The Drunken Philosopher

Along the lines of "The avalanche has started; it is now too late for the pebbles to vote":

https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/


Along the lines of "Everything is going to be just fine":

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-archive


Along the lines of "I need grounding":

https://nist.time.gov/

This is a 1 hour black bean soup, best made with a blender and a pressure cooker.

(note: if you put in less water, you get bean dip instead. Which is also good.)

Expected time to prepare - 3 hours without a pressure cooker, 1 hour with. Note- you'll need a blender.

Scoville rating: 100 (approximate)

CAUTION: As prepared in this recipe, this Voodoo Black Bean Soup is quite spicy (not evilly spicy, just quite)... you're hereby warned.

CAUTION: if you use a pressure cooker, there are explosion hazards while cooking black bean soup. Fill the pressure cooker no more than 2/3 full, and make sure the pressure relief valve is unobstructed. WEAR SAFETY GOGGLES when cooking this way!

You have been warned...
Ingredients for 8 servings as a starter soup

1 bag (1 lb, about .5 kg) dried black beans
3 cups (about 1 liter) cold water
one very large onion (or 2 big ones), slivered
one very large yam (or 2 medium size ones), cubed to the size of a fingernail
one red pepper, slivered
one green pepper, likewise slivered
four cloves garlic, or a big spoonful of garlic powder
a shot of olive oil
a bit of sea salt
cajun spices, if you like them.
sour cream
shredded cheese (pepper jack is good)

How to make it:

Put the cold water and the beans into the pressure cooker, and put in a shot of olive oil. Cook at maximum heat until the safety valve starts to dance, then reduce heat to hold at "barely dancing" pressure for 20 minutes. (if no pressure cooker, boil for 2-3 hours, adding water to make up for losses). The beans are cooked enough when you can crush them easily between finger and thumb.

After 20 minutes, remove the pressure cooker from the heat, and run cold water over the top till the
pressure valve releases, then open the pressure cooker. Watch out, the stuff inside may still be superheated, be careful.

Get out the blender. Spoon about 2/3 of the beans into the blender container, and add enough of the hot water to half fill. Blend till it's smooth and creamy (will take a few minutes). Beware splashes.

Put the blended beans back in.

Add the slivered onions and cubed yams.

Close the pressure cooker and put the pressure cooker back on the heat, cook 10 minutes at 15 PSI (40 minutes if not on pressure). Again, don't count time coming up to pressure, keep the control valve barely dancing.

Turn off the heat, relieve pressure.

Add the cajun spices, slivered red and green peppers and the garlic (mashed).

Simmer 5 minutes (no need for pressure), salt to taste.

Serve with sour cream and shredded pepper jack cheese.

Amazingly satisfying... spicy but with a very nice body and good nutritional values.

This is a moderately authentic spicy HOT sesame seed beef

Expected time to prepare - 30 minutes prep time, then 5 minutes stirfry.

Scoville rating: 10,000 - 30,000 (approximate)

Credits: I stole this recipe from Ed Falk, who stole it from someone else. I've changed a few things (no oyster sauce, a little more sugar, different veggies) but that's the way good cooking goes.

CAUTION: The hot bean paste and stir-frying can burn you, both chemically and thermally. BE CAREFUL and WEAR SAFETY GLASSES.

CAUTION: The recommended types and amounts of the ingredients below may cause you extreme distress should you get them into an eye or other bodily orfice undiluted. For this reason WEAR SAFETY GOGGLES and WASH HANDS CAREFULLY AFTER HANDLING THESE MATERIALS!!!

You have been warned...
Ingredients for about 4 servings of Hot Sesame Seed Beef
Start by making the marinate:

2 tablespoons rice wine
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 1/2 tablespoons sesame oil
2 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce

Mix the marinate up well; mixing it in a 3-quart bowl will let you marinate the beef in the same bowl.
Slice the beef

1 lb (1/2 kg) really good beef; kabobbed is good
a sharp knife and a cutting board

Get yourself a pound of really good beef; kabobs is fine (and cheaper) for the same quality beef.

Slice the beef across the grain; you are shooting for pieces that are about 1/8" (2 to 3 mm) thick, and 1/2 or so inch wide (1 to 2 cm wide), by a couple inches (4 to 6 cm) long.

