Camping calamity

“Look at this, Spot!” The Professor called out as he was reading the article in the newspaper.

“There’ s going to be a spectacular meteor shower tomorrow night.”

“We’ve got to see that, don’t we?”

After thinking for a moment, he added, “To get the best view, we have to go somewhere remote. Have to avoid light pollution, houses, traffic… anything.”

“We need to go camping!”

The dog did not seem to object, so the Professor went to dig out his old tent from the shed. After some rummaging around he found it. He dragged the dusty canvas bag onto the lawn. It was much heavier than he remembered.

As he opened the bag he was greeted by a musty smell, a mixture of damp cloth, mould and old material. There was also whiff of rotting wood. Laying out the contents of the bag on the ground, the Professor realized that the tent had seen better days. Much better, in fact.

“Hmm,” he considered, “not sure I’d like to sleep in that.”

Having had his plans shattered, the Professor went back into the house to have good think. Assisted by a nice cup of tea, three lumps of sugar and a splash of milk, he tried to find an alternative.

“Do I have to bite the bullet and buy a new tent?”

He decided this would not be a good investment. He was not a regular camper.

Obviously.

“Why don’t I just make one?”

This seemed a much better plan. After all, the Professor had an inventive mind and he had managed much more complicated constructions in the past. He set his mind on the task of designing the perfect tent.

“Should really get rid of all those strings, pegs and poles,” he considered. “Always end up in a mess trying to put a tent up… and just think of all that tripping over the strings in the dark. Terrible design.”

“There must be a better solution.”

“Putting up a tent ought to be as easy as pushing a button. Hey presto, and there it is.”

“Why don’t you just make it inflatable?”

At first this sounded ridiculous, but the more the Professor thought about the idea the more he liked it.

“There’s no reason this shouldn’t work,” he decided. “And you can make improvements, like having a soft airbed built in.”

He went to the inventing studio to try to put the inflatable tent together. Luckily he had some flexible material left over from another project, so it was really just a matter of figuring out what size and shape the tent should be. He decided to make it small, because it only had to have room for himself and Spot. And the dog preferred sleeping outside anyway.

They arrived at the small campsite late in the afternoon. After parking the car, the Professor unpacked his invention. He laid the material out on the ground, connected the gas canisters and pushed the inflate button. In a matter of seconds the small tent was ready. He secured it to the ground with two ropes.

“How about that?” he exclaimed happily. “Easy as pie!”

With time to spare, the Professor took Spot for a walk in the beautiful countryside.

Returning to the campsite he noticed that the wind was picking up. The inflatable tent looked distinctly wobbly. He decided it would be a good idea to secure it better with a couple of tent pegs.

The Professor rammed the first peg into the ground.

It would have made sense to use only as much force as was required, but this did not occur to him.

It would have made sense to aim properly, but this did not occur to him either.

It would have made sense to be careful and avoid puncturing the tent.

This did occur to him, but by then it was too late.

With an almighty farting noise the inflatable tent shot up in the air, and disappeared over the trees. The effect was the same as letting go of a blown-up balloon, only on a much more impressive scale.

Dumbstruck, the Professor watched as his night of comfort vanished in the air.

“Hmm.”

The Professor turned to find a man standing behind him, puffing on a pipe. The man was unshaven and looked a bit worn.

“Most impressive,” the man said with what might have been a smug smile.

“What are you going to do now?”

 “No idea,” mumbled the Professor. “Might as well give up and go home, I suppose.”

“You could always stay in our pod, you know,” the man continued. “Just finished building it.”

He gestured in the general direction of a corner of the campsite. The Professor could see a small wooden building. It reminded him of a bicycle shed, but he obviously did not say that.

“Got a real bed and all. How about it?” The man finished.

The Professor accepted the offer. He did not have much of a choice. Beggars can’t be choosers.

The sky was clear and billions of stars twinkled from the firmament. All of a sudden, one of Nature’s own fireworks erupted. It did not last long but it was a breathtaking nevertheless.

It was not until it was over that the Professor felt the chill in the air. Shuddering, he retired to the borrowed pod, which was kept at a nice temperature by a wood-burning stove. As he was dozing off on the comfortable bed, he thought to himself, “Why bother with a tent when you can stay in a pod?”

“Could get used to this glamorous kind of camping…”

And then he was asleep.

