A cousin was on holiday (from England) in New Zealand, about as far away from home as you can get. She was sitting in a restaurant, chatting to a friend, when the young man with his back to them at the next table turned round and said "Hello, Aunt Mary". He was also on holiday.

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"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head" Terry Pratchett

OK, here's one from me:

Me and a friend from college went to this astronomy lecture. We began discussing, and chat rooms came up. He told me he had been a regular member of Physics 2 for many years. I told him I was a newbie on the same chatroom, and it had been my favourite for 3 months! He and I were never online at the same time because he used to chat in the night, and I during the day. We had been chatting in the same chat room for 3 months, never knew each other, and ended up in the same class with the same major in our college!

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Limericks, written by me: http://limericker.blogspot.com

With all this meeting people we know, I wounder how often we see complete strangers twice+ and in weird places....

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

Okay, the best part of this one requires a little bit of computer science background. In C++, there's a property that classes can have called friendship. It basically gives one class access to the private members of another class (oh, how we had fun with that definition). Anyway, it was drilled into us in my first year computer science class that friendship is reflexive, not symmetric, and not transitive. Repeat: friendship is not transitive.

There are many names here, so try to keep up (dont' try too hard). I'm sure I've forgotten someone in this story, but I can't remember exactly how he fit in. I'll leave him out for simplicity's sake... it's crazy enough as is.

In my first week of university, I came to be friends with a girl named Helen. One of Helen's roommates was Erin, who was dating a guy named Kevin. Now, Helen had a friend named Carson, who just happened (we later learned) to be Kevin's roommate. Carson and Kevin's other roommate was Joe, whom I met while making peanut butter sculptures with Helen in his living room, while waiting for Carson one evening.

Now, I didn't meet Kevin that semester, though I knew Erin well enough to invite her over for Thanksgiving, and Carson and Joe well enough to play football with them, and despite the fact that I sat right in front of Kevin in two different classes and across the aisle in a third. Finally, I ran into him in the hall one day, and we both pointed at each other, having been described to each other about a hundred times. Each of us just knew who the other was, and since he was dating Erin, we ended up hanging out together a fair bit after that.

In a different vein of friends, a friend of mine from when we were about 3 years old was getting irritated one day with his friend Ed's pestering. "Go show it to Glen," he said when confronted with a clever math proof (I am Glen). Ed, who didn't know me, came over and started talking math, and we soon became friends.

Now, the next year rolls around, and Carson and I meet up in the cafeteria. He's met a girl named Amy, and we all have lunch together. She's taking the same joint major as I am, and we're the only two people taking it. Neat. We all promise to get together for lunch again.

The next day, Ed starts telling me about this girl in his physics class. She's smart, has American citizenship (like him), is taking computer science (like him), plays chess, et cetera. He's downright infatuated. Soon enough, he becomes friends with her, and they start hanging out. At this point, I've never seen her, but am told I will some day.

So, a couple of weeks later, I go up to residence to talk to Kevin about something. Joe's there, and we all start discussing logical relations. We're discussing transitivity and how it pertains to C++ classes when Carson opens the door and comes in with two people, Ed and Amy. Ed says, "Glen? How do you know Kevin?" Amy says, "Ed? How do you know Glen?" Carson says, "Glen? How do you know Ed?" Joe says, "Ed? How do you know Glen?" And so on.

Now it was just getting silly. Everyone in that room knew everyone else, but through at least three different routes. Ed and Joe knew each other from math class. Amy was the girl Ed met in physics class. Kevin had just met Amy in his computer science class (they were a year behind me and Ed). I knew Carson through Helen. I knew Ed through someone else. You get the idea. No one knew that anyone else knew more than two other people there.

After a short while, an incredulous silence fell upon the room. Then Ed proclaimed the memorable and improbable words, "In my world, friendship is transitive!"

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"It's turtles all the way down."

snarkophilus, that one's pretty amazing.

In college, my first roommate was named Tim Waller*. Being a third year freshman in the same degree program on his fourth college (or something like that), he only lasted the one semester. When I returned from Christmas break I had a new roommate waiting for me - Tim Wallman*. I suspected the second Tim had showed up and asked for his room and someone had looked at the directory, thinking "Dude, how'd you forget your room number?"

The best, though, was Disney. My uncle took me to California as a high school graduation present. One day we went to Disneyland. While standing in line for Space Mountain, someone says hello to my uncle. It's a guy traveling from Australia back to Texas who my uncle knew.

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*Names changed to protect the innocent -- me.

Snarkophilus, now THAT story is worthy of an award! Not only the amazing story, but also the way you tell it.

