You've probably heard of the Grimms fairy tale The Elves and the Shoemaker in which some elves help out a struggling shoemaker by sneaking in to his workshop overnight and making shoes for him to sell. We seem to have some similar creatures lurking around here who, rather than making us rich, however, mess the place up. We call them Maxwell's Demons*. When I set up El Presidente's computer I'm certain that I had all the wires behind the desk nice and neatly sorted out with everything going to sockets in a logical order. But look at the wires now. You'd have to be a rare talent to arrange wires like this! It would take hours of dedicated unplugging and plugging back in again to get the wires like this. We can only deduce that some unknown entity or strange force is behind it.
* The term Maxwell's Demons was coined by a physics teacher at my school, Doc Standen, who when asked how a perfect vacuum came to be in the bell jar on the lab table as he claimed, replied "Maxwell's Demons put it there." It's as good an explanation as any for something which ought only to exist as a philosophical concept but has somehow apparently come to pass.
No comments:
Post a Comment