Finders Keepers

(If you have ever lost your glasses, then this is for you!)

Professor Kompressor was very clever, but he was not terribly organized. He had a particular knack for losing things. One moment he would know exactly where whatever it was would be. The next moment... gone. Things tended to disappear mysteriously whenever he needed them the most.

‪He was trying to find his glasses. 

First he looked everywhere they could possibly be, but were not.

Then he looked everywhere they could not possibly be.

They were not there either.

Trying to figure out what was going on, he took off his glasses and started polishing them with his handkerchief.

“Where could they...”

Then it struck him.

“I’m such a fool,” he groaned.

“Why is it,” he reflected as soon as he had calmed down, “that it’s so difficult to keep track of these infernal things? Even when they’re right in front of my nose.”

He was, of course, not the first person to have this problem. Glasses go missing all the time, all over the world, causing immense frustration for their owners.

Professor Kompressor decided to do something about the problem. The situation was calling for an invention, but it was not clear what this invention should be.

His first suggestion solved the problem, but was not very practical.

“I could just stop wearing glasses,” he considered. “Then I wouldn’t lose them.”

“On the other hand,” he added thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t see very clearly.”

“Could be dangerous, as I might crash into things.”

“Better think of something else.”

The second idea was more promising.

“How about making the glasses more noticeable?”

“I know! I’ll install bright flashing lights on the frames, turned on and off by a remote control.”

“Whenever I mislay the glasses, I just turn on the flashing lights and they should be easy to find.”

“Might look a bit silly, but that doesn’t matter.”

The Professor could not afford to be vain.

He went straight to the inventing studio to work on the idea of the flashy glasses.

Emerging a couple of hours later, very pleased with himself, he decided to test the new invention by mislaying the glasses. On purpose.

This turned out to be quite difficult, but eventually he managed to forget where he had put them.

“Alright, then...” he muttered to himself, “time to see if this works.”

“Only need to push the red button on the...”

“... remote control!” he gasped as he realized that he could not find it.

He looked absolutely everywhere.

As he was rummaging through a pile of letters and mixed paperwork on a shelf in the hallway, he considered that it might have been a good idea to put flashing lights on the remote control as well.

“Of course,” he figured, “then I would need another remote control and I bet I’d manage to lose that, too.”

Eventually, he found the offending item. In his left trouser pocket.

He pushed the button and, to his great relief, saw the red lights on the glasses flash from the bookshelf.

“Seems to work,” he concluded.

In the evening he sat down to watch television. It was a program about wildlife in the Arctic, or somewhere cold like that. The snow on the screen made the Professor feel chilly. He decided that a mug of tea, three lumps of sugar and a splash of milk, would be just the thing to keep him warm.

Returning from the kitchen, he sat down in his comfortable chair.

Unfortunately...  

... he managed to sit on the remote control.

The glasses started flashing.

On – off – on – off...

Stunned by surprise, the Professor had no clue that was going on. He was simply sitting there, flashing like a Professor-shaped emergency vehicle.

The only thing missing was a siren.

This mishap made him decide that the invention was not quite what he was looking for.

He went back to the drawing board.

The next day he solved the problem, once and for all.

He simply tied a string to the glasses. That way, when he was not wearing them, they dangled on his chest.

Tried and tested solutions are often the best.

The dark side

I’m sure you remember the deep thoughts on known and unknowns by a certain Donald Rumsfeld. Ridiculed by many, hailed as profound wisdom by a few, these words fit our current understanding of the Universe remarkably well.

Maybe you have thought about this already? If not, consider this: According to increasingly precise observations, most recently from the Planck Satellite, the Universe had three main components;

First we have the known knowns, the normal matter. The stuff that we are all made of, the stars in the sky and so on. Basically, things that physicists would claim to understand.

Sadly this is only a measly few percent of everything,

The second part is the dark matter. The known unknown. Needed to explain how galaxies form and why stars in the outer edges of individual galaxies move as they do. A typical physicist would not claim to know precisely what this stuff is, but he/she might be prepared to make suggestions. This fifth of the Universe is mysterious, but maybe not outrageously so.

Finally, we have the third part, the unknown unknown. The dark energy. Sounds a bit sinister, doesn’t it? And it is. Nobody seems to have a working explanation for this part. Yet we need it to explain why the rate of expansion of the Universe is gradually increasing. And it makes up pretty much three quarters of the Universe as well. So, whatever it is... there’s “lots” of “it”.

