Wry On The Rocks

In the current brouhaha over the TSA body searches at the nation’s airports, there has arisen a battle cry of “don’t touch my junk!”  Now, I have no idea who invented this phrase, but it is obviously someone with a very low-self esteem problem. 

I’m ordinarily not the bragging type, but I’m sorry..I do not consider that part of my anatomy as junk!  Admittedly the phrase “family jewels” might be a little too narcissistic, but I’d rather be thought of as having an over-blown ego than an undernourished John Thomas. (see Sex in the City!)

So, if I’m faced with a groping at Logan, I plan to take a page from the Victorian playbook and sternly advise the TSA handler to stay away from my bawble!  And that goes double for my tallwags, trinkets and twiddle-diddles !

I betcha thought that all the nerds at MIT sat around trying to figure out how to get a man on Pluto or how to create an artifical brain or how to get a ’49 Packard on the roof of the school library, but you’d be wrong.  They actually spend a great deal of time on important issues that impact our everyday life.  At least for those of us that don’t care about levitating ’49 Packards.  Issues like how do cats drink water?

 Now you’d think that you could just watch a cat drink for awhile, like some Sunday morning, when you’re bored reading the paper and the game hasn’t started yet.  But, it takes more than that Bubbe.  Like MIT researchers Pedro Reis and Roman Stocker plus two more engineers recruited from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Princeton University, a robotic simulator from the International Space Station and the use of the high speed Edgerton camera.  Not to mention the application of the aspect ratio and the Froude number.  After four years of intense study, they determined that the cat is able to lap up water through a combination of fluid inertia and gravity at the rate of four laps per second.

Now you and I would probably stop there; pat ourselves on the back and pour another martini.  Which is why you and I aren’t at MIT.  These guys actually worked out a formula to predict the rate of lap (known as ROL) of other cat speices.  In case you’d like to know it’s the weight of the animal raised to the power of minus one-sixth and multiplied by 4.6. 

It’s work like this that makes Cambridge such a special place.

President Obama announced today that he has heard the American people and henceforth promises to a zero sum spending policy…only spend what you take in.

To prove his adherence to this stance he points to the fact that on his visit to India he secured a $10 billion dollar trade deal.  He predicts this should just about cover his travel expenses in Mumbai and Indonesia.  He’s hopefull about a similar deal in South Korea to pay for the return trip.