Put the sliced beef into the marinate as you slice it; you want the marinate to soak in.

Leave the beef in the marinate as you prepare the stirfry veggies. 10 minutes is enough, 20 minutes is better.
The Veggies
Get yourself a couple cups worth of any/all of the following; they all work, you can mix to taste or favor.

1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger <-- YOU NEED TO GET THIS
broccoli - cut the stems to make bite-size florets
carrots - clean, and slice-cut at an angle
bok-choy - tear to bite-sized pieces
snowpea pods - clean, use as is
scallions - clean and chop
whatever else looks good at the market. If you like it, you'll like it.

Have these veggies EXCEPT for the ginger ready to dump in last. The ginger goes in _first_, before the beef, so don't mix the ginger in. You want about two cups or so of chopped veggies, to go with the beef
Make The Magic Sauce
You need to get this at the market too:

2 tablespoons sesame seeds
1 tablespoon "Hot Bean Paste" (may be labeled "chili pepper bean paste"). You can get it at chinese markets. This is the HOT stuff, be careful how you handle it. If you want a milder dish, put in less.
3 tablespoons hoisin sauce (get it next to the hot bean paste; this is really mild sweetish sauce.

Put these all together in a small bowl, and have ready for adding after you finish the stirfry.
The Stir Fry Part

Get out a wok. Put about 2 to 4 teaspoons of peanut oil in it; vary to taste. Turn the heat up high. When a bit of ginger dances around or bubbles madly when you toss it in, it's hot enough to fry. Toss in the ginger, and let the ginger brown for just a bit.

Keep the heat all the way up, and add about 1/4 the beef. Stir-fry it, meaning to stir it madly around while swearing in an exotic foreign language. When the beef looks almost but not quite cooked, scoop it out with a fork or strainer, allow whatever oil wants to drip to drip, and put the cooked beef to the side. Let the oil heat up again (almost to the smoke point) and repeat for the rest of the beef, in 1/4 lb batches (the idea here is to do small batches so the oil doesn't get too cold.)

When the beef is cooked, put ALL the beef back into the wok, dump the veggies in, and stir it all around for a minute or two at high heat. This warms the veggies but doesn't wilt them.

If things look too oily, pour off any excess oil NOW. You probably won't need to do this unless you used a lot of oil in the stirfry.

Turn off the heat, and add the Magic Sauce. Stir well, so everything gets coated (the little oil that's left helps the magic sauce to flow out on everything.)

You're done.

Enjoy. It's good for you. :)

Vegetarian Spicy Alien Hatching Calzone

Expected time to prepare - 10 minutes dough prep time, then 60 minutes yeast rise time, then 10 minutes final prep time and 20 minutes bake.

Scoville rating: 1100 (approximate)

CAUTION: As prepared in this recipe, this Spicy Alien Hatching Calzone is extremely spicy (and kinda scarey to look at, too! ). As with any extreme cooking, you should consider having it prepared by an expert before attempting it on your own.

CAUTION: The recommended types and amounts of hot sauces and spices below may cause you extreme distress should you get them into an eye or other bodily orfice undiluted. For this reason WEAR SAFETY GOGGLES and WASH HANDS CAREFULLY AFTER HANDLING SPICES.

You have been warned...
Ingredients for 6 servings as a main dish

3 cups (750 ml) flour
one cup (250 ml) hot water (hot but not scalding to the touch)
one packet bread yeast
one half cup (125 ml) nonfat dry milk
one tablespoon (5 ml) sugar
one chicken egg (optional)

one bud of garlic (not a clove, a bud. One bud contains about twenty cloves).
one big onion, slivered to 3 cm x .5 cm, about 250 mL (1.5 inches x 1/4 inch, about one cup)
one green pepper, likewise slivered, 250 ml ( about one cup)
sliced tomatoes, likewise slivered, 250 ml ( about one cup)
one cup (250 ml) of tomato sauce, either plain or 'pizza sauce'
two cups (500 ml) of shredded mozzarella cheese
one teaspoon (3 ml or so) of Inner Beauty Real Hot Sauce (DANGEROUS STUFF!!!)
a shot of olive oil
a bit of sea salt

How to make it: part 1- the dough

Mix the sugar into the hot water. Add the yeast, stir.

