An apparently true story.

DEPRESSED MAN DIAGNOSED AS "SCOTTISH"

Alistair McGregor, an expatriate Scottish man living in America, was recently diagnosed as clinically depressed, tanked up on anti-depressants and scheduled for controversial Shock Therapy when doctors realized he wasn't depressed at all.............only Scottish.

Mr. McGregor, a Scottish man whose characteristic pessimism and gloomy perspective were interpreted as serious clinical depression, was led on a nightmare journey through the American psychiatric system.

Doctors described McGregor as suffering from Pervasive Negative Anticipation - a belief that everything will turn out for the worst, whether it's trains arriving late, Scotland's chances at winning any international sports event or even his own prospects to get ahead in life and achieve his dreams.

"The satisfaction Mr. McGregor seemed to get from his pessimism seemed particularly pathological," reported the doctors.

"They put me on everything - Lithium, Prozac, St John's Wort, Ginseng", said Mr.McGregor." They even told me to sit in front of a big light for an hour a day or I'd become suicidal. I kept telling them this was all pointless and they said that it was exactly that sort of attitude that got me here in the first place."

Running out of ideas, his doctors finally resorted to a course of "weapons grade MDMA", the only noticeable effect of which was six ours of speedy repetitions of the phrases "mustn't grumble" and "not too bad, really". It was then that Mr. McGregor was referred to a psychotherapist.

"Suicidal?" Dr Isaac Horney explored Mr.McGregor's family history and couldn't believe his ears. "His story of a childhood growing up in the drab back streets of a windswept grey town with treeless streets of identical run-down houses where it rained every day, passionately backing a football team who never won, seemed to be an idealized depressive memory-I thought all that was a myth..."

Mr. McGregor had six months of therapy but seemed to mainly want to talk about the weather - how miserable and cold it was in winter and later how difficult and wet it was in summer. I felt he wasn't responding to therapy at all and so I recommended drastic action - namely ECT or shock treatment".

"I was all strapped down on the table and they were about to put the rubber bit in my mouth when the psychiatric nurse picked up on my  accent," said Mr. McGregor. "I remember her saying 'Oh my God, I think we're making a terrible mistake'." Nurse Alice Sheen was a big fan of Scottish comedy giving her an understanding of the Scottish psyche. "Classic comedy characters like Chick Murray, Will Fife and The Crankies, all hopeless cases with no chance of ever doing well or escaping their circumstances," she explained to the baffled US medics. "In Scotland, being depressed to the point of suicidal is considered the norm and is not seen as pathological at all." Identifying Mr. McGregor as Scottish changed his diagnosis from 'clinical depression' to 'rather quaint and charming' and he was immediately discharged from hospital, with a selection of brightly colored leaflets and an "I love New York" T-shirt.

Speaking of transport, one of my spies has given me
inside info on this whole Enron scandal.

Andersen has been working with ADIC (Advanced Digital Information Corp.), Enron, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and lawyers to recover lost electronic documents. Andersen has a backup strategy that includes a "byte-level differential backup" of all employee laptops into a "data vault" whenever they touch the network. This corporate e-mail and memo police department is mysteriously called DREAD.  So Andersen can be expected to fully disclose, even if Enron employees are handy with the delete key.   Meanwhile, Andersen people still have a sense of humor.   The company needed to ship one of the ADIC units off-site for data restoration and packing materials were short.  The Andersen guy suggested there should be plenty of shredded paper around to do the job.

The lawyers in the room didn't find that as funny as I do.


This is an actual question on a University of Washington physics mid-term exam.

IS HELL EXOTHERMIC (gives off heat) OR ENDOTHERMIC (absorbs heat)?

Support your answer with a proof.

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyles Law (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

"First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So, we need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and the rate they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul goes to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:

  1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
  2. Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Ms Therese Banyan during my Freshman year, "That it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in that area, then (2) cannot be true, and so Hell is exothermic."

The student got the only A.

I'm losing patience with my neighbours, Mr Bush

Terry Jones  Sunday, January 26, 2003 The Observer:

I'm really excited by George Bush's latest reason for bombing Iraq: he's running out of patience. And so am I! For some time now I've been really pissed off with Mr Johnson, who lives a couple of doors down the street.

Well, he and Mr Patel, who runs the health food, shop. They both give me queer looks, and I'm sure Mr Johnson is planning something nasty for me, but so far I haven't been able to discover what. I've been round to his place a few times to see what he's up to, but he's got everything well hidden.
That's how devious he is.

As for Mr Patel, don't ask me how I know, I just know - from very good sources - that he is, in reality, a Mass Murderer. I have leafleted the street telling them that if we don't act first, he'll pick us off one by one.

Some of my neighbours say, if I've got proof, why don't I go to the police?
But that's simply ridiculous. The police will say that they need evidence of a crime with which to charge my neighbours. They'll come up with endless red tape and quibbling about the rights and wrongs of a pre-emptive strike and all the while Mr Johnson will be finalising his plans to do terrible things to me, while Mr Patel will be secretly murdering people. Since I'm the only one in the street with a decent range of automatic firearms, I reckon it's up to me to keep the peace. But until recently that's been a little difficult

Now, however, George W. Bush has made it clear that all I need to do is run out of patience, and then I can wade in and do whatever I want!

That's why I want to blow up Mr Johnson's garage and kill his wife and children. Strike first! That'll teach him a lesson.

Then he'll leave us in peace and stop peering at me in that totally unacceptable way. Mr Bush makes it clear that all he needs to know before bombing Iraq is that Saddam is a really nasty man and that he has weapons of mass destruction - even if no one can find them. I'm certain I've just as much justification for killing Mr Johnson's wife and children as Mr Bush has for bombing Iraq. Mr Johnson and Mr Patel are just the tip of the iceberg.
There are dozens of other people in the streets who I don't like and who - quite frankly - look at me in odd ways. No one will be really safe until I've wiped them all out.

My wife says I might be going too far but I tell her I'm simply using the same logic as the President of the United States. That shuts her up. Like Mr Bush, I've run out of patience, and if that's a good enough reason for the President, its good enough for me. I'm going to give the whole street two weeks - no, 10 days - to come out in the open and hand over all aliens and interplanetary hijackers, galactic outlaws and interstellar terrorist masterminds, and if they don't hand them over nicely and say 'Thank you', I'm going to bomb the entire street to kingdom come.

It's just as sane as what George W. Bush is proposing - and, in contrast to what he's intending, my policy will destroy only one street.

Is Hell hotter than Heaven?

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible: Isaiah 30:26 reads, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7 times 7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that. With these figures we can compute the temperature of Heaven.

The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation,

(H/E)^4 = 50

where E is the absolute temperature of the earth (300K),
gives H, the temperature of Heaven, as 798K (525 C).

The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed ... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone (or sulphur) means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6 C.

We have, then, that Heaven, at 525 C is hotter than Hell at 445 C.

From "Applied Optics" vol. 11, A14, 1972
or
From "A random walk in science", Ed E Mendoza 1973

Based on an unoriginal email forwarded by Richard Walters, January 1999.