Dreams: Patties

Excerpt from mail sent 1998

In my dream, there was this sort of food feng shui guru who was talking about the proper way to make "Nature's Burger". "Nature's Burger" is this veggie burger powder that comes in a box. You mix it with water, form it into patties, and fry the result. It isn't much like hamburger, yet it serves its purpose admirably. Of course, you don't have to form it into patties. Dave Loftesness and Veronica sort of crumble it before frying to make part of a taco filling.

This food feng shui guru was saying that circular patties were better than those with corners or concavities. He drew a spiral shape on a blackboard to show how evil influences would be trapped inside the spiral, and thus be ingested by whoever was foolish enough to eat such a thing. He drew a straight line, representing the path of an evil influence, and showed it bouncing into the middle of the spiral.

This had struck me as suspicious. I used a computer to model the spiral shape he'd used, and saw what happened when rays were projected into it. They bounced a couple of times, but always came back out