[sdiy] Student successfully hacked flanger pedal

[Magnus Danielson]

From: "Richard Arntzen" <richarnt at frisurf.no>
Subject: RE: [sdiy] Student successfully hacked flanger pedal
Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 00:55:13 +0200
Message-ID: <006f01c66d72$4f02f110$e001a8c0 at radt>

> >  > And don't even get me started on how come we end up with all these 
> >  > single socks from matched sock pairs?  Where the hell do 
> >  those socks 
> >  > go???  And what are we supposed to do with all these unmatched 
> >  > discretes?
> >  
> >  You naturally dispose of the single sockets discretely!
> >  
> >  The best way of doing that is to go to the quite little park 
> >  outside your local community library (or similar) and let 
> >  them free in the park. Sit there for a while and watch them 
> >  run out in the free, meet new friends and go about and make 
> >  new matched pairs over in the bushes... the discretion is 
> >  naturally to look the other way during this last phase... :o)
> 
> Hello?? Standardize!

Yes, yes, yes... I AM working on it. :O)

> Buy Identical Socks Always (in bulk). You only get single socks if you
> count, so:
> 
> Never Count your Socks.

Ah, the Heisensock theorem! I thought somebody ought to bring that up! :-)

For the non-enlightened, Richard referred to the "Heisensock" or rather
Heisenbergs particular sock uncertainty principle (later generalized to become
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle).

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) had this problem with his sock drawer, he never
knew if he had matching pairs of socks. After the initial attempt to bring
order into the problem, he tossed all old socks and bought a whole set of new
socks, all alike. However, he soon discovered that whenever he looked inside
his sock drawer, there could be any number of socks there and statistically he
only had a 50% chance of there being an even number of socks and thus matching
pairs. He even became uncertain that he actually had any socks at one time!
(As he was taking a bath, the maid had picked up the socks for washing.)
This made him formulate the sock uncertainty principle. He knew that he had 12
pairs of socks, but the more certain he wanted to be that they where all in the
sock drawer, the more uncertain it became that they where there. He only
succseeded in finding 11 pairs there at any point in time!!! (The poor bastard
did not realize he had the last pair on his feet, but that is another story.)

Since Heisenberg was keen to play guitar, he naturally dewared his footpedals
as he learned from another great guitar-player, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes during
a particularly wet and joyfull party in the physics department. This led him
into the quamtum mechanical problems and he finally refined his theorem to a
more general case.

As an attempt to both parody on Heisenberg's problems as well as tutor the
students, the prankster Schrödinger reduced the Heisenberg sock theorem to that
of his cat, for which he later became (in)famous for.

Cheers,
Magnus