Mix the nonfat dry milk into the flour. [using a mixmaster is a good idea for this part]

[optional - add the egg to the flour/dry milk. Stir well]

add the yeast-plus-water-plus-sugar to the flour/dry milk. Mix only enough to form a dough, not more (to avoid shearing the yeast to death)

Cover the mixture and place in a warm dark place. Covering the mixing bowl with saran and floating it around in a hottub works great. Leave the jets off, though.

You now have classic bread dough. Let it rise for an hour and mix it again. Put it back in the warm place to allow the dough to relax and proceed with the following:

Part 2: - the fillings

Peel all the garlic. All of it. Yes, it's a lot of garlic. Bask in the fragrance. Revel in it! Good stuff, eh?

Slice the garlic thinly.

Heat the olive oil to frying temps, and fry the onions mixed with half of the garlic slices to golden, then...

Turn the oven on to 350F.

Sliver the green pepper.

Slice the tomatoes about 3/16 (5mm) thick.

Grate the mozzarella cheese, if you didn't get it pre-grated.

Open the can(s) of tomato sauce. For every 250 ml (8 oz) of sauce, add one teaspoon of "Inner Beauty Real Hot Sauce" or equivalent; mix it in well. Be very careful of this stuff, it's HOT (about 100,000 scoville units). Whatever you do, don't lick the spoon unless you are into self-destruction.

Put a tablespoon of olive oil on a baking sheet with a raised rim. Spread the olive oil around on the sheet.

Take out the dough. It should have risen somewhat again. Note- it'll have "relaxed", which means that it will be pliable and easy to press out. BUT- after a very few bends, it will stiffen up again. That's the way bread dough is. So, minimize your poking and flexing of the dough, to make it easy for you to flatten the dough onto the baking sheet.

Oil your hands with olive oil.

In one fell swoop, scoop the entire wad of sticky puffy dough out of the mixing bowl and onto the baking sheet.

Press the dough out to cover the entire baking sheet, right up to the rim. The olive oil allows the dough to slide pretty easily around, and hopefully not stick to your hands either.

Now you've got a baking-sheet-sized slab o' dough. Sprinkle the peppers, then the sliced tomatoes, then the fried onions, then the remaining sliced garlic, then the cheese and lastly the spiced-up tomato sauce in a stripe down the middle of the long axis of the dough slab. The stripe should be about 1/3 as wide as the dough slab. You can use a fork to smooth down the tomato sauce.

Now, fold each side of unoccupied dough over the veggies; pinch the dough together to make a seam down the middle of the slab. Sometimes this goes easier with two people- one doing the folding and the other doing the pinching.

Pinch/fold the ends over as well.

Put it in the oven until golden brown (15 minutes to start, then you'll just have to wing it).

While it's cooking, the pinched-together topseam will usually split, giving a look rather like the "Alien Egg" in the movie ALIEN. Don't be afraid, it's supposed to do that. On the other hand, don't bend over and put your face close to it, either. :-)

Remove from oven and allow to set for about 5 minutes before slicing. Use a bread knife or a serrated knife for best results.

This is really yummy.

Crash's Extreme Baklava

This is real Greek baklava, just like Socrates used to make. Safety tip - leave out the hemlock juice.

Expected time to prepare: 40 minutes pastrywork, 90 minutes bake (of which you need 20 minutes of saucepan time to make the honey-lemon syrup), then three or four hours to cool.

Scoville rating: roughly 50 Scoville.

Calories per piece: infinite. Oh, well, almost infinite. Not recommended for the faint of heart or the high of cholesterol.

CAUTION: BAKLAVA is a VERY intense food. If you are unfamiliar with extreme cooking, you should consider having baklava prepared by an expert before attempting it on your own.

CAUTION: BAKLAVA HONEY SYRUP when cooking is a supersaturated solution, not boiling even though well above the nominal boiling point and can go into superheat boiling unexpectedly. If you stop stirring it, boiling appears to cease and the liquid appears quiescent. However, it's actually superheating. Abrupt superheat boiling can then be triggered by the addition of a tiny crystal of anything. When this superheat boiling begins, superheated syrup may be spattered and can cause second-degree burns. Wear protective clothing and don't stop stirring the syrup with a plastic or wooden spoon to prevent superheat events.

