We need a good laugh!

If Operating Systems were Airlines
(copied from the Internet; probably not original where I found it.)

DOS Air

All the passengers go out onto the runway, grab hold of the plane, push it until it gets in the air, hop on, jump off when it hits the ground again. Then they grab the plane again, push it back into the air, hop on, etcetera.
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Windows '95 Airlines

The terminal is very neat and clean, the attendants are all very attractive and the pilots very capable. The fleet is immense. After your plane arrives 6 months late, you begin to wonder why it has not arrived yet. Your jet takes off without a hitch, pushing above the clouds, and at 20,000 feet it crashes without warning.
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Mac Airways

The cashiers, flight attendants, and pilots all look the same, feel the same and act the same. When asked questions about the flight they reply that you don't want to know, don't need to know, and would you please return to your seat and watch the movie.
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OS/2 Skyways

The terminal is almost empty, with only a few prospective passengers milling about. Airline personnel walk around, apologising profusely to customers in hushed voices, pointing from time to time to the sleek, powerful jets outside the terminal on the field. They tell each passenger how good the real flight will be on these new jets and how much safer it will be than Windows Airlines, but that they will have to wait a little longer for the technicians to finish the flight systems.
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Fly Windows NT

All the passengers carry their seats out onto the tarmac, placing the chairs in the outline of a plane. They all sit down, flap their arms and make jet swooshing sounds as if they are flying.
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Wings of OS/400

The airline has bought ancient DC-3s, arguably the best and safest planes that ever flew and painted "747" on their tails to make them look as if they are fast. The flight attendants, of course, attend to your every need, though the drinks cost $15 a pop. Stupid questions cost $230 per hour, unless you have SupportLine, which requires a first class ticket and membership in the frequent flyer club.
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MVS Airlines

The passengers all gather in the hanger, watching hundreds of technicians check the flight systems on this immense, luxury aircraft. This plane has at least 10 engines and seats over 1,000 passengers. All the passengers scramble aboard, as do the necessary complement of 200 technicians. The pilot takes his place up in the glass cockpit. He guns the engines, only to realise that the plane is too big to get through the hangar doors!
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UNIX Express

Each passenger brings a piece of the airplane and a box of tools to the airport. They gather on the tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they want to build and how to put it together. Eventually, they build several different aircraft, but give them all the same name. Some passengers actually reach their destinations. All passengers believe they got there.

Oddly, I don't see anything here about VMS. Someone needs to work on this . . .

Balance

Recently, I found Rachel in the kitchen mixing cereals: Fruit & Fibre with Total, as I recall. She said she was trying to get the right fruit-to-flake ratio. Living in the city, I suppose that's something we need to think about. We have plenty of both, but balance is critical.

Modern Physics

If you tied a piece of toast butter side up to the back of a cat and dropped the cat from a height, what would happen?

An interesting question . . .

1. Toast usually is not dropped randomly, but slides laterally off a table top; the toast begins to rotate when its center of gravity passes beyond the table edge.
   
2. Most tables are approximately the same height (within a narrow range).
   
3. Toast usually attains a rate of rotation that allows it to complete one-half turn when falling from the height of a typical table. (Combination effect of 1 and 2 above.)

Thus, simple physical interaction causes the apparent Murphian perversity of dropped toast.

Now, how does this affect the cat?

Presence of a living complex organism (the cat) within this otherwise simple physical system decreases the system's overall predictability. Without the cat, we could describe the toast's behavior in terms of rotation rate and vertical distance; however, behavior of a cat-inclusive system depends almost entirely on the state of the cat. This is difficult to predict, and may be innately unknowable (see Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.) I suspect there are two general cases:

1. The cat behaves normally (for a cat), landing upright. Causes may include:
   • The cat does not know of the toast.
   • The cat does not care.
   
   
2. The cat makes no attempt to right itself. In this case, if the cat falls a sufficient distance, aerodynamic forces will probably cause the cat to invert and land on the toast. This could happen if:
   • The cat is preoccupied with trying to eat the toast. (My cat would probably do this.)
   • The cat faints from excitement.

The state of the cat, and thus the state of the system, may be indeterminate. That is, its state will not be resolved until an observer perceives it, like Schroedinger's well-known thought experiment on atomic decay. Interestingly, Schroedinger's system also housed a cat. Are all cat-inclusive systems indeterminate?

Do we know of any experimental verification?

I was tempted to pursue this line, discussing the conceptual model of cats as elementary particles randomly changing state between in and out, conservation of in-ness and out-ness (when one cat goes out, somewhere in the universe another comes in), and cats as carriers of entropy like electrons carry charge. Regrettably, the need to do productive work prevented that pursuit.

A true story

The U. S. Marine Corps teaches recruits an official, approved, required method of doing everything: grooming, saluting, shining shoes, speaking to superiors, everything! The official method of lacing your boots requires: laces outside the boot face across the bottom eyelets, then left-over-right all the way up. This requires a transition zone to reconcile outside-in lacing at the bottom eyelets with conventional inside-out lacing on the rest of the boot. (You never thought about this detail, did you?) Although everyone else seemed to be using it, this transition looked silly and wrong to me, so I laced outside-in all the way to the boottop, left-over-right. No problem, I thought.

. . .

Our drill instructor snapped us to attention and paced slowly to each man, glaring at every detail of our dress. He stopped in front of me. I stood stiffly, impassively, motionless as he checked my collar, my belt, my shoes . . . my shoes . . . my shoes! He looked sideways at my left-hand neighbor's shoes, then again at mine. He glanced to my right, then back to my guilty, sweating feet. While I stood stone-faced and fearful, he raised his eyes and quietly spoke: "It figures," he said, "that you would find a way to do exactly what I told you to do, and still be different from everybody else." Then he stepped to the next man.

Who says that drill instructors never utter a kind word?

Religions of the World

Elementary

The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by physicists at Watsamata U. The element, tentatively named Administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has a atomic number of 0. However, it does have 1 neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice-neutrons, and 111 assistant vice-neutrons. This gives it an atomic mass number of 312. These 312 particles are held together in the nucleus by meson-like particles called memos. Since it has no electrons, Administratium is inert; however, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with.

According to the discoverers, a minute amount of Administratium caused one reaction to take 4 days to complete when it would normally take 1 second. Administratium has a normal half-life of approximately 3 years, at which time it does not actively decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice-neutrons, and assistant vice-neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that atomic mass number actually increases after reorganization.

Research at other laboratories indicates that Administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to condense and concentrate at certain points such as government agencies and universities, and can usually be found in the newest, best-appointed and best- maintained buildings.

Scientists point out that Administratium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration, and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how Administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.

Cosmic Questions

• If your're driving on the wrong side of the street and hit a jaywalker, who's at fault?
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• What do you call a female android? A gynoid?