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Weak XI

13 March 2025

No. 850 (cartoon)

You may be assured that I won’t do that again.

I’m relieved.

You may be assured if you ignore reality.

14 March 202

Pi Day

It’s Pi Day again, 3.14 and all that.

“Government efficiency” scams aren’t new; almost nothing is. In 1897, moronic simpletons introduced the Indiana Pi Bill to declare that pi equals 3.2, period, full stop. Amazingly, the bill never became law.

Meanwhile, back in the land of science, geeks at Solidigm announced that they’d calculated pi to a hundred and five trillion places before their abacuses (abuci?) overheated. An irrational pursuit of an irrational number smells like art to me!

15 March 2025

Diereses Are Here to Stay

The New Yorker has released a new style book to bring the venerated periodical into the nineties, e.g., “in-box” is now “inbox.” Can the new millennium be far behind?

(Yes.)

The good news for pretentious people like me is that diereses are here to stay, a decision I was hesitant to embrace since I’d never heard of diereses before. I discovered that diereses are umlauts except that they’re not. The Internet explained, “umlauts change the pronunciation of a vowel while diaeresis indicates that two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately.” And to muddy the semantic waters even more, I discovered that tramas are also diereses, for real. (I think.)

Having blathered all that, I should add that I’m ignoring all well-intentioned advice, and shall continue to revel in my clueless grandiloquence. I shall not coöperate with the magazine’s editors; ’round these parts the Internet will never become the internet.

16 March 2025

Inside and Outside Spiders Revisited

A few months ago—21 August 2024 to be precise—I doubted the existence of two different populations of spiders, indoor and outdoor. “Now hold on just a minute: where did the inside spiders live before humans built structures with outsides and insides?” I asked rhetorically.

When it comes to ignorance, I say flaunt it if you got it.

I had no idea that Andrew read this piffle, but he gave me a brief lecture on spiders to let me know that I was wrong wrong about indoor spiders: they really do exist, and have been documented for millennia. Ninety-five percent of ’em have never been outside, so I’ve been inadvertently cruel to have evicted them. He suggested that I leave ’em alone and consider them to be harmless roommates who dine on insects.

17 March 2025

Euclidian Astronomy Headaches

Astronomers using the Euclid space telescope discovered twenty-six million new galaxies—each one comprising between umteen and a kajillion stars, planets, and such—in only a week. If each galaxy was only a millimeter wide and put side by side, they’d stretch almost two-thirds of the way around the equator.

If your brain isn’t already throbbing in pain, consider this: scientists expect to find two hundred and fifty times that many new galaxies as they continue to probe the heavens and hells.

18 March 2025

Inconclusive Precipitation Measurements 14-17 March 2025

I put ten test tubes with pH sticks on the patio wall in anticipation of an atmospheric river headed this way to make, Inconclusive Precipitation Measurements 14-17 March 2025. I conducted the ersatz experiment to amuse myself, and in that regard the investigation was an unqualified success.

The research yielded no solid scientific data, though, since there were too many variables to consider, such as the random redistribution of raindrops by the oak tree under which I carried out the evaluation. Also, I have no idea how one of the stout containers could have tipped over.

The photograph is very sharp, but only in the plane of the very narrow depth of field I chose. It looks horrible at the low resolution reproduced on the Internet. As was the case a couple of weaks ago, no one except studio visitors will ever see what I see in my bubble.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart