Scribe, ut possis cum voles dicere: dices cum velle debebis (Pl. Ep. 6.29)

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Self Preservation Keeps the Crowd Alive

Last night Hadar told me a bedtime story. Something about entropy, quantum mechanics and waves of light with changing amplitudes. She's clever. Today she told me that she never saw me falling asleep so quickly.

When i was about five years old, my sister Olga, who was in highschool at the time, read to me something from her physics book. It was a chapter about some experiment with a surface which magnetized or electrified or something like that, and to which nails are stuck at the bottom, and when the magnetic power decreases, the nails start falling one by one.

Actually i just bullshitted you, i have no idea what that chapter was about, but i remember a picture that went something like this:

nails falling from the table

Olga read that chapter to me and in the end i asked her: "Could you please read it to me again? There's something i didn't understand." Everyone in my family remembers that and we laugh about it from time to time. I told Hadar this story. She said: "I can't believe it! You told her that there's 'something you didn't understand'?! You bullshited people back when you were five years old!"

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