On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > > >On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, David Silberstein wrote: >> [tangent] >> >> I have the notion that "pararectal" ought to be prefixed before >> all examples of science and technology as portrayed in the movies and >> television. So, for example, Lara Croft is pararectal archeologist. >> >> The more the science/tech deviates from reality, or from sane >> speculation, the more prefixes we add to the term, to indicate that it >> came from further up the descending colon. So while, say, Trek's >> "warp drive" is merely pararectal, the way the universal translator >> *immediately* recognizes languages is hyperpararectal technology, and >> the bogon-particle-du-jour is superhyperpararectal particle physics. > > >I think about these sorts of classification on occasion and find them >difficult. There may be a lot of particle species out there, I can >imagine how a universal translator might work, and I suspect a warp drive >violates causality, and there may be a lot of particle species out there, >so I would tend to reverse the order you present, depending on what the >bogon does for a living. The current "zoo" of nuclear and subnuclear particles is already known and (mostly) named; hypothetical unnamed particles are not found precisely because they are very difficult to create in the first place (and even most hypothetical particles are already named!). A universal translator, as depicted in Trek, *certainly* violates casuality - it knows how to map verbal expressions to concepts even when the species has just been met and it has never been exposed to the expressions before! And warping space has been tentatively identified as theoretically possible by real-world science; there's a paper out there somewhere. Now, granted, it isn't a *whole* lot like Trek's warp drive, but the concept itself is not completely absurd. >In order of increasing unlikelihood, I would put: >Santa Claus, one's neighbor's major religion, astrology. >But what do I know. I do think this kind of back-of-the-envelope >estimate would be good for tests of grad students in some field of study >which probably doesn't exist but should, and which I guess you've named. > Pararectal Quantum Bogodynamics