Losing and finding.
 

Why is it that just when I finally find my GPS, I now can't find my parallel rule? It always seems the same, found Girl Guide whistle (doesn't work, blown for ages, nothing) and now can't find wife's Grandfather's Bosuns' pipe.

Is there a quantum connection?

Old age amigo.

geoff

Too simple! This has gone on for many years, and it is the linking of things that intrigues me. Grandfather's prismatic compass does not seem to be capable of existing at the same time as his telescope. Perhaps there is only so much "brassness" available in my house, one winks into existence, POP, there goes the other.

Hmmmmm....the world of coincidence.....used to work with me in disasters.
Places I visited in London where within hours something like a train crash happened...Hither Green train disaster,Kings Cross fire etc, Ronan Point flats collapse...

Later followed my home where several companies I 'door-knocked' in the North East closed down within a few weeks! One outfit in Peterlee refused to see me as I had visited their Tyneside operation a few weeks before...and they had since shut down!
geoff

I know what you mean about disasters, it seemed at one time I was followed around by fires, barns burnt down, tractors and a combine immolated. It really wasn't me. Companies closing down happens so much now how would you know? If anyone followed my employment career back, there is no-one and nothing left, quite a few houses have gone or been joined into the next door one.

Trying not to pick the fly poop out of the pepper, surely you mean the wife's Grandfather's Bo'sun's call ?? :yawn:

You lot remind me of Joe Btfsplk in the L'l Abner comic strips -- nothing ever went right and he always had this little black cloud over his head.

No Tom, I am a very happy bunny, just puzzled by the vagaries of a life I enjoy.

You are of course right about the wife's momento.

(Damn, I spent three days on those tricky little scratchy marks, and I get called on something else)

I think we should meet in the chartroom for a couple of bottles of Four Bells and ruminate over our good fortune to be able to participate in friendly banter.:pint:

I have a book on Chaos Theory, "Does God Play Dice", can't remember the author and can't find the book at the moment, which, I believe, substantiates Farmer John's predicament.
I am glad I read the book because it supports what I have adopted as a guiding principal most of my life so far, which is: what happens, happens; what doesn't, wasn't supposed to anyway; i.e. Chaos governs everything, life, intelligence, matter, space, etc.etc.
So if one cannot, at this moment in time, lay one's hand upon the sextant, but can find the chronometer; but tomorrow the situation is reversed; don't worry, it's meant to be that way.
Just go with the flow.

Murphy's Law, Section 3, sub-section 8(B) :egg:

Chaos is more interesting than order.

I'm still sorting through my parents accumulated stuff. If I stop for a few days, and then go back to it again, I sometimes can't find the last thing I was looking at, so begin sorting through different stuff. This is always more interesting than the previous stuff, with more long forgotten episodes brought back to life.

Does God play Dice (with the Universe) was firstly an Einstein statement or question, Ian Stewart wrote a good book on it,in later years Stephen Hawking has also written on it...

geoff

Oh, I have been there, sorting out one house full of stuff, then finally two more, thousands of photos, boxes with hundreds of letters, the residue of two lively minds with such close memories, a shifting perspective on grand parents and yet not a clear thread to carry you on a journey. Still at it twenty years on, an opened envelope brings a picture of Mum at the age of eighteen looking like your child. No wonder my catalogues are muddled.

Uncle Albert did indeed originate the phrase 'God does not play dice' when he was referring to some of the principles Quantum Physics, which he refused to accept until his dying day.

When the Nobel committee decided to award him the Prize for Physics, they did it not for either of his Theories of Relativity but for his paper on the Photo Electric effect, which is considered one of the foundations of Quantum Physics !!

Who says the Swedes don't have a sense of humour ?

I have a chaos monster lurking in my attic, but so far have managed to keep it at bay .. (sort of.)

Just ordered a power supply for my old Digital Video camera. I am now waiting for the long hunted-for lost one to wink into existence.

A spare is always handy - I've got plenty of them if I could find them.

A backup is a prime requirement.
Trouble is with many power supplies they exist as long lost echoes of something that you had many years ago and have long discarded. (I mean, you don't throw away something that works fine ... right ?)

So now these black beetles with their long tails lurk everywhere providing dc voltages from 3 through 30 volts. They've already filled drawers and shelves with their sinister presence, "and slowly and surely draw their plans against us."

:sweat:

I hear them rustle in the desk late at night.

Of course. Why would Grandfather have wanted to smoke a boatswain?

Oh Varley, what know you of old boatswains from the Isles of Sheppey?

posted by Farmer John:
The three variables in this phrase immediately struck me as having interesting possibilities:

1. Was it the maternal or paternal grandfather?
2. Was it a pipe belonging to a boatswain who was under some allegiance to the grandfather?
3. Was it a boatswains-pipe as a musical instrument?

So, let the wife be A, the maternal grandfather B, the paternal grandfather C, the boatswain D, the pipe E and the pipe as a musical instrument F:

By Boolean algebra we have

A+B+D+E = 1
A+B+F = 1
A+C+D+E = 1
A+C+F = 1

Consolidating the four expressions we get:

A + B.C + F.D + E = 1

All of which proves that it makes absolutely no difference which grandfather it was and whether or not the boatswain smoked or blew his pipe.

The only question which arises is: was it ever found?

Erudite and amusing, the best kind of insult. :>}

Digital Video camera working beautifully, computer has lost Firewire port.

No comment is necessary, but:

QED

I have 6 places where I keep my "stuff": My place, my son's place, the boat, the travel trailer, my son's motor home and my car. The is one immutable law attached to this: Where ever I look for any particular item, it is never where I think I left it, it is never in any of the places where I look, and, as soon as I give up and purchase a new one, I immediately find the item I was looking for in the first place. The sub section to this law is that if I have two, or more, of the item I was looking for, they are all in the same place. :(

I've decided I've got a poltergeist. I'm currently revamping my computer room so as to put in an amateur radio station. Every time I put a tool down to do something else, the tool is moved to another place.

This isn't 'losing and finding.' This is a dark force from beyond .... :smoking::big_tongue:

I'm sure most of us have a selection of pozidriv/phillips screwdrivers. Ever noticed that the one you can put your hand on is the one that's completely knacked?

I bought a special calendar this last month as a present for our daughter.....I said ' I am putting it here in a safe place as we lost the one last year"...........neither of us can remember where this safe place is and we have two weeks before she is back in country..........urghhh

geoff

Nowadays we, in theory, get around that problem by using power drivers with separate bits.
So when the bit wears out you can just bin it - But you don't, you throw it in your tooolbox and when you are looking for a new one next time you can only find that one.
System works with Stanley knife blades as well.

I think the phrase for old knackered tools (as well as a host of other things) is: "Well I don't want to throw it away, it might come in useful for something down the road." :sweat:

I too belong to that school which never throws anything away. I still use a wire-stripping tool given to me by my father 55 years ago; all of the more recent ones have disappeared.
Has anyone else noticed that the more useful a device is, the more legs it grows in order to relocate to somewhere other than where it is supposed to be?


Question: Why is a grub-screw driver like a teaspoon?


Answer: Because no matter how many of them one has, there is never one available when needed.

The law governing the suitability of the tool that you can find for a job is not the same as the tool that you need for the job, is related to another law that dictates that the last nut you need to slacken off in the most difficult place to access, is rusted solid.

These laws were first established by that obscure Victorian steam age engineer, Septimus Onesimus Dickinson, and have been known ever since as "S.O.D's Laws.":)

I think this may sum it all up!

https://1funny.com/the-remember-song/

I believe that as the years progress finding and losing develops an inverse progression in that losing becomes easier and finding becomes more difficult, and this is why I subscribe to the theory of parallel universes. These are where upon death one will be consigned to start all over in a new one, and it is into one of those where the tool I put down five minutes ago has migrated in preparation for my demise, although as others here have noted, it is one of the unexplained effects of quantum physics that purchasing a replacement causes the immediate reappearance of the original. This is called "quantum entanglement" and is not my fault.

Another explanation that does occur quite frequently is that the tool last used two months ago and urgently needed now was borrowed by #1 son and never returned, and the loan had been forgotten so a new one had to be bought. This is simply a variant of the parallel universes that one's offspring inhabit, and it is one in which quantum entanglement does not apply.

Two years ago my grandson dropped a toy engine when playing with it in my room. It has never been seen since! There is a lump in one corner of the room where stuff gets misplaced, but so far most stuff gets back.

I am going to post this and then dash over to The Other Site to see if it emerges there.

Yup. That proves it beyond all doubt.

There is a link! Who will advance a theory?

posted by Farmer John:

Engines have whistles; now, find the engine and you will find the missing boatswain's pipe.

Of course, if it really went over the edge it will be happily running up and down railway tracks on the underside of the Earth, with the driver thinking he's actually on the upper side.
Which simply proves my hypothesis: It's all in the eye of the observer……...

The other site! More poof of the flat earth. Obviously SN is on one side (we will call it hear the dark side) and SH is on the other. The learned professors on SN are cogitating over the problem of gravity as the mass and its distribution seem wrong for M1M2/D^2 to reach 9.81 Newtons.

Perhaps we can incorporate the lost-things-coming-back effect. We should seek to determine the distance between the two planes and the density of the 'filling'. The answer, I am sure, will lie here.