h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

At least rotten eggs float.
Despite lacking the beach-hugging genes, I am now waiting for summer to come quickly.

Time and space questions can be tricky to grasp outside the framework of time and space itself. That's why we invented quantum, I guess. It doesn;t explain anything, but at least we can give it a name.

I find it productive to examine things from different points in spacetime - even if the vocabulary is necessarily different.

I sometimes wonder how bad I would be at living in a different time. I mean yes, we do have maore technology than in the past. But if it comes to it, how much of that would I be able to reproduce in a functional way. Then there is the language barrier of course. People in the future might have lost some skills too.

Yep. I always laugh at people who take the Mark Twain approach to time travel. 'Oh, I'm from the future: I know things.'

More likely, the time traveller lacks basic skills used by everybody wherever they're going. Time traveller=permanent greenhorn.

I once stood in a museum in Toronto, in front of a simulated Inuit village. Some Inuit people had been kind enough to come and do demonstrations at the museum. They were showing various kinds of technology, all amazing, but I wasn't watching them.

I was watching their baby. Who was sitting quietly with one of those cup-and-ball-onna-string setups that used to torment us as kids.

And catching.it.every.time.

My Mother spent the time that students nowadays stare at their smartphones to teach herself to lift her eyebrows independently, same thing for moving individual toes. The eyebrow thing can be really useful in non-verbal communication as a teacher.

I used to be able to bin tangerine skins over large distances, after first figuring out the most efficient way to peel them in one piece. (some people comment on the resultant shape. I call it 'the elephant', but others appear to have more phallic descriptions)

Interesting skills.

I spent some time as a kid learning to write with my left hand. My grandfather said my left-handed writing looked about like his, and he was left-handed.

I also learned to write with my toes.

I learned to write left-handed and peel tangerines with one (left) hand when I had a sprained right wrist at Uni. Never tried foot-writing. I do pick up things from the floor with my feet. Chopsticks, I can do with both hands.

Aha! The things we do when we're bored.

Or partially incapacitated.

Or that, true!

'Ha! Take that, vertebrates!' -