[tlug] Newton's Fourth Law [C&C if you watch Looney Tunes]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

CL writes:

 > Perhaps a C&C warning is in order:

I did like that part about the Chipotle napkins, I lost my six-line
proof of the 4-color theorem that way (that was back when I was losing
my brain cell to the gaily painted ladies, bright lights and booze as
well[1], so I've never been able to reproduce it, sorry).

 > > Newton's unknown fourth law goes something like this. The amount
 > > of stuff which works in the universe, and the amount of stuff
 > > with 'out-of-order' signs hung on it, totals to a constant. If
 > > you fix something, something else in the universe will break so
 > > that its still totals that constant. People love slogans, so the
 > > easy way to think of this is 'The conservation of screwed'.

Yeah, but everybody knows this.  Once you realize the existence of
gremlins (and that was revealed in the Bugs Bunny cartoon that ended
with the famous line, "Air brakes."[2]), it's intuitively true.  (IOW,
everybody knows that gremlins believe in MBO, and what's more
objective than a constant quota?)

The scary quantum theory that most people don't know, is that Laws of
Conservation simply don't apply at quantum scales.  Specific to this
case, if you rearrange Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle using spinor
algebra, you can derive the result that the uncertainty product of
brokenness and time has to be at least as big as Planck's constant
times the mass of Schroedinger's cat.

In layman's terms, the *shorter* your lapse of attention, the
*greater* is Murphy's freedom to break things while you're not
looking.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Anybody from Cleveland in the audience?

[2]  Sigh.  Can't break the habit of academia, always providing
citations.