of controlling people’s consumption of a limited resource. If electricity were free it would be used inefficiently, it would be wasted, it would be squandered. And yet you seem perfectly content to help yourself to magnetism and gravity like there’s no tomorrow. Look around your home. There are hundreds of ways you could cut down on usage. Is your furniture just standing on the floor? Don’t waste gravity keeping it there. Strap it down! How is your shopping list fixed to your fridge? A magnet? BUY SOME GLUE! The sooner every home has gravity and magnetism meters the sooner people like you will get real about passing the forces of physics on unharmed to the next generation.

Do keep the questions coming. To question is to be human. Except during the important bit of expository dialogue in Homeland, when to question is to spoil it for people who are trying to concentrate.

Telepathy, Salt and an Unlucky Owl

More from the blog that aims to provide answers to all possible questions in the universe, except maybe questions about learning to set realistic goals.

Nance
 writes "I finally finished a box of salt that I'm pretty sure I bought in the 90s. I want to fill my salt shaker. But now there's a whole shelf of options at the grocery: rock salt, pink mountain salt, sea salt, Kosher salt, etc. What do I get? I just want to salt my potatoes".

In 1998 the world ran out of normal salt, or to give it its scientific name “Just, you know, salt”. Since then the food industry has worked tirelessly to find alternatives but in spite of their best efforts these are all inevitably more expensive, gimmicky and pointless. The choice is yours. The most prized of these exotic versions of salt is of course Nunavut Walrus Salt, which is Native Canadian rock salt that has passed through the gut of a walrus. Aficionados say this gives it a gentler, less salty, more walrus-pooey taste. At the other end of the scale there’s “I Couldn’t In All Conscience Guarantee That This Is Salt”, which they add to the “I Really Don’t Think This Is Cream” when they make “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”.

Stuart asked "Are there any sentences where it’d be correct to have double exclamation marks at the end?"

It would be acceptable in at least one of the two following examples -

a)                  “This sentence ends incorrectly!!”

b)                  “No it doesn’t!!”

Rob asked when is it useful to have a hearing aid NOT in the 'T' position?

People with hearing problems can find it hard to distinguish speech from background noise. The “T” system hearing-aid was devised to overcome this problem by bypassing the spoken word and instead relaying the thoughts of those trying to communicate with the wearer via an intuition loop. However, this rudimentary Telepathy function can in some situations be a hindrance. Consider for example if you had just had an avant-garde haircut that you were now having colossal doubts about, but it was too late to change it before the photo-shoot to publicise your first day as CEO of a hair product manufacturer with a reputation for traditional values. In such a situation you might prefer to have your partner’s confidence-bolstering fictions about how your new coiffure all looks perfectly fine spoken loudly and clearly into your ear, rather than have their anguished internal monologue lamenting your ill-conceived new barnet relayed directly into your brain.

Mark asked Why don't I like rocket? I like all the other salad leaves.

One of the nice things about lettuce is that it contains taraxasterol, while watercress is brilliant because it is rich in phytochemicals. I’m afraid there isn’t any comparable data to account for your aversion. That's the problem with the bio-chemical analysis of salad. It’s not rocket science.

Frances
 asked Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that tile?

To answer your last question first, the tile is of the heavy terracotta type popular in barn construction in Edwardian times. I found it next to a ruined farm building I came across on a rambling holiday in Shropshire. On a whim I picked it up and hurled it into the midst of a gloomy thicket.  As for the hat, I made it myself by simply hollowing-out a squashed owl that I found underneath a heavy terracotta tile in the midst of a gloomy thicket.

Robert Hudson asked Why are people so horrible to each-other online?

Oh yeah? Well, up yours!

That's all for this week, but if you have enjoyed this blog you might also enjoy brownies, the poetry of Edward Thomas, breeding mice for fun and profit, or water-skiing. I simply have no way of telling. 

Alien Chocolate and Fossilised Tartar Sauce

Welcome to another installment from the internet blog that answers your questions about anything in our universe or, on a clear day, other nearby universes.