Whenever you have unknowns like this in science you find speculation galore. You could argue that this is healthy and may in the fullness of time lead to progress on problems we don’t currently understand. Alternatively, you could take it as evidence that some scientists are ultimately loons. I think the truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. Hopefully closer to the former, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

I am not a great fan of dark energy. It is too freaky.

I can cope with the idea of dark matter, though. I even find some suggestions amusing.

A recent idea about the known unknown provides particular pause for thought. It is really quite simple. Basically, all the stuff that we see and understand interacts electromagnetically (emits light, essentially). The dark matter does not. Obviously. It is dark. It only affects gravity. So... the new suggestion is that dark matter could be pretty much “normal” stuff, only not interacting through standard electromagnetism. There could be dark atoms, molecules, larger nuggets and so on. Perhaps dark stars, planets... Maybe dark matter people, or is that going a bit far? Anyway, the point is that we would never know, as we wouldn’t see these things.

In order to build large dark objects there would have to be some force to replace electromagnetism. A dark force, as it were.

Does this sound a bit too much Star Wars for your liking? Perhaps, but ... and this is a big but... the idea was proposed by well-known scientists at some of the world’s best Universities. Whether this is the result of inspired thinking or too much science fiction, well... hopefully we will find out. One day.

Outnumbered

(As I was leaving on holiday a month or so ago, I learned about a script writing context where the challenge was to involve concepts from Maths. Luckily, I did not find time to think too much about that... but... here is a short story involving a few too many numbers.)

As the Professor finished the crossword puzzle, he noticed a very odd thing at the bottom of the page. It was a square with a lot of smaller squares in it, a grid really. There were numbers in some of the boxes, but most of them were empty. Intrigued, he tried to figure out the rules of this new game. Apparently you were supposed to fill the boxes with numbers, without repetition either inside each smaller square or in each line or row.

“Tricky...” he decided, because it was.

He decided to give the challenge a go anyway. You can not really hold a curious mind back.

Half an hour later he had made some modest progress, but he was getting tired. His eyelids were drooping and he was finding it increasingly hard to concentrate.

As he fell asleep, it was inevitable really, his last thought was on the puzzle.

“Should it be a six or a nine? So many numbers to choose from...”

The transition to the world of dreams was seamless.

He found himself in a peculiar place. It was an odd country. The colours were brighter than usual. The shapes were so very different. They reminded him of something, but what was it?

“Numbers...” he thought, “... numbers everywhere.”

The Professor found himself surrounded by numbers.

The numbers came in all shapes and sizes and all the colours of the rainbow. They spoke in many different voices. He could not make out if they were all speaking the same language, but it did not matter because he seemed to understand them perfectly regardless.

“Get in line,” he heard a fairly large number six call out.

“Everyone line up... in order of size, please!”

After some commotion there was a resemblance of order, but there was still a fair bit of movement going on.

“Small ones to the left, large ones to the right,” bellowed a massive number nine. “Come on, get yourselves sorted!”

“I don’t know where to go!” cried a small shape, with a hint of desperation in its voice. “I don’t know where to go!”

“Oh, come on, try to be rational,” piped a medium sized number five. “Go and stand with the little ones!”

“What about me?” asked a shape that looked like a small n, but with slightly sharper edges.

It was difficult to understand what it was saying because it had a mouthful of what might have been cake, but could have been pie.

“eeeeeeeeee!” the letter e screamed past. It ran circles around the number three, which seemed just a little bit annoyed by this irrational behaviour. Finally, the letter decided to stop near two and three quarters.

It was getting very confusing.

Two twin circles joined up and marched off towards the very end of the line, but it was not clear if they would ever get there.

The letter i was standing way out of line, shouting “I don’t want to line up!”

“Why should I line up? Look at all this space! Two dimensions are more complex than one!”

“Get real,” grumbled a surprisingly fat number two to no one in particular.

Professor Kompressor woke up.

He could not remember the details of the dream, but the sight of the unfinished number game made him feel ever so slightly queasy.

He resolved to stick with regular crosswords in the future.

“Words are so much more manageable,” he decided.

“Numbers… there are just too many to keep track of.”