Science

Puzzle corner: our guest is logic theorist Vincent Danos

How was the universe created without defying the third law of thermodynamics?

Ah yes, ageing. It’s a natural obstacle that we all face – and it’s all downhill from here, according to our mardy bum elders. Good news everyone: wrinkles, creaking joints and drooping (yes, you heard me) are features of ageing that we can all look forward to. Hooray! If only we could avoid this metamorphosis and live forever as spritely twenty-somethings. Which leads me to ask: is there a secret to living forever, be it an instant Dungeons & Dragons-esque remedy or simply a wise choice of lifestyle? Even then, is eternal life physically possible?

How did the eye evolve? Surely half an eye isn’t much good.
The first eye was probably just a few cells on an animal which could detect light, giving it a very limited, but still existent, means of spotting blob-like predators. Gradually the technology improved to the point that we can now tell the difference between Jon Bon Jovi and a herring, though this can be difficult if the herring is pickled.

Professor: If I want to accidentally kill some pigeons, what’s the best way to do it?

People who like sex, but don’t like it when their partner is human and/or alive, have reason to rejoice this week, as engineer Douglas Hines has invented a ‘sex robot’, an anatomically accurate android with a personality, which doesn’t object to being frequently violated.
In fact, ‘Roxxy’ comes with five in-built, but not particularly complex personalities, which mostly involve giving pre-programmed responses to certain physical actions, like some kind of modified ‘Tickle-me-Elmo’.

Matt Groening and Nietzsche don’t have a great deal in common, other than being the originators of my favourite quotes on love (see boxes). As they pointed out, love can cause incredible suffering, and robs people of their rationality (indeed it’s been described as a mental illness; sufferers exhibit brain patterns similar to those seen in drug addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder). How could something so destructive persist for so long, when, for example, bower birds manage perfectly well under the Warren Beatty school of drive-by shagging?

“Conversational learning occurs within two distinct but interconnected temporal dimensions; linear time and cyclical time. The discursive process is guided by linear time, whereas the recursive process follows a rhythm of cyclical time. The discursive process is an epistemological manifestation of individuals’ ideas and experiences that are made explicit in conversations...

Old Ben is my favourite physicist. These are transcribed as verbatim as I can remember:
“The theory was, if you’re going to cock-up, make it a big one. I think my biggest cock-up was when I was working with the disc-thinner. We had this device that would fire these ions at a spinning disc, to thin it out until it was only a few atoms thick, and then you could do your scatter experiments on it. And we got this sample of moon dust. This was back when moon dust was a pretty exciting thing. But our sample was oxidised and we couldn’t do aything with it.

"Individual words and sounds not contextualised within utterances make no sense (this of itself problematises the issue of what constitutes a linguistic datum), and utterances make sense only within discourse practices (Fairclough, 1989, 1995). Ultimately, the relationship of signifier (the word) to signified (the concept) and referent (the 'thing') remains unverifiable, so the mathematical laws derived from, and applied to, the study of the physical world that govern positivist research cannot safely be held to apply to utterances (Culler, 1976).

If Christianity gave out fatwas, Nietzsche certainly would have picked one up for his claim that "there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." While Dawkins might go all 'Joss Ackland’s spunky backpack' over the quote because it's slamming religion, I like it for the realization that people mainly worship themselves.