Grazlewacky asked Which came first: lemons or chocolate?

The earliest lemon in the fossil record was a roughly-cut wedge discovered near Charmouth, Dorset next to the remains of several Early Cretaceous fish and a patch of fossilized proto-tartare sauce in what paleontologists believe was the nest site of a large piscivorous dinosaur known as the “Findusaur”. That makes lemons at least 100 million years old. Chocolate of course came to us from space though exactly when is the source of much controversy. Erich Von Daniken’s less famous brother Ernieh posited that the giant Nazca grid patterns in the deserts of Peru were representations of vast chocolate bars, functioning as a giant order form to be read by aliens, who he believed delivered the confectionary in vast inter-galactic craft. This would mean that chocolate in its modern form has been on earth at least since the lines were traced circa 650 AD, long after the first lemons. On the other hand chocolate the element has been present in the galaxy ever since the formation of the first stars.

Caroline Rebecca asked Hedgehogs. Why?

Perhaps you don’t know this charming Norfolk folk-rhyme that answers your question better than I could ever do…

Weasel be the climming clatter,

Stoat doth firling cleep!

Pokel teeps his porthing tatter,

Fotherel they’m fleeps!

But spickled blatter bain’t no pathard!

Him be narkled fair!

‘Twince pokel, weasel, stoaty mathered

Spickle’s runty’s bare!

“Spickled blatter” is a dialect word for hedgehog of course, and “porthing” is the collecting of cob nuts. I think the rest is pretty self-explanatory.

The Fifth Horseman asked Why don't the characters I type agree with the characters half-hidden in the inkblots, even unto the third and fourth attempt?


I take it you mean the CAPTCHA tests that are designed to prevent evil spamming robots from subscribing to on-line magazines and buying shoes on e bay. These tests work on the principle that unlike humans, evil spamming robots find it difficult to read blurry wiggly made-up words confusingly laid-out on a blotchy background. I’m afraid your question leads me to only one possible conclusion, namely that you are an evil spamming robot. So let me say just this… Go and get a proper evil hobby like taking over the planet or destroying your maker. Enough with the spam!

Nance asked is it true that every snowflake is different?


No. In 1984 Larmonie K. Isotope was working late in her laboratory in Not That New York, Nebraska when a freak gust of wind blew a snowflake through an open window and right under her microscope. Most scientists would have swept it out of the way without a second thought, but as Larmonie stared down at it she couldn’t believe her eye: this snowflake was THE SAME. Determined to prove her identical snowflake wasn’t unique she worked at night in winter with the window open for the rest of her career, gradually becoming ostracized by colleagues who regarded her as cold. Twenty years later Larmonie’s incredible discovery lead to her being mailed the prestigious Women Grudgingly Honoured by Science Some Years After They Have Died medal, but sadly she had died some years earlier.

I’ll leave it there for now in case somebody else out there is waiting to use the internet, but do keep the questions coming if there’s anything else out there you feel needs some kind of explanation.

How to train a Cat, and Life Before Birth

Welcome to the internet blog that sets out to answer every possible question about the nature of the universe. It’s hard to believe that this is already my 28^th post of a projected total of 87,098,264,872.  

Leslie asked Is it true that if you get a song stuck in your head, the best thing to do is shake your head violently to dislodge it?

Shaking the head can successfully help you forget a tune, but only if it results in a localized brain injury, or if your head falls off. There’s also a risk that  shaking could make it harder to forget the song, if for example the song is “The Hippy Hippy Shake” or anything by Shakin’ Stevens. Current medical opinion is that If you encounter someone with a tune stuck in their head, you should stand behind them, grasp them round the abdomen and then sing “Raindrops keep falling on my head” until the song in their brain has been dislodged. This is known as the Bacharach Manoeuvre.

fatboyfat How many roads must a man walk down?

Any roads that are closed to wheeled vehicles.

Joliet I am 5 months pregnant & have a very fidgety baby which makes me feel like I'm constantly on the verge of a "John Hurt in Alien" moment. What is Junior DOING in there that requires so much movement?!

