draliman on life

A few weeks ago I arrived at work to be told that my coffee mug had suffered an unfortunate dishwasher accident. Apparently the force of the water in the dishwasher had blown my mug apart! This mug had been with me for years, so understandably, the sight of the broken handle was almost too much to bear. But, accidents happen. Half of the handle was missing, and when the dishwasher broke down that very evening, everyone assumed that the handle was stuck inside somewhere.

The dishwasher was fixed and the incident forgotten. The handle was never found.

A couple of weeks later the handle turned up – in the mug cupboard opposite the dishwasher.

Now it’s Nobel Prize time – quantum tunnelling of a mug handle through two large barriers!

Quantum tunnelling involves teensy-weensy particles (for example electrons) tunnelling through a barrier, which classically, would be impossible.

We now see evidence of a large object, billions of times more massive than an electron, tunnelling through both the dishwasher door and the cupboard door! The probability of this, while finite, is so small to be mathematically impossible.

So I’ll write a paper on it and get famous.

Although, thinking about it, I guess the probability of someone telling a little fib after accidentally breaking the mug while putting it away in the cupboard it a bit higher, I suppose.

Hold the paper. More research required.

A generic sock

It’s a well known fact that socks vanish, often under mysterious circumstances. This “black hole of socks” has never been adequately explained, but has been linked in the past both to “laundry day” and separately to “messy teenagers”.

This post is about neither. This post is about the “sock lottery”.

Every week I do my laundry which among other things, includes seven pairs of socks. Fourteen socks. I’ve got this thing where I always hang socks on the dryer in pairs. This way I can both satisfy myself that none of my socks have succumbed to the aforementioned black hole, and it’s easier to pair them up before putting them away.

Now, here’s the thing. On many occasions the first seven socks I’ve pulled out of the washing machine have all been different. Obviously this is quite a rare event, but it’s not unusual that the first five socks don’t match. How can this be? Mathematical genius that I am, my head hurts even thinking about how to work this out, but surely the odds are against this?

So I would like to know why I only win the (very) occasional tenner in the National Lottery? One would think that, having beaten the odds so convincingly in the world of socks, I could do the same when the big bucks are at stake. Sure, the odds of winning the lottery are much higher than the whole sock thing, but I’m not greedy. One of those medium-sized prizes would do me just fine.

Then I suppose, looking at it another way, I actually want socks to come out in pairs. So one might argue that even when the odds are clearly in my favour, I still can’t win.

I had a clumsy day yesterday. First I cut my finger open on a can of chili, then I dropped a jar of black-current jam in my dessert.

But back to the finger. Three first aid boxes in the house, and could I find a plaster? Nope. Not one single plaster in the whole house. Loads of bandages, no plasters. I had to go out to the car, in the rain, kitchen towel wrapped around my finger. There I found two more first aid kits, both with plasters in.

Why do I have five first aid kits, you ask? Well, that’s not important right now. Maybe I have a thing for first aid kits. The important question is “Why were there no plasters in the house, only in the car?” What was going through my mind when I made that choice, if a conscious choice it was?

“If I accidentally cut my finger in the house, I’ll wrap a massive bandage around it, this disabling my entire hand. But if I’m out in the car and witness an accident, and if I’m not frozen in shock and manage to help, I’m sure the very thing to stop an arterial bleed is a sticking plaster.”

There are now plasters in the house and the car. And bandages too.