WARNING: BAKLAVA is an extremely unhealthy food. You shouldn't eat it. Not one bit. Because you'll like it sooooo much, you'll have to have another piece. And another. And...
Ingredients for 1 pan (dessert for 50 people )
It is recommended that you provide an alternate, less intense dessert for anyone not wishing to partake

** You need to make both parts **

Pastry Part
one pound of pre-prepared frozen fillo leaves (a.k.a.pastry leaves), thawed
3/4 lb of unsalted butter, melted
1.5 cups granulated sugar
1.5 cups raisins
1.5 cups walnuts, chopped to 5mm (1/4") size
one teaspoon cinnamon

Syrup
one cup of honey
two cups water
three cups granulated sugar
juice of one lemon
one teaspoon cinnamon

How to make it:

Start off by making the filling. Mix the 1.5 cups of sugar with the raisins and the nuts. Add a teaspoon of cinnamon.

Butter the inside of a medium-sized rectangular cake pan. Use solid butter, not the melted stuff.

Open the pastry leaves. The leaves are VERY thin sheets of dough, stacked up, then rolled up inside the plastic bag inside the box. The leaves dry out in like 30 seconds if not covered with a damp towel, so have the damp towel ready.

The leaves tend to stick together if given any excuse. Don't pinch them together. Sometimes a knife blade can separate the leaves if they're being uncooperative.

Separate out a leaf. Important: cover the unused leaves with the damp towel RIGHT AWAY!!! Having a helper is very useful here! Put the pastry leaf in the pan. (it will overhang a lot- that's OK. I usually set it in so one end is flush and there's a huge overhang off the other side.

Butter the part of the leaf in the pan. Use the melted butter and a pastry brush.

Fold the long overhang back into the pan. Butter the top.

If a leaf tears, don't panic. Put it in the pan as best you can, butter it down, and carry on. Likewise for stuck leaves; do the best you can, butter it, and carry on. You will _never_ notice if you have some stuck leaves (yes, I've tested it and you don't).

Repeat till you have put six or so leaves (twelve layers or so, since one leaf usually has top be folded onto itself once to fit the pan) of fillo leaves into the pan.

Make sure you butter at each opportunity.

Now use a big spoon and spoon out about a third of the nuts-n-raisins (plus sugar and cinnamon) onto the surface of the buttered pastry. You'll get about 50% coverage. That's fine.

Repeat with six or so more leaves; then another layer of nuts-n-raisins, then six more leaves, then the last of the nuts and raisins, then the last six leaves.

You should have now used up all the pastry leaves in your package, since they seem to put about 24 leaves in a one-pound box.

Set the oven to 325 degrees (yes, it's a low oven. You're going to heatsoak the pastry, not bake it fast.)

While the oven heats, get out a sharp knife and a straightedge. Cut the pastry from one corner to the other of the pan, all the way from the top to the bottom. Make sure the cut goes all the way to the bottom of the pan.

Now, cut parallel to the original diagonal cut, about an inch away, on each side of the diagonal cut. Make sure you go all the way to the bottom.

Repeat the diagonal and parallel cutting on the other pan diagonal. Yes, it's OK to use your fingers to keep the pastry from riding up on the knife blade. You now have a bunch of one-inch-or-so diamond-shaped pastries, all arranged neatly in a pan.

Put the pan into the oven, top rack. If it's an electric oven, put a "diffuser" on the rack below the pan. An old (single-thick) cookie sheet works well, but a sheet of aluminium foil a tad larger than the pastry pan is adequate. All you need to do is shield the bottom of the pastry pan from the direct radiant heat of the heating element.

Set a timer for 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Now, prepare the syrup. Mix the 3 cups sugar and 2 cups water in a large saucepan. Boil. Add the 1 cup honey. Watch out for superheat events- keep stirring! Use a wooden or plastic stirrer. Add the lemon and cinnamon- and be careful when you do, as this almost always causes some frothing.

Boil for fifteen minutes. Then remove from heat, cover, and put in a safe place to cool. Watch out, it's superheated and will cause a nasty second-degree burn if you spill it.