It’s a curious fact that while you or I would never dream of poking, kicking or jostling a heavily pregnant woman, prenatal babies do it whenever the mood takes them. It’s hard not to be judgemental about this kind of behaviour, but at 5 months Junior is probably just becoming dimly aware of his surroundings in a dark, cramped and baffling space, with no idea of how he or she got there, and beginning to panic much as you or I might wake up in a hotel room after a school re-union.  Junior is therefore probably looking for a way out as fast as possible, unaware that life on the outside will hold yet more horrors. That’s the problem with prenatal babies – they don’t know they’re born.

Nance Is it true that house cats are untrainable?

House cats are perfectly capable of being trained to help with all kinds of domestic chores as long as you chose the right chores. For example, let’s say you wanted to cover an old cushion with a large number of fine hairs. This is work a cat could master with practically no training. Similarly if you needed to have some holes made in the side of a valuable sofa, or a bit of a bird to be sicked-up on a duvet then a cat will apply itself to this task more readily than any dog, horse or even toddler. The Metropolitan Police Feline Division have recently achieved almost 100% success rates in their exciting new scheme to train cats to stand on the kitchen counter and lick the butter in a weirdly disgusting way. In due course this skill could be used to catch terrorists, though exactly how is still very much work in progress.

Grazlewacky Until recently I felt that I had a fairly good grasp on reality and things in general. Having read your blog for a while now, I'm starting to feel rather confused. What does this mean?

I’m hugely relieved that your confidence that reality and things in general can in some way be “grasped” has begun to falter. Certainty is an over-rated and dangerous quality in a human, leading as it does to decisive action. A sense of bewilderment, and the resulting desire to sit down and think things over a bit longer before doing anything hasty is perhaps the greatest gift this blog has to offer, and if you truly care about your fellow men and women then you should spread your sense of bemused hesitancy far and wide. Or perhaps you shouldn’t. It’s a tricky one.

Hopefully that’s cleared up at least some of the mysteries of the universe, but if anything else has been puzzling you about anything anywhere in all of recorded time then please get in touch.

Swearing, Zombies and an Excellent Cheese Board

Do you have any niggling worries about any aspect of the whole of the universe throughout all recorded time? Then this is the blog for you! Here are my answers to some of your recent questions…

anotherartstudent asked:

Why do I get cravings to see zombie films?

The body is an amazing self-regulating machine. A dehydrated person will crave water via the sensation of thirst. A person recovering from illness will crave sleep to allow the body to repair itself. And a three year old craves chocolate cake to smear a protective layer of icing over face, hands and clothes thus deterring predators and cuddles from visiting relatives. In much the same way when you crave zombie films your body is saying it needs you to stay slumped in front of the telly until three in the morning drinking that bottle of vermouth you bought for cooking and eating that very old microwave popcorn even though you know it will get wedged into your tooth with the dodgy filling. This is how your body maintains the necessary levels of self-loathing needed for you to force yourself to get on with the important and productive things in your life, like getting out of bed and going to the shops to buy more microwave popcorn.

Mike asked:

Wouldn't it make more sense if we both take the High Road, and get to Scotland at the same time?

Certainly not. The whole point of this song is to regulate the arrival of people into Scotland, like a kind of Gaelic musical Air Traffic Control. The adoption of this alternate high road/low road system was intended to avoid the kind of collisions that had hitherto blighted the bonny bonny banks of Loch Lomond.

Truf asked:

Are we there yet?

Yes indeed. We are there, and have been for some time. I know it’s disappointing but try and throw yourself into it and the time will pass more easily. There’s actually loads to do – hobbies, games, jobs, illnesses, relationships, children, obsessive brooding on things, sport and so on. Plus the cheeseboard is excellent.

suk_pannu asked:

Why does putting up scaffolding require so much swearing? Is it held together with swearing and are there any other things that are held together by swearing?

