The event horizon has been delayed.

I am sorry to inform all of you, the event horizon has been delayed for approximately 2 weeks while a defective light is being replaced. You may ask, how did anyone know the light beyond the event horizon had gone out? Many more however will ask, what's the event horizon? I'll get back to that later.

I took a quiz about depression and I failed. There are at least 6 people more depressed and crazy than I am. At this point, I think I would fail a urine test.

I changed the blog colors. Why? Just because I could.

OK, back to the event horizon thing. The event horizon can be defined as a boundary in spacetime, from beyond which nothing can be observed. In general relativity space and time are completely intertwined. Bend space you bend time. Bend time and you bend space. Therein, you can travel anywhere instantly if you can bend space without breaking it. Given a pair of wire cutters and a clue about the programmers family I could hack the password and break both. (Sidenote: The perfect T-shirt for me)

We start with the black hole. No, not her. A black hole is thought to be a thing (technical term) with absolute definition and such mass (and subsequently gravity) that nothing can escape it's grasp. This would include light and stuff defined as "anything".

Since that which we see is a function of things, or in the case of seeing them, light, we can not see anything beyond this boundary. The bigger the black hole, the greater the grasp and the less we will see.

So, if THE CAT is beyond the event horizon, even if we attempted to see what the cat was doing we couldn't. Does that mean we wouldn't influence the outcome? (Schrodie's Cat T-Shirt)

Nevermind.

The thing (different but still technical term) that gets me, is what the hell happens to all that stuff. Take our favorite scalar physical quantity known as energy. According to the law of conservation of energy Energy can not be created or destroyed. Its a LAW and it's on the interweb so:

1. must be true
2. don't screw with it.

So, nothing can be destroyed and nothing can escape the hole. So what exactly is going on in there?

Entropy (Another LAW) basically states that all things are moving from a state of order to disorder. (Wait, how does evolution work then???) Yet, you have a collection of energy which cannot escape the event horizon. Stupid Chaos Theory.

What is going on in there is very similar to a small child losing their intestines to a swimming pool cleaning system. (Sadly, the poor girl has died.)

None the less, where does it go? Damn it!!!!!! Its annoying me. I can't get over this. Are you with me? You can't destroy or create energy. (Everything is energy.) It goes beyond the horizon and disappears forever. But everything is going from order to disorder.

Right at the heart of this is the gravitational or spacetime singularity. You can only measure this in infinite terms. Holy crap. Infinity? Wait, what happens if I bust past the event horizon at infinite speed?

Better yet, according to General Relativity (actual NASA link) the Big Bang occurred at one, single, finite, specific, uno, point. Yet a singularity occurs within all these black holes. Okay, you're right, these are curvature singularities.

Actually, singularities are commonly separated as conical and curvature singularities. The differences is whether or not they have an event horizon.

I'm guessing there some serious wackiness going on. I suspect the oil companies are involved too.

Did I mention I'M SINGLE?

hapax legomenon

Where is Burke when you need him? Which Burke? James Burke of course.

Here is a man who puts Johnny Cochran's logical progressions to shame. If Burke said angry, purple, lesbian, chinchillas were the origin of the Space Shuttle program, then you had best believe him. In fact, I believe he did say that's how it happened.

If Burke said the Internet didn't exist and I read that on his website, then it would be that much more factual.

So what is it I need Mr. Burke to do? I need Burke to keep track of what the hell I was doing a few minutes ago. Burke is likely the only one who could research my dysfunctional thought process that started with a topic for today's blog entry and ended up with the phrase: "hapax legomenon".

So in a Connections-esque blog entry for the day we start with the Democratic Republic of Congo. A nice enough place, but in fact home to the deadliest conflict since World War II. While one may surprised to learn this, especially with it's neighbors of Sudan and Rwanda and their mastery of genocide, Congo has been passed around by Dictators, Superpowers, and Colonialists - leading it to it's present station.

In a short modern history, Congo was a Belgian Colony until 1960. They repackaged themselves in 1971 as Zaire. They went through much turmoil and turnover until a series of wars beginning in 1996 until July of 2006 (now referring to themselves as Congo Classic) when they held their first free elections since Belgian Independence.

Every good new administration needs a cabinet. You need a minister for this that and the other thing. The other thing just happened to be Trade.

Enter Andre Kasongo Ilunga. This guy is the bomb. He's 34 and excellently qualified. Nothing hidden in his background. No previous positions on issues to raise a stink. No illegitimate children. No major financial interest in Enron, Haliburton, or Disney. He's never smoked a cigar so we don't have to worry about Monica.

In fact, he is the perfect man for the job. He will never do anything along the Gaff-line, because.. well because he doesn't exist. That could be a problem for some. I think he's perfect though. He won't ever lie to anyone about what happened.

You see, Ilunga was the creation of Honorius Kisimba Ngoyof. He wanted the job. But the rules required the party provide two candidates. So Kisimba creates Ilunga as the second option. Surely they wouldn't pick Ilunga over him.

You can make the argument that this is "gaming the game". Within a framework of rules and norms there may be undefined conduct. This conduct is neither legal and allowed or illegal and disallowed. In fact gaming the game, generally is a means to end where the action adheres to the rules but was an abortion of a mechanism intended to inhibit some other action.

Next, gaming the game lead me to Google Bombing. The practice of doctoring a web page so it ranks higher in search results. Its quite a sport. Imagine searching for Chevrolet where the top 25 results were Ford pages.

Not far removed from the Google Bomb is Googlewhack or Googlewhacking. You enter a query into the search engine of 2 words. Both words must be in the search engines repertoire. A successful Googlewhack returns only one result. ( http://www.googlewhack.com/rules.htm )

This brings us to the hapax legomenon. A googlewhack is the miserable progression of such a thing.

From Ancient Greek ‘(something) said only once’. Noun. A word occurring only once in a given corpus. There is a lovely technical term for a word that appears once in a body of text: a hapax legomenon (plural: hapax legomena), Greek for “once said.” The term comes from philology, the study of old texts. — Steven Pinker, Words and Rules page 172.

It's Shakespeare's fault. Ask Costard about Honorificabilitudinitatibus. Better yet, ask Burke. It's something to do with the aforementioned chinchillas.