Boffin Lab

Future: That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured. Ambrose Bierce


Swami Gondwanawurka's Prediction Generator

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Electron Retrospectroscopy
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Dr Bertrand Lens PhD
Founding Father of Electron Retrospectroscopy

The precise workings of the Electron Retrospectroscope are so secret, they don't even appear in the Company's Strategic Plan. But as every scientist knows, management and administration staff have short institutional residence times, whereas science & technical staff are (and are treated) like long term inmates. This relationship can be expressed mathematically in a way analogous to radioactive half life. The Electron Retrospectroscope fires a pulsed beam of electrons at an administratively-constrained plasmoidal representation of a particular management-initiated event (technically known as a "crisis") and, through post-emptive multitasking and extremely fuzzy logic, attempts to orbitally force the manager's short half-life to correspond to at least a harmonic of the scientist's long one.


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The Electron Retrospectroscope

The orbital forcing has the potential to alter (transmute) the crisis, producing many branching decay events that would have arisen "if only" things had been different. Output from the black box is burned on CD-ROM, and several Terabytes of virtual reality action can be played back for laughs at the next Happy Hour.

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Aha, that's why my proposal didn't get funded

Current uses of the Electron Retrospectroscope include
  • finding out what really caused the extinction of the dinosaurs
  • making cast-iron 100% guaranteed weather and climate forecasts
  • safely observing the annihilation of pasta and antipasta when brought into mutual contact
  • successfully obtaining grant money after a proposal has been rejected




Statistician Joke
Three statisticians go out hunting together. After a while they spot a solitary rabbit. The first statistician takes aim and overshoots. The second aims and undershoots. The third shouts out "We got him!"
From the January 89 issue of Unix/Review