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Limericks, written by me: http://limericker.blogspot.com

There are about a 1000 people with my unusual last name in Belgium. There are probably no more than five people with my (not very common, not really unusual either) first and last name in Belgium. Yet, someone with exactly the same name but otherwise completely unrelated has studies at exactly the same high school (of some 200 people, all six years together, some 100 km from my hometown) as me some 15 years before me.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

I once dated two girls who didn't know each other. One day, while I was at the pool, the one who I'd been dating first arrived and laid down next to the one I'd just begun to date and was growing sweet on. I had to break up with the first, but sadly several months later things didn't work out with the second one.

Fifteen years later I hooked up with the second again - in another state about 1,200 miles away.

One day she said, "let's go to the pool." Why not?

We got there, and while I went to the restroom she picked out a spot and laid down next to the same girl, whom I hadn't seen in 15 years!

snarkophilus - what rah said - I'm definately impressed!

About a year ago now, me and my neighbours, both in their early 20's, were involved in a months-long game of oneupsmanship. They knocked on my bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning to wake me up, I put rotten banana under the handles of their car doors, they egged me on the way home from school, I put salt in their sugar bowl. Just fun stuff.

Anyway, one day me and my sister are waiting for the younger one to come home. I've got a bunch of eggs, and my sister is on the roof with flour. The plan goes that I'll pelt him with eggs, and when he runs into his house for cover, my sister will dump flour on him. I'm behind him, fairly close, and just before I let fly, he mutters to himself "Man, I feel like a cake!"

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Begone, braggage!
My bible!

Three coincidences yesterday:

The night before last, I read a web page which was linked from
a thread in this board. That page mentioned a "mattock", which
is a gardening tool similar to a pickaxe. It made me think of
the time I used a mattock to practice/test my aim at swinging a
mallet in that carnival game where you try to hit a device with
a big mallet in order to make a metal weight slide high enough
up a rail to ring a bell. The only place I'd ever seen that was
at the state fair, and the last time I'd seen it at the fair was
probably more than 25 years ago. I never followed through on
the practice to try my hand at it, and I've only thought of it
maybe two or three times over the decades.

So the night before last I spent fifteen minutes thinking about
how, if I were to attempt it now, I would take a minute to inform
the audience-- in case anyone intended to bet on my performance--
of the quality of my aim, since I figured that my attempts to hit
the target as hard as possible would cause me to miss completely.
More thinking about it than I'd done in the previous 25 years.

Yesterday evening I went to a neighborhood party, and one of the
games they had set up for the kids was a kid-size version of the
ring-the-bell game.

An hour later, I was in line waiting to climb to the top of the
old water tower, which is opened to the public for this purpose
one day a year, and seeing some little kids and their parents
made me think for the very first time ever, I'm quite sure, that
raising kids really is a task that only young people (younger
than me, that is to say) are cut out for. Ten minutes later,
a hundred feet farther along in the line, the little girl in the
group immediately ahead of me started crying. Her grandmother
made some comment to me about the girl being two years old, and
I replied with a quip that if she's only two, not two and a half
yet, then the best is yet to come. The grandmother then said to
me exactly and precisely what I had thought ten minutes earlier:
that raising kids is something only young people can handle.

Later on I was in a grocery store and a haggard-looking Native
American in the checkout lane beside me said I was a double for
someone he saw downtown, which I took to mean downtown St. Paul,
since the store is in St. Paul. I don't recall anyone ever
telling me of someone who looked just like me. Fifteen minutes
later, at the bus stop, a haggard-looking white guy told me I
looked exactly like someone he saw in downtown Minneapolis.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

For years, while working in the pulp and paper industry, I would tell people my name (I have unusual first AND last names) and routinely, people in the business (in New England) would proudly say, "I worked with your father during (project x,y,z)" and I would be puzzled because although my father did work for a paper company for a while, it was as a heavy-equipment operator, and although he became a sheet-metal mechanic, he didn't stray too far from our hometown. One day, a lady who is a long-time friend (her husband and son were gun afficianados and dealers, as am I) called me and said that she had bumped into an interesting lady at a regional meeting of rug hookers. She told the lady her name and the lady responded in kind. When Joyce heard the very uncommon last name, she said that she knew a fellow with that last name and told her my first name. The lady then told her that was her husband's name AND her son's name - he was a Jr. Joyce told her that I was also a Jr. and that the father and son in both families were just about the same age. That cleared up a LOT of mysteries, since these people (mill managers, paper machine superintendents) would grab my hand and say "So YOU'RE Harley Jr.! Great to meet you! Tell your dad I said hi!" I think I stole quite a bit of business from my competitors on the basis of a family relationship and friendships of which I was totally unaware.

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The ether of general relativity therefore differs from that of classical mechanics or the special theory of relativity respectively, in so far as it is not 'absolute', but is determined in its locally variable properties by ponderable matter.

Albert Einstein, "On the Ether", 1924

I went grocery shopping to today (June, 6). The total came to ..................


$ 66.06


edited to add date

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"To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the winding road to clarity." - Brian Greene