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

Aren't tanks big these days? They used to be cramped little things. Take the Panzer 1 for example. Barely room for its two occupants. But today I looked on the army website as part of the preparatory work for my BTEC (which I may or may not come on to later), and they had a 360 degree tour of the inside of a Challenger 2 and an AS90. Very nice. The AS90 has a crew of 5, but you could probably house a family of 10 in there with room to spare for when gandma comes to visit. It was quite a good 360 degree tour, as they go. You start of with a rotary view of the outside, and can click at any time to stop it. Then you can click on the hatches to view inside. The internal view of the Warrior IFV was a little dissapointing as it didn't show the driver's compartment.


Anyway. There's an interesting theory on existence in the Hitch Hiker's Guide radio show. There are 5 dimensions that affect us. The 3 geometric ones (x, y, and z axes, along which we move freely), time (along which we move in a linear fasion, not always at a constant speed; assuming we don't use time travel, which really screws things up), and probability (along which we don't move at all). All along the probablity axis, there are different versions of us, that made different choices, or made the same choice but someone elses choice affected us, or had different DNA combinations, or weren't born, or are identical apart from what they had for lunch yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that...

The list for different possibilities is endless, and so is the probability axis. At each point on it, the universe is slightly different. For this reason, if you move slightly along the probability axis, everything, or nothing, could change. I think this is what happens when something happens to you that is inexplicable. Can't find some matching socks? Well, you've moved in probability and now you don't own a single matching pair! Just met someone who isn't happy about you being near them? Well, a different you must have done something horrible and raped them or something, and now YOU have to cope!

I think this is a rather nice theory, and explains very well how an entire street's worth of people I'd never met before welcomed me as an old freind, because to them I was. This is much more plausible than me forgetting them all, because there were quite a few of them, and all were memorable (not for reasons that they would find flattering though). Anyway, enough about me. How about you? Are you mad, or have you just moved along the probability axis to a universe where people speak English not Chinese, and gravity works in what I would consider to be the right direction?

Nurse! He's out of bed again!