10^YETI

Tomorrow is my last A-level exam, the fearsome physics Synoptic. This exam pulls together all the things our motley crew of young physicists have learnt over the past two years. Since I have trouble remembering the previous day sometimes (I wish I was joking) I should probably be up to my eyes in physics text books. But I'm not.

Tomorrow marks the end. The end of my life as I have known it for...well, all my life. At 3:30 tomorrow afternoon the summer holidays don't start, school ends. No more school. At all. Ever. In about nineteen hours time I will be an 'adult' proper. If you've gone through this before, or if you know me, this is a pretty terrifying thing: like sitting in a car which for the past eighteen years has been coasting along a reasonably comfortable highway; but in nineteen hours there's no more tarmac, just a shear vertical cliff with a lot of down.

This metaphor goes along way to explaining my recent thoughts of my own mortality, if the last eighteen years have raced by, and time only speeds up, how long until I start elevating daisies? And other such sentiments.

How am I going to be remembered?

If there's one way to be remembered after you've kicked the proverbial bucket is to have a number named after you: h, Plank's constant; H, Hubble's constant (whatever the hell it is); Na, Avogadro's number (but that's chemistry so we talk about that in hushed tones); Stefan-Boltzmann constant, etc etc.

That's just a small fraction of numbers that have special names. But since numbers are infinite, that group is a very small and elite group. So this is where I propose to find my immortality.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Yeti's Number!!

10^22500

This number is found by associating letters with numbers in the simplest way (A is 1, B is 2....Z is 26).

Multiplying the numbers that are associated with the word YETI. Y*E*T*I=22500

Then raising 10 to this number. 10^22500

As far as google can tell me, this number means nothing to anyone, because it's so flipping huge. The number is a one followed by twenty two thousand, five hundred zeros. This number is so big and useless; the width of the universe in millimetres is probably a smaller number.

But this is how I will go down in history, by claiming a number with no practical use at its christening.

Yeti's number.

***Update***

As it has been correctly been brought to my attention, no number worth it's salt doesn't have a special symbol to show that that number is special. Therefore, to denote Yeti's number the symbol of a reversed lambda would be used. I would show you this specail symbol for Yeti's number, but blogger has no respect for the character map.

The teenage years are a confusing time. Many changes are happening. The teenage mind is being wired up for the next sixty years or so, it has to cope with mortgages, taxes, wrinkles, grey hair and evolution's favourite: babies. And during this period of reengineering the average teenager can do some very embarrassing or downright dangerous things.

I am afraid my mind is going through this process at the moment.

I thought I had gotten away with it, my 18th birthday just around the corner, the light at the end of the tunnel. But alas, those chemical bastards made a charge at the end and bit me in the ass. I am ashamed to tell you that something I'm going to do is both embarrassing and highly dangerous. This blog, for one post only I hasten to add, is going to get political.

I don't know how widely reported this is, but the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has been doing some renovating as of late. Not to his home, to the homes of thousands of his citizens. Renovating is completely the wrong word because he has had these townships bulldozed to the ground leaving thousands of Zimbabweans homeless. Mugabe says he's trying to cut crime. Those who don't fear him say he's trying to oppress or eliminate his political rivals, which you'd expect to be quite numerous after 25 years of the same government.

Needless to say this is a major breach of human rights.

Hold up, did you say 'a major breach of human rights'? Why yes I did. Can we think of any other individual to have the same qualification to his name? Maybe one with a moustache? And sitting on a rather large source of oil? Yes, I know, I'm quite ashamed to jump on this bandwagon. But let's do a comparison for the fun of it.

Iraq:
Saddam Hussein, a bloke in charge for a long time, commits crimes against human rights.

Zimbabwe:
Robert Mugabe, a bloke in charge for a long time, commits crimes against human rights.

Iraq:
Exports: (a lot of, 83%ish) crude oil, crude materials excluding fuels, food and live animals
To: US, Spain, Japan, Italy, Canada

Zimbabwe:
Exports: cotton, tobacco, gold, ferroalloys, textiles/clothing
To: South Africa, Zambia, China

Iraq:
Action: INVASION!!!

Zimbabwe:
Action: Well, we'll wait and see.

When some serious metal was itching to roll into Iraq, we had weeks and weeks of reports of just that, sometimes and entire evening broadcast was devoted to it. Bush and Blair side by side, ready to lead their troops with the 'evidence' and moral high ground into battle from afar. This evening's BBC news broadcast, where I heard about the events in Zimbabwe, the story was the headliner (at least that's something) and lasted approximately ten minutes including a short statement from our home secretary, Jack Straw, and his American counterpart, who I'm not going to even try and spell. No statement from Blair as he was busy pissing off Europe, and no statement from Bush who one can only assume was busy looking for the Vaseline for when Tony came running crying "All those older boys are picking on me!!".

