Chaos theory applications

Yesterday, I and my roommate went shopping to restock our dwindling supplies of nutrition. We were supposed to go to a supermarket with student-friendly, i.e. *very* low prizes and then look for an Arabic store so that we might purchase some more... exotic items, not very common in traditional Swedish cuisine.

Prior to our departure, I consulted my preferred weather forecast service - the window. It was cloudy, with a slight cold northwest wind, looking ready to pour down heavy amounts of rain any minute. Heeding the advice of my inner voice, I searched for my umbrella. I found it in the wardrobe, successfully playing the role of a sleeping bat. Luckily for me, it had not developed any life-threatening traits apart from the substantial layer of dust lying on the handle. I disentangled it from the pile of coat hangers and put it into my backpack. After giving in to my scroogy side, I provided it with company - two plastic bags, so that I would not have to pay extra for those in the store, should the need arise.

We were all set to go and ventured bravely towards the unknown stores of Uppsala. We managed to do a lot of window-shopping and a fairly good amount of actual shopping. We had been strolling around the streets for more than two hours when we finally got home. And in that time, not a single droplet of rain managed to land on our bodies. Not that we were using the umbrella, mind you. The ex-bat was now re-enlisted in the mimicry division, this time as a cat, purring quietly in my backpack. There was simply no rain at all. And I was certain that had I not taken the make-shift parachute, we would have been soaked after the first ten minutes of our journey.

This obvious application of the Murphy’s Law made me think. What if rain was not caused by wind patterns, air mass migrations, temperature shifting and all the complex climate machinery meteorologists try to sell to us as an excuse for not doing any actual work? What if it was simply the Chaos theory combined with quantum mechanics that was the real deal? Imagine that there is a city somewhere with a certain known population. Let us say that one half of those people have used their windows in the way I did. The quantum theory says that an object could be in one of several different states simultaneously and only the act of observation determined which state was the currently correct one... for this particular universe. This means that those people that looked through the window are the ones that actually influence the weather. The rest are simply victims.

Let us say that it was the same cloudy day in that town as it was yesterday here in Uppsala. There is a certain probability that it would rain. The actual rainfall, however, manifests itself according to Murphy's Law. In other words, if more than half of the people that looked through the window had not taken their umbrellas, raincoats or whatever waterproof device they would prefer, it would rain. It is as simple as that. The combined observation and resulting decision of a certain amount of people would generate enough influence waves in the fabric of space-time that it would shift the weather balance towards rain or no-rain. Presently, I am not sure how this can be applied in more serious weather effects such as tsunamis or hurricanes, but I am positive they are observed by a very large number of people, so that decisions and consequences thereof have much greater impact, thus resulting in much greater damage.

In conclusion, if it looks as rain, use your umbrella wisely. Sometimes rain is needed.

What being a King feels like

It was another night at work. This time, I was a waiter at a private party. Several days earlier, when my boss was recruiting me for this particular event, he said that the guests had requested that only female personnel should serve them. However, since there were not enough waitresses available on that particular evening, I had to fill in as a honourabale woman. No, no surgery was necessary, thank you.

When I arrived at the crime scene... I mean, the nation, I cast a quick glance at the quest list. Then another, this time slower. At the third peering into the sheet I managed to discern two female names. The other ninety-four were all men. Some kind of a men choir having a reunion. Poor souls, they were so desperate for female attention that they have specifically requested "No boys allowed!" Well, guess who was going to shatter their dreams. That's right, the Czech guy. I am an honourable woman, remember?

The first surprise of the evening manifested itself in that from the nearly hundred guests none were allergic to anything; there were even no vegetarians around. I wonder if this is somehow connected to the singing or to their thirst (look here for more details). Then, to even out my karma, I received a whole table for myself, while the others had one side of the table each. Not that I was complaining though. Having worked as a waiter at Uppsala Castle, I was amply able to keep up with them. What I *was* complaining about though was the fact that some of the singers had lungs only matched by the size of their bellies and their chairs were drawn so far back that they almost touched next table's chairs. It made squeezing between the tables a bit tricky, especially with the lack of any levitational abilities of my part.