When the timer rings on the 1 hour 15 minutes, check the pastry. You want the top to be the color of perfectly cooked toast. If it's still too white, you can turn the heat up to 350 or so and give it another ten minutes. (yes, the pastry is supposed to be making those hissing, spitting, crackling sounds as it cooks)

When the color is what you want, remove the pan from the oven and IMMEDIATELY pour the honey-lemon syrup over the pastry. You will hear a buckling and roaring sound as the syrup goes into repeated vapor/liquid phase shifts; the metal pan may well buckle from the differential heating as the liquid reaches bottom. Don't let it scare you; it's supposed to do that.

Put the whole pan aside for at least two hours to cool and allow the syrup to adsorb into the pastry.

Cover with aluminium foil after an hour or so, if you want.

Serve when it's cool to the touch.

Baklava will keep several days without refrigeration, which is good because it doesn't taste nearly as good cold as it does at room temperature

Those of you who know me (more or less) know that I've been a fan of synthesizers for ... well, most of my life. Kraftwerk's AUTOBAHN, Edgar Winter's FRANKENSTEIN, Carlos' SWITCHED-ON BACH and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Tonto's Expanding Headband; these are a few of my favorite things.

I did dabble in grad school with some smaller synthesizers, but I never had the time or the money or the space for one of those modular monsters that you saw on the cover of Switched-On Bach.

Until this year. I finally bought a modular synthesizer; used, half the slots empty, but fully functional. It's a "Synthesizers.com" (a.k.a. a "dotcom"), the same form factor as the classic Moog modulars, but even more modular (i.e. any module can go in any position; there's no "half-size row" nor any backpanel wiring other than the power squid, and since then I've added a module here, a module there... and now it's a little over-full.

It has big meaty 1/4" jacks and a crateful of 1/4" patchcords to connect up the various functional modules, and is covered in thick black naugahyde.



Never underestimate the aesthetics of a musical instrument. It should sound good, but it should also make one _want_ to play it.

Every function on this machine has a knob or a switch. No menu diving, trying to navigate via a little two-line LCD. The knobs glide, with just enough viscous damping that you can set it "just there". (and no, none of the knobs go up to 11. There _are_ knobs that go -5 to +5, so it's 11 but really not quite. Does that make sense?)

It's _wonderful_. I can just sit there for an hour or two and come up with a little musical ditty that nobody else has ever heard before.

Nobody? I'm pretty sure that nobody ever did. Here's why... I had a little drink and did a count of knobs, switches, and jacks of this machine.

I have:

109 analog knobs (call them 0 to 10, for 11 discrete states)

6 6-way switches

11 3-way switches

15 2-way switches

91 input jacks

71 output jacks

So, how many different combinations can this thing be set to (don't worry about whether or not whether a particular configuration actually makes a sound or not; no configuration is more than one cable change or knob twist from a combination that _does_ make a sound).

Well, there are 109 knobs that go from 0 to 10; that's 11^91 settings right there (although there are probably at least 100 easily repeatable values, the sound change between each one may not be readily discernable. 11^91 is 5.84E94 possibilities.

Then there are the switches. 6^6 * 3^11 * 2^15 = 2.7E14 combinations, just on the switches. (for this purpose, I'm ignoring the switches on the MIDI inputs; we're looking only at the sounds that the modular synth can make _on it's own_.)

Finally, there is the patch cord system. There are 91 input jacks; each and every input jack can be fed from an output jack (all signals, be they audio or control, share the same voltage range and impedance (mis)match, and so are compatible to plug together. You can also leave a jack unfed (so there are 71 outputs, plus a hypothetical "no connection plug" meaning "plugged into nothing", for a total of 72 possible inputs to each input jack). That's 72 options, repeated 91 times or a total of 72^91, which is 1.04E169 options. (Yes, the concept of "multing" makes it a little more complicated, but the synth has two "mult" modules and I also have a box of "twofers" that piggyback two jacks into a single plug, so to a first approximation it really is a 72 -> 91 full crossbar interconnect.)

Multiplying it all out, that's (very roughly) 5E94 * 3E14 * 1E169 ~= 1.5E278 possible sounds (many of which _sound_ like silence, but that's not our worry here).

If I can do one of these sounds every second, then that's ~5E270 _years_ to hear them all.

For comparison, the whole universe is only about 15E9 years old. At about E40 years, all protons are predicted to have decayed, and there won't _be_ any matter to build synthesizers out of. Even if every proton in the universe is somehow able to be made into a synthesizer, it would still not be enough to listen to every sound that the machine that fits on my kitchen table can make.

