I recently learned...

Hey, did you know you can buy shirts with ties?

I mean, a shirt, with a pre-matched tie, in the same package! Amazing. What will they think of next?

I grew curious about this, after seeing several of my co-workers with well-matched ties. I was kind of surprised, actually, because most of them are engineers. (Did I ever mention, by the way, that we actually have to wear ties at work? It's kind of weird - other than the traveling consultant job I had many years back, I've never had a job where people wear ties before...)

Anyway, I eventually noticed that, some of these people always wore the same shirt with the same tie - and, being, me, I eventually had to ask. Yes, it turns out, you can buy them together at many stores. And, as long as you keep the shirt and the tie together, you'll always have two that look good together.

Of course, that kind of takes all the fun out of it :)

And, neither of the two stores I saw had french cuff shirts that come that way, just plain normal shirts. So that's out. I really like my cuff links, and it's even more fun cuz you get to try to match the minor colors in tie with the cuff links.

Being a male, a geek, and a heterosexual, I never got around to doing the whole accessorizing thing before.

And now there's a rumour going around that we're going to be switching our dress code to business casual (no ties). I kinda hope they don't. I mean, I realize it's kinda ridiculous for a company to make it's geek corps wear ties. It's not like any customers will ever see us or anything. But, dammit, I look good in business dress. Hmph. Just when I finally start learning to accessorize, they take it away from me. It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

100 years

The world ended 100 years ago today.

That was when some smart-ass patent clerk daydreamed about surfing. Specifically, about surfing on a beam of light. This, of course, led to his Special Theory of Relativity, in which he took away all our notions of a nice stable universe of universal time and space and cast us into the dark shadows of curved space and even time itself bending and stretching about us as we moved. This work eventually led to quantum mechanics, which messed everything up even more, but he rejected it until his death, leaving his famous quote that "God does not play dice with the universe." (Stephen Hawking has pointed out that, indeed, it is the dice who play God with the universe.)

Without Einstein's early work, we would not have modern computers, the nuclear bomb, black holes, or the Iridium satellites. OK, maybe we'd still have black holes, but we wouldn't know about them. As for the Iridium satellites, I was rather interested to learn that they actually have to take into account the time differences. not just different time zones, but the fact that time advances more swiftly up in orbit where they are and that this difference is significant enough that it has to be taken into account in the nanosecond timing they use to communicate with ground stations...

Kansas doesn't go far enough!

That's right! Getting Evolution out of our classrooms is just the first step!

We need to get all of this anti-God materialist science[1] out of the classrooms. And here's a good start!




[1](See Fallen Angels by Larry Niven.)