The dinner was going smoothly as it gets, hors d'oeuvres out, red wine in, main course in, more red wine in, main course out, dessert... ah, you get the idea. Well, some of the guys were still hungry after the dinner due to the modest-sized portions but I think they got the rest in fluid form. To make it even nicer, the guests were singing. Not the usual Swedish out-of-tune, table-banging singing, mind you. Those fellows were professionals. Beautiful four-voiced canons, Gregorian chants, even the posh drinking songs sounded as if they were sung under the spires of the Uppsala Cathedral, not in our nation. It was amazing.

In the end, the guests sang for the staff. We went into the dining hall in a straight line and bravely faced them. First it was a thank-you song, then the national anthem of Sweden. Now *that* was something I consider myself lucky to have witnessed. Generally I cannot be touched by other anthems except my own country's. This time I received goose bumps all over. And after that, the lights were dimmed and the fellowship dismounted their chairs. They started singing a love song. And very slowly, they approached and encircled our line. After a brief commotion just in front of me (after all, they wanted to sing for a girl, not for a guy) all ninety-six singers got down on their knees and grabbed our hands. The girls blushed immediately, and the guys that had got hold of my manipulative appendages had a hard time not bursting in laugh from the absurd situation, as did I. I felt like a King and every nobleman was swearing an oath of allegiance. The effect was almost ruined, though, when one of them kissed my right hand. His moustache tickled!

Bartender stories

It has been raining the whole morning and I am getting sick of rearranging the paragraphs in my degree project... might just as well write something.

Last Friday night I was managing the pub at the place (ok, one of the places) I work. The music was nice (I was choosing it), the orders were going smooth... until THEY came. Among students in Uppsala there is a peculiar habit called pub crawling. This would probably need some explanation. In our little town with 200 000 inhabitants, 40 000 of which are students, there are 13 student unions. Much like fraternities in the United States, but it is compulsory to be a member of one of them. Each and every of these "nations", as they are called, has its own pub. A pub crawl is therefore an event which comprises visiting every student pub in town and having one beer in it. Now, thirteen beers on one night are manageable, though for the price of repeated visits to the toilet. What is really putting a strain on the whole affair is that the pubs are only open from 18.00 to 01.00, with the bars refusing to take orders after 00.30. This leaves exactly half an hour for each pub. That is, if you could teleport from pub to pub with the beer waiting for you. Since the powers of telekinesis are still lacking in the common population, one has to go between the pubs. And some of them lie good 15 minutes from one another... and the time needed to reach the next one increases proportionally with the amount of the imbibed beverages. So actually you have 10 minutes per beer. And this is dangerously near to this particular state when one has to pray to the porcelain god... those usually leave a bad aftertaste. For my part, I prefer a little slower-paced drinking... and more eating.

Back to our story. It was around 11 o'clock when a jolly laughing gang endeavouring such a holy quest as conquering all the pubs in Uppsala came to GH nation. One of them was particularly under the influence, with walking trajectory representing a line from the second degree ("A curved line from the first degree is a straight line!", my lab assistant in mathematics during my freshman year in Bulgaria). According to protocol (and trusting a sudden prophetic revelation about near future cleaning-events should I do otherwise), I refused to serve her alcohol on the account that she was too intoxicated. "How do you see I'm drunk", she asked me. "Well, for one part, you are talking too damn high and are irritating all the other guests, and for the other, you couldn't even walk in a straight line from the bar to the piano". Trying to prove me wrong she marched on to the piano... proving only that the zigzag is the shortest distance between two pubs. So when I told her that under no circumstances this evening I was going to give her anything with a higher alcohol concentration than tap water, she was infuriated.

"What are you, a fucking Russian?", she asked me? Well, I certainly have not had intercourse with anyone from that country, so I regretfully admitted that this was not the case. Then she apparently thought I was deaf or blind or suffering from a short term memory loss, because she started speaking from a distance of half a centimetre from my nose. Now, I am a tall guy so she had to stretch up really good, which made me snicker despite my futile efforts to keep a stern face. Seeing this she showed me the finger (I managed to restrain myself from grabbing that finger and breaking it, now that would have been foolish), and left the pub to everybody's relief. Later, one of the waitresses reported having seen her urinating on the outer wall of the pub, thus exacting her revenge. Sadly, it was utterly pointless in the light of the huge amount of water coming down from the sky two days later. I cannot think of any moral for this story, but rumours about this encounter spread fast in the nation and everybody was equally amused and appalled. Except the real Russian, he was laughing his heart out.