Mr Straw and counterpart were asking African countries to not let this happen. I guess the Coalition won't be rolling into Zimbabwe any time soon.

The next story was about how fuel prices keep going up.

As I said at the beginning, this is an embarrasing one off foray into letting politics creep onto this blog. I apologise profusely for any naivety shown, or for any anger of the teenage variety.

As time goes by

There's a problem with spending a lot of time on your own, you get to think a lot. More specifically you get to think about yourself.

Have you ever wanted something all your life? Something you've wanted for so long that you can't remember when you first wanted it? Or what it was that made you want it, if there was a reason?

I have.

All my life I've wanted a girlfriend.

Now please understand me, I may be in my late seventeenth year, but this is no hormonally induced craving: I can well remember wanting a girlfriend in playgroup; a time where it is traditional to for boys to exclusively kill other boys with imaginary machine guns in the playground; a time when a select group of girls gender bend to play mummies and daddies with the rest of the girls; and for both genders to think of their counterparts as smelly. I didn't have a chance of getting a girlfriend at that time.

And then a couple of years later, the full on chemical warfare of puberty would begin. Hair, height, chests would grow and these two genders would want to play with each other and consider themselves smelly instead. I would see people pair up, hold hands, kisses steadily emigrating from the cheek to the lips (I'm making myself sound like quite the voyeur). Now I'm not the smartest, or the funniest, or the strongest, or the prettiest thing to look at, but I'm not the worst person in the world. When people paired up I was asking myself "Why him and not me?" even when people I didn't know got together. As this theatre would draw to a close, the number of couples would act as a negative radioactivity decay, k more couples than the last unit of time, some negative decays occurring in my circle. Me, slowly drifting behind the masses, and I found a discouraging pattern emerging.

Soon I will be going to university (fingers crossed, touch wood) where if American teen comedies have taught us anything, there will be a lot of booze and sex. I don't know how well this translates here, over the pond, but I don't drink and I don't know how to French kiss so I don't think it matters.

After that marriage, family (fingers crossed, touch wood), old age. You sometimes hear of people that die unmarried, I find that impossible to comprehend. I can't believe that some people can go through life alone. This is partly to do with my belief that you can fall in love with anyone given enough time and effort, yes it's cold and ironically heartless, but it's also neurochemistry. But it's also to do that I have been virtually on my own for fourteen days now and I'm feeling lonely enough to write this, multiply this by decades and it is incomprehensible to imagine how I would feel.

I guess the greatest tragedy is that you get used to being alone.

Chewits: little cuboids of flavoured tire rubber

Chewits are amazing things.

Amazing in that they have an extremely odd hold over time, you finish a pack before you tuck into them.

I was walking down to my local shop to buy some frozen oven chips (the telepathic amongst you will know that I am currently doing a L.E.N.T. +1, this involves me giving up chips for about six weeks, then gorging myself on them for a week, and then onto L.E.N.T. +2, shall we see how many commas I can get inbetween these brackets? Along with these additional L.E.N.T.'s I've also given up chocolate, well not so much given up but forced to out of trying to prove my sister wrong by not eating that divine substance for a year, nine months to go, any way, back to the story) when I happened to notice a packet of fruit salad chewits magically appear on the shelf next to me. I looked at that little coin that my mother had pressed into my palm (not literally you understand, there's not much you can buy with subcutaneous currency).

Hmmmm.

Enough money for a bag of chips. Or enough money for several packets of chewits.

I stood there in the queue for the till doing double-triple-quadruple-and so on takes between the chips and the chewits. I've been out of school for about ten days now so my mind was working quite slowly so this was taking a bit of time. The shop staff were getting impatient but I threatened to call my lawyer and they promptly rolled over and kept returning an annoying stick I was trying to get rid of. The french Canadian nuns behind me though could not be threatened with such evil and were starting to get violent.

I made my decision. I put the chewit bar in my mouth and ripped open the plastic of the chip bag, tipped roughly half the contents on the floor and kicked the resulting pile under the nearest counter.

Tear one of the staff off my leg, pay for the chips and chewits and out the door.

By now the temporal effects of the chewits had kicked in with some bravado. In three seconds I had finished that little sweet. And it was the same for every one after it. I don't consider myself to be a very aggresive eater and so three seconds per chewit didn't seem right. I could only come up with one theory: as soon as a chewit enters my mouth a cascading chain of reactions makes the chewit fold up into itself and be pushed back in time to appear on the shelf I first spotted them on.

I'm sure you can agree with me, this is brilliant, I can eat all the chewits I want and my teeth won't rot and that 'tire' around my belly won't get more 'air' in it.

If only I could say the same about chips