Wolf! Wolf!

Most of you will be familiar with the story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" attributed to a slave named Aesop in Greece, somewhere around 650 BCE. In short, if you call the alarm to gain attention when there is no actual problem, you will eventually be completely ignored where there really IS a wolf snacking on your toes. I believe this tale is still told to children, as it certainly does still apply.

I happen to live near a school with very small children, whom are occasionally allowed to play outside. Occasionally, I can hear them playing and laughing and the occasional squeal of surprise/joy/rage. More often though, what I hear is blood curdling screams, which sound for all the world like a wolf has entered the playground, and is crunching their bones to splinters. I assume that is NOT what is actually happening, since the adults assigned to watching them appear to have little interest in the carnage playing out before them.

These are not happy peals of laughter, not even screams of feigned fear and amazement. These screams are imbued with every bit of life or death fear the child possesses, at the maximum volume available to the small but shrill lungs. The screams are also not short in duration, or occasional, they are continuous and lung emptying wails of terror. The problem is, there is no actual danger or inciting event. It's about getting attention -- just like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

You may be thinking "This grouchy old crank is just annoyed at a noisy neighbor. I would know the difference between a scream from a child in real danger and one that's lost possession of a playground toy." While it's possible that you could tell the difference, my point is that I cannot, and only one of us will be in a position to rush to their aid and fight off the wolf.

Speaking of the wolf -- maybe that's the problem. What modern child knows anything at all about the real danger a wolf would pose, or what it would be like to be watching over sheep, far from the village? Aren't wolves like doggies? Sheep are definitely not threatening, and kinda cute (sheep are actually stupid creatures that invent new ways to die while they sweat lanolin and bleat loud enough for any local wolves to easily locate them.) The threat model posed by a predator which is nearly impossible to encounter in the wild, which has resulted in only three documented attacks against humans in North America in recorded history -- is incomprehensible to modern children.

So, if we are to use the general concept from the fable, we would need to use a threat that modern children would actually regard as frightening. Here is our problem. The only things that modern children would actually regard as truly frightening are so heinous that it would be borderline abusive to even refer to them as the potential consequences of "crying wolf." We would appear to have no possible way of explaining to children that making everyone around you believe that you are dying on a very regular basis is generally a bad idea. I suppose we could breed wolves in captivity and release them apon suburbia, but at this point I expect I would still just turn the music up a couple of notches to drown out the screams.

n.b. My actual suburban neighborhood is actually pretty overrun with the wolf's small scrawny cousin, the coyote. I personally have no fear of coyotes, as I know for a fact that just before they might get me, an anvil will fall on their head as they fall into a crevasse.

I am the singularity of Christmas future.

I may have been wrong about Santa/Krampus/St. Nick. I'll be big about it and admit that while I've predicted that he will be the disease vector which will end the human race, or his apparently anti-matter powered sled, radioactive reindeer or just plain obscene levels of danger involved in having a 250 lbs mass moving through your house at something like 0.2 c at some time Christmas eve would spell the end of civilization as we know it. I've gone so far as to advocate building a bunker and hiding deep under the earth on the night of terror. As it turns out, I may have spoken prematurely.

I have now come to believe that there is a serious danger of SantaGheddon in the form of a black hole with earth as the starting mass. As the population of the earth increases, the odds of this year being the one,  the year when at some point a singularity forms and obliterates every little boy and girl, along with everything else made of matter in the general vicinity of earth. No no, the mass of the extra people has nothing to do with it (we're made of stuff that's mostly already here on earth anyway, the extra population is mostly about shifting the balance between soil and ambulatory meat sacks a.k.a. "babies" which eventually turn back into soil, but not before generating at least 1.5 copies)

The problem I see looming, threatening the existence of all life on earth has more to do with something as fundamental as the reason matter has mass. I'll get to how a relativistic Santa/Toymass could mean our doom in a moment, but first some fundamental basis borne of the standard model. 

I'm not going to launch into a description of the standard model here, much as I know you would like one. Click on the link if you're interested in trivialities like "how the universe works" or "real stuff." Stay tuned here if you want to know how the Jolly Red Menace is likely to collapse all of the matter in our vicinity into a gravity well so deep, Timmy and Lassie, mamma Ruth and the entire Martin family will be consumed with nary even a bark of despair escaping.

