Anyone else out there remember the big deal about scissors in grade school? You used to have to use these extremely horrible plastic scissors with metal edges when you where in kindergarten. By first or second grade you could use the moderately horrible metal scissors with rounded ends. If you showed sufficient competence with them, you could graduate to the slightly-less-than-moderately horrible metal scissors with pointy ends.
There were actual scissors quizzes. You had to be able to cut things out accurately in order to show that you were sufficiently skilled and coordinated to not injure yourself or others with the pointy scissors. I’m not sure that there is any correlation between precision and trustworthiness, but for some reason the teachers seemed to assume that kids who could make accurate incisions were less likely to go all “Dial-M for Murder” than those who were sloppy. Personally, if I were a teacher and a kid showed a lot of enthusiasm for slicing things up, I’d be a little less likely to hand over the tools for doing so.
Dinner last night got me thinking about this. It was pizza, which usualy doesn’t have a lot of scissor-like qualities. Specifically, the way that the pizza was sliced. I think whoever cut it should be demoted back down to plastic scissors. Either that or they should be given a degree in advanced topology.
From a mathematical standpoint, the pizza was fascinating. Eating that pizza was almost like desecrating a scientific wonder. No two slices were the same size. Somehow the cuts were made at an oblique angle so that the crust beneath each piece was a different shape than the cheese on top. A careful analysis of the angles and vectors involved in cutting that pizza may have led to an unfolding of the mysteries of the universe!
Of course, the people making the study would probably conclude that, although the universe was cooling off, it was still tasty. But that a cold universe with barbecue sauce was less tasty than a cold one with standard sauce. And that next time we should make sure the universe doesn’t have so much bacon on it.
Note from My Wife:
Yes, but fortuitously I know the ASL sign for bacon now so when the Universe goes deaf I can sign BACON at it. For whatever good that does. Mmmm, bacon.
Thankyouverymuch.