MumblePeg

A Different Tone

Oh my dear, it has been …
Ages.
Absolute ages, since I wrote anything
Of consequence
Of value
Of import.

But screw all that, right?
Those jerkoffs in suits
The Ones Who Decide Things
Can suck my
Blood, let’s say,
They can suck blood,
But not my spirit.

Because when I write it’s lightning.
The kind that makes kids cry
And dogs hide under the bed
Because holy living mother of bicycles
This is hot stuff.

I just wish you could be
Here to see it with me,
Because then it might be like
It used to be… the phrases
Taking shape across the pages
Like a boat building itself
While skimming across the sea
Of all those cliche hopes and things
Cabbages and kings,
And pink teapots…

God — I’d forgotten about your teapot.
I said I wouldn’t cry
And I really did try
But the more I tried
The more I cried
All the little rhymes kept spilling
Out of my mind
As the tears kept filling
Up my eyes
And Lord, what a teapot.

Pink, with beige around the spout
And black on the bottom
Where you burnt water, once.

I still cook enough for three;
Mine, yours, and the leftovers,
But now it’s just more leftovers
And I always throw them away.

I know you wouldn’t have wanted
Too much mourning, so
I’ve been keeping a stiff
Barely-trembling upper lip.
The cat really misses you though.
He wishes more than anything
That you could come back. 

Another Common Misconception

The left-right brain hemisphere thing.

God, people need to stop doing this.  Imagine, for a moment, someone who hasn’t really kept up with the times, and still genuinely believes that the Sun goes around the Earth.  You would see them as at least a little out-of-touch, right?  Maybe even stupid, or crazy?  Well, not to seem harsh, but that’s kinda what people seem like when they talk about being “right-brain” or “left-brain,” because that is an incorrect theory that for a long time now has been known to be incorrect.  In fact, if you repeat it in front of anyone with even a rudimentary psychological background, they’re just going to laugh at you (and maybe not even just on the inside).  I’m not even gonna start with the concept that you use 10 percent of your brain.

Just… please.  Please stop repeating facts you find on the Internet, unless they are supported with at least some kind of empirical, repeatable, experimentally determined evidence.  ”My aunt says…” is not evidence.  ”This one scientist/insider says…” is not evidence either.  If something really exists, 999,999 times out of a million it’s going to have overwhelming evidence in all sorts of formats (and no, “Interesting Tumblr Facts” is not really an acceptable format).

Common Misconceptions

A jiffy is not 1/100 of a second, no matter who you talk to (unless that person has read some “cool facts” list and has defined “their jiffy” to be 0.01 seconds).

In physics it’s generally 3e-24* seconds or, in one proposal, the Planck time or 5.4e-44 seconds, which is the time it would take for light to travel one Planck length if ordinary geometry still held relevance at that size.

In computer science it’s one tick of a system timer interrupt, which is variable, but on Linux machines tends to be about .004 seconds.

In alternating current a jiffy is the time between AC power cycles, and again it is variable, but it tends to be about 1/60 or 1/50 of a second.

And the “original” definition of a jiffy (as in, the first time someone tried to give it a formal definition, rather than just “a short amount of time”) was 3.33564e-11 seconds — the time it takes for light to travel one centimeter.

THE MORE YOU KNOW

* Scientific Notation.  In this format, 2e5 is 2 with five zeros (200,000), and 2e-5 is a two with four zeros behind a decimal (0.00005).   It’s just much faster to write it as 3e-24 than to type “0.000000000000000000000003 seconds.”

The Typical Crime Drama

“Open up!  FBI!”  After no one answered, the agents burst through the door, only to see a flash of white shirt as their suspect disappeared through an open window.

“We got a runner!” said one, but the other stopped him.

“We won’t catch him.”

“What?  How can you be sure?”

“Well we’ve only had twenty minutes of action and relevant dialogue.  We need at least another half hour before we can have an emotional resolution to this case.”

“Oh, right.  OK, let’s go back to the office and enhance some photos.”