So, very frankly, when I sit down and just "noodle around", it's highly unlikely that I'll hear anything that will ever, ever be heard again. There isn't the time enough- in a very literal sense.

Zathrus was wrong. You _can_ run out of Time.

(true story follows, and yes, I was there, this is not third person
"friend of a friend") story. And yes, I have corroborating witnesses.

(edit: this was not Mitnick's first exploit into DEC. He apparently also
got onto the RSTS/E dev system "Ark" in 1979, see the story in
http://passwordresearch.com/stories/story47.html for details. And yes,
I know the Anton of that story and he knows me, but this story is
entirely orthogonal to that story)

Back in the Old Days (summer of 1986, to be precise), I was a fledgling
programmer/hacker at DEC in Hudson, Massachusetts. DEC documentation
used the example name NODE for the name of a computer, and USER for the
name of a user (yes, all caps), and of course, USER had the password of
PASSWORD. So, the standard example email address was like this (note
that this was before Internet and so no "@" sign):

To: NODE::USER

... and a certain young engineer (NOT ME! But someone I worked with...
initials were /redacted/ and he rode a BMW motorcycle...) thought it would be
cool to have a DEC-internal machine named NODE, with a user named
USER, to see what email came in on it from the noobs who read the
documentation literally.

We saw some interesting stuff come in for NODE::USER. Trivia. Jokes.
The occasional lurid hookup booty-call. All good fun; we had a
DEC-internal mailing list you could subscribe to if you wanted to see
the traffic.

But- that meant that there was a user named USER, on node NODE. And
USER's account had to have a password. Which was, of course, PASSWORD,
just like the documentation used.

The owner of NODE did the "right things". Among them, it was a VMS
machine (i.e. quite good security at the time), USER didn't have any
privs at all, was in it's own group, and besides, the machine was on the
internal network at DEC, where in theory at least everyone was trusted.

In theory at least....

When Mitnick (yeah, *that* Kevin Mitnick) broke into DEC ISTG and ZKO
the first time (this was summer of 1986, mind you, way way before
Shimomura et al), he did it by social-engineering (we think) a phone
number in the modem bank (remember modem banks?). That got him into
the LAT (the terminal server), with a social-engineered password.

From there, he tried NODE::USER, password PASSWORD, and sure enough, he
was in.

NODE's owner noticed something was up- that there was activity when
there ought to be none. So we started watching- but we were slow off
the starting gate. It caused considerable consternation when this
unknown visitor continued to social-engineer out of NODE:: and up into ZKO.

In fact, we didn't even know his name - Mitnick wasn't famous then.
(it turns out that one person working in the group _did_ know him
socially- and that was the "social engineering entry point).

We just referred to him as "Our Friend"; that was as good a codename
as any; we specifically avoided any online discussion of the goings-on
because we didn't know what Our Friend might be reading. Everything
was face-to-face communication or handwritten notes, kept in folders
in locked desk drawers, and shared only with those with a need to know.

We realized Our Friend was no ordinary "leave nothing but footprints, take
nothing but pictures" kind of tourist, and I built some special hardware
(thank you Radio Shack Marlboro for proto-board and the rack of cheap
chips on blue cards in the back of the store, and a certain state judge
for issuing a wiretap warrant !).

We didn't know how good Our Friend really was at hacking, and
that's why we built the special-purpose hardware - he *might* have already
compromised the LAT terminal server and thus we couldn't trust that,
we had to build something that was, from his end of the telephone wire,
undetectable.

From then on, we watched and logged every move Mitnick made. Fortunately,
his tradecraft was as bad as his social engineering was good (he
never even changed the modem line number he was dialing in on! ).

We got the evidence.

Mitnick went to jail for a year.

Clearly, that was not enough. His tradecraft improved slightly but his
sense of ethics remained as weak as ever.

He did mung on a few things, including some mission critical software.
His coding style wasn't great. But since we never could be sure he
didn't have another back door into the systems, we had to wait till
he got put in jail before we could start a full sweep of everything,
and then that's exactly what we did. Full examination of every line
of code; it took the group I was in basically 100 man-months to do.
Not cheap, but I take some comfort that he spent about the same number
of man-months in jail.

