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Worthless Saturday

January 29, 2005

I overdid it a bit this week and found myself exhausted on Friday.  I have to be careful about exhaustion.  One description of fibromyalgia I’ve heard is “you look your age but you feel 90.”  You work hard to control chronic fatigue and reduce pain, but it’s easy for it to get out of hand.  So I spent a good part of today in bed and now I’m feeling only very tired.

Last night I did pop in a tape to record the CBS series, “Numb3rs,” a schmaltzy buddy-cop show about a brilliant but tortured mathematician and his action-hero cop brother.  The hook is that the math-guy can predict the future (essentially) with important-sounding algorithms.  So he knows what bad guys are going to do before they do.

I just watched it tonight and it’s great – I mean, if you like crappy cop shows, this one is in a class by itself:

Scene – a glass-walled conference room in a busy cop-office with dramatic lighting and lots of complicated mathematical symbols written in white grease-pencil on the glass…

(tortured-genius brother) “There’s one thing we’re not taking into account here – Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  Heisenberg said you can’t observe anything without changing it.  Like the smallest electron – you can’t truly measure it without bumping into it in some way and changing it.”

(action-cop brother) “Woah, woah, wait a minute.  You know I got, like, a “c” in physics, so could you just simplify this for me and tell me how it relates to our case?”

(tortured-genius brother) “They know we’ve observed them.  Like a light particle, we’ve interacted with them.  They know we’re trying to outthink them.  They’ll change their pattern.”

I may not have gotten every word right, but you get the idea.  It was pretty hilarious stuff.  I give it three episodes before the network puts it out of its misery.  But then, I predicted the same fate for “CSI” and it has spawned a raft of equally crappy spinoffs.

Other than that, I didn’t do a darn thing today.  There was something I wanted to write about but it slipped my mind so I’m going to bed.

Categories: Personal
  1. January 30, 2005 at 03:57 | #1

    I actually find CSI to be quite amusing.  I love the monologues explaining various crime scene analysis techniques ostensibly to one another.  Could you imagine if people actually did similar in real life? 

    Me (to Capitalist Pig while driving my car): You see, so now I’m applying my foot to the accelerator.  This will lead to an influx of fuel to the engine thus increasing the rate of combustion.  As a result of this the vehicle will accelerate to approximately 60 km/h.

    Capitalist Pig: I think I read something about this in Car and Driver magazine.

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