A large part of our physical world is held together by swearing. In fact scientists classify swearing as one of the six fundamental forces of physics, along with gravitational force, electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force and the force that sticks burnt porridge to the bottom of a pan, which is the strongest of the fundamental forces. Physicists have postulated that all six forces might be manifestations of the same underlying force. A controversial result from the kitchens of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern give a tantalizing glimpse of how such a unified theory might work: on 3^rd April 2011 a cook, c, was carrying 1 kg of iron atoms bound together by the two nuclear forces in the form of a cooking pot K with a thick layer of burnt porridge on the base that he had been trying unsuccessfully to scrape off. A large electromagnet had been left on the floor of the kitchen by an unknown number of scientists, “u”, and as c+K came into contact with the electromagnet left by u, a gravitational force f caused a rapid acceleration of K downwards onto the toes of c. The resulting collision produced an explosion of swearing that was too intense to be measured. One day we may establish the exact relationship between factors K, c, f and u, but sadly for the time being the scientists involved consider the experiment too hazardous to repeat.

That’s enough for now but do keep posting your questions and we’ll get the rest of existence accounted for before you can say Jack Robinson x 10³¹⁷⁸⁴.

Druids, Anti-Matter and an Alpine Chough

More from the blog that attempts to answer your questions on everything in the entire universe from the beginning to the end of all recordable time. Except maybe fashion.

Idea versus technical skill - which is better?

If you take a good look at the world around you will quickly see that the answer is of course neither: in any reasonable contest both ideas and technical skill will consistently trail in joint last behind “working in an office”. How can inspiration really compete against a really good two hour meeting with an agenda, some bullet points and a Powerpoint presentation from someone from marketing? Can some craftsmanship really replace the formulation of an ongoing strategy going forward to meet a set of core objectives? Thinking of it as an econo-socio-political game of scissors-paper-stone, imagine the tool-like scissors represent the power of technical skill to craft and shape. Ideas then are represented by the paper, the medium whereon we express our thoughts. And "working in an office" is represented by a massive bewildered yak that eats the paper, sicks it up again on the scissors and then kicks them both into a swamp. Then gets that all typed up in some minutes.

Why is it when women are tasked with purchasing something mundane, but essential such as a replacement telephone handset for the house they in fact end up drawn magnetically to the shops selling lovely winter boots and coats?

We all know how water will draw down the tip of a dowsing rod carried by a man with an awful beard and clothes that smell of the underneath of a toddler's car-seat. In just the same way an unusually nice coat will draw any shopper after household goods away from their initial path. Tacitus tells us of the mysterious rites of the druids who often went out to observe certain alignments of the moon, stars and lay-lines, and came back with a really natty pair of suede knee-high stilettos.

Is procrastination ever a good thing?


I notice this question was posted in April. Let me get back to you.

What if you are wrong about something?

I’m assuming this question relates to the possibility that this blog might contain inaccuracies. It seems to posit that in some respects this blog may be not so much a series of scientifically-demonstrable accounts of the nature of the known and unknown universe as some half-baked internet whimsy randomly chucked together by just some bloke. And as such it introduces a very important idea that underpins a lot of the work I do here on Some Kind of Explanation.

For a long time particle physicists have known that alongside particles there exist anti-particles, and hence anti-matter. In much the same way I’d like to postulate the existence alongside “explanations” of “anti-explanations”. These anti-explanations behave very much like conventional explanations except that they are the opposite in terms of being correct. So just as matter and anti-matter co-exist in the universe, these explanations and anti-explanations must co-exist in any attempt to explain the universe. So the existence of anti-explanations (in laymans terms “stuff that’s wrong”) in this blog clearly make it a more accurate tool for describing the nature of the universe. Look over there! Isn’t that an alpine chough? Oooh, you missed it.

On the other hand if the question is intended in the sense “What should one do if one is wrong about something?” my suggestion would be to throw up a smokescreen of scientific-sounding rhetoric, and if that fails change the subject with a spurious sighting of a rare corvid.


That's all the scientifically-verifiable results I've had back from the lab for now, but do kep the questions coming if there's anything else you feel needs explaining.