I've found more magic here. Apparently, in the more magical of bathrooms (there are hundreds of these), all one has to do to produce water from the faucet is wave one's hand in front of the faucet. The same goes for the soap. And the soap these days isn't the slimy ooze we used to have in high school, it's a very high tech foamy substance, much like the material they use to extinguish fire, I imagine.

This led me to thinking that lasers must be magic, too. And from there the connectedness of all learning sort of sprung up on me: if magic is science, and math is science, and language is math, and literature is language, then of course literature is magic but more importantly, they're all the same thing. It follows: magic>science>math>language>magic. And that's just a simple glimpse of the loop. Of course I don't believe in magic. That's silly. I do, however, believe in being amazed by the world. By life. Of Inspiration. And thereby not necessarily taking science for it's word when it says its word is the last - I've a sneaking suspicion this magic of mine is what it truly rests on.

Case in point: electricity. Supposedly we know that when you do this and that with certain raw materials you get electricity. Furthermore electricity, they say, is a combination of certain sub-atomic particles (or something like that) that are charged a certain way and move a certain way around each other and in doing so produce the type of energy we call electricity. That's what they say, but we all know - when we're honest with ourselves - that what really comes out of those sockets and wires is something we don't understand.

Another case in point. As a part of my adventures here I've figured out that in order to program the now classic Atari game "Missile Command" (which, subsequently, I called Nissile Command for years before figuring it out) the programmers had to have used Linear Inequality equations at some point. When you graph a linear inequality you get a trajectory type line that bounces off of your base point, only without air viscosity, gravity, etc. That's okay, Atari was old. The title of our chapter is entitled "Linear Inequalities and Applications". The text doesn't mention Missle Command. However, I digress. To get back on track: the geniuses at Atari had to use, in some form at least, this equation to get the desired track of the incoming nuclear missile, and so probably set up some sort of situation where they plugged in the equation into some randomizer that provided for different missile trajectories level by level, etc. BUT- how exactly do little tiny pulses of electricity form a letter on a screen and shoot through a wire into a tiny little carbon square with a million little copper spider legs and poof! Give me Missile Command? I'll tell you how: magic.

Broadcasting live from The Underground: God be with you all.
JS