Anyway, I've not had any dealings with him since '86, and like it just
fine that way.

And THAT, children, is why you should be careful on the Internet...

(this was written as a reply to someone who asked me the question of "If there is no god, then where did the universe come from", and it came out pretty well, so I'm preserving it forevermore here.

No problem.

First off, I am a scientist but not a specialist in the particular field you want (you want a cosmologist, I'm not one of those). So, I'm going to make some very simplifying assumptions that will not be exactly right but ignore those please.

Second thing: I'd suggest reading up on all of this in Wikipedia; it's free.

But here's a simple way to think about it. You've heard of the law of large numbers, right? That things will average out. That's the whole basis of thermodynamics - that things "run down", hot things cool off, cold things warm up, friction drags on everything.

For example, if you put a soccer ball on the floor, it stays there. That's because the number of molecules of air hitting it on the left average out to be the same number as the number of molecules of air hitting it on the right. So, nothing seems to happen.

But start shrinking the soccer ball. About the time it gets to be the size of a tiny grain of dust, you notice the dust-grain-sized soccer ball starts to quiver a little now and then. That's because it's small enough that so few air molecules hit it every second that the law of large numbers starts to break down- occasionally, enough more hit it on the right (or on the left) that the whole dust grain moves. Is that "free energy"? Sort-of... but there's reasons why it's hard to harness it, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

Now make the dust smaller yet... microscopic in size, the size of a bacterium. You won't be able to watch it easily now, because it is in _continuous_ motion. (this is called Brownian motion, after the Scottish Botanist who described it best (although Lucretius, in 60 BC described it as well). This is also why the sky is blue, because the dust way up in the air that scatters the blue light preferentially would fall down if it weren't for Brownian motion.

Now make the particle smaller yet- the size of an atom- and you find that the law of large numbers has completely broken down. Atoms in air are jumping wildly about continuously.

Crazy? Yes- but it gets worse. Look smaller than an atom. At the subatomic scale, the math of how electrons and protons and light waves move doesn't work out correctly unless you postulate things called "vacuum fluctuations".

Essentially, a vacuum fluctuation is when the Universe "borrows" energy to make a pair of particles (say, an electron and a positron, the positron being antimatter) that will exist for only a tiny time period, fly around a little bit, and then rejoin themselves together. The positron is antimatter, so it and the electron annihilate each other leaving two gamma rays- but instead of the gamma rays going out into the rest of the universe, the Universe steals them back and uses that to pay back the energy it borrowed.

These tiny invisible pairs of particles happen to be flashing in and out of existence all of the time, all around you- in fact, inside you too.

So, these vacuum fluctuations are occurring, creating (for a tiny amount of time) matter and energy out of _nothing_. We can actually observe this occurring in the lab (for example, the Casimir effect - particles going faster than the speed of light under very limited conditions).

Now, take another step- assume that you are looking at not just a very small particle, but _nothing_. Nothing at all exists.

Space is utterly empty, with no atoms or light whatsoever. Yet, if the field equations are to be satisfied, vacuum fluctuations _must_ exist. And the first one that comes along- WHAM - total system instability. A random but huge amount of matter/energy blossoms forth, literally from nothing. And there's nothing in the math that says it can't happen if you have _nothing_ to damp the vacuum fluctuations out.

Worse - it MUST happen, because the total emptyness is itself unstable and the first vacuum fluctuation that happens (and it will, the uncertainty principle applies) triggers the detonation- the Big Bang.

It's like the paradox of coin flips - flip a billion coins, and pretty much you'll have half heads and half tails, result = 0.5.
That's the law of large numbers; things average out even though there is no "memory" in the coins themselves.
But if you flip ONE coin, the chance that it'll give a 0.5 result - that is, stay on edge - is pretty close to zero.  When
you have small numbers, the law of large numbers fails completely, and in completely empty space, there is no
large numbers of anything.

So yes, when the law of large numbers fails, you _can_ create something from nothing. Worse- the "you" is unnecessary; SOMETHING will be created, by itself. There is no need to take action to "create"- the creation is automatic... and _prevention_ of the creation is impossible!

And that is how I think the Universe happened.

I hope that helps...

Testing entry. Nothing to see here.

Move along, move along.