OK, I'm exaggerating. The actual phenomena as an observer moving past a spherical symmetric gravitating object (or "Earth", as we like to call it) at close to the speed of light is called the Aichelburg–Sexl ultraboost. Seen as a sequence of smooth Lorentzian manifolds; space curves along the axis of symmetry which resolves as a Dirac delta as acceleration approaches c, thus resolving relativity rather nicely and NOT creating an inescapable event horizon.

On the other hand, as Santa's relative speed with respect to the earth increases based on the number of places he must visit (additional population) and his rest mass is increased by the additional number of toys he must pack onto the sled, his relativistic mass density becomes a very very large number. Eventually, the resistance of the atmosphere as he travels at such speeds near the surface will turn the atmosphere into a glowing plasma, while his energy density and momentum increase to the point where the resistance to changes in direction and stresses to the Higgs field in the local area are likely to make this region of space uninhabitable for a while. Presumably, he's shedding mass at a pretty rapid rate, as he infiltrates homes of good girls and boys & dumps presents, but his initial mass and required velocity to visit each home in one night will eventually catch up with us all. All that, and I'm completely ignoring what happens when he tries to slow down from that speed in any reasonable time to start making his evil plans for the next year, imagine how hot your brakes get when you stop your car while driving down a hill. Now multiply that heat by Santa's relativistic mass density including the sled, reindeer and toys. Can you say nova? Huh, not on December 26th you can't, as you'll be an expanding ball of plasma.

I have a plan to help, but first I need to convince some friends at the LHC to place a chimney in _just_ the right place.

Now you are shopping into the twilight zone

You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of retail. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of clerk knowledge. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the floor associate Zone! 


Apologies to Rod Serling, but it's time to describe yet another level of retail joy. In this installment, I'd like to discuss the concept of knowing what you sell. I'm not referring to this in the abstract sense of "You work for a hardware store, you should eat speak and live hardware (though that would help.) No, I mean this in the sense of - when someone asks you if you have a left handed Tesla coil tuning spanner, either

1. Knowing if you have one, and where it would be
2. Not knowing if you have one, but where it would be if you did
3. Not knowing if you have one, or where it would be but the correct person to ask this question of

All too often, in HomeOfficeStapleDepot what I actually get is more like this:

Associate: Can I help you?
Me: That seems unlikely.
Associate: Maybe I can help you find something.
Me: OK, I need a left handed Tesla coil tuning spanner. 


Here's a branching moment, several replies are common

Branch 1

Associate: Those don't exist.
Me: I already have two, but one of them was lost in that unfortunate thermal cascade event last week and the other is in an evidence locker somewhere.
Associate: Well, if those do exist, we don't sell them.
Me: I bought my last two here, but I can't recall where you keep them.
Associate: (Who is now answering in their own mind their first question of me) Let me find Bill, he will know.
[Associate runs like I have an explosive device in my hand, which I don't. I see them flinging their apron/cap/nametag at the manager on their way out the door which they hit at full speed.]
Me (to another nearby associate): Where could I find "Bill?"
Associate2: That was Bill that just ran out the door for some reason. Can I help you?


Branch 2
Associate: So, you're really looking for a thumbdrive, aren't you?
Me: No. Tesla coils and thumb drives don't play well together. 
Associate: Oh, I see. [leads me to the bathroom fixtures isle] First, you'll need a new wax ring [pulls one off the shelf] and then...
Me: I'm not installing a toilet either. I'm tuning a 130,000 volt Tesla coil, and it's at McMurdo Station, so it has to be a left handed one. The electrons swirl the other way down there.
Associate: Oh, I know what you're after now. We keep those with the fencing. 
Me: OK, you meet me there. I'm going to make a quick stop in the fertilizer section. By the way, can you tell me what fuel these fork lifts run on?


Branch 3
This isn't really a branch of the other two, but is similar in nature

Another patron: I'm looking for a 3/8" piece of string.
Associate [speaking to the other patron] What you describe doesn't exist
Patron: Are you sure? I thought I saw one in your ad. My nephew has one that he says he bought here.
Associate: Nope, you are living in a dream world old man. Nothing like what you describe has ever been manufactured, and I would know. I'm an expert.
Me: [to associate] could you help me move this 80 lb bale of 3/8" string you're sitting on? It's in front of the left handed Tesla coil tuning spanners.
Associate: That's a big bale of stuff. We'll need to block both ends of the isle and get a fork lift in here to move it.
Me: No need, I have this bag of fertilizer, and your folk lifts are out of diesel anyway. I'll move you and the bale shortly.,
Me: [to patron] You're gonna want to duck behind that fork lift for a minute. Oh, and hold out your hand, there will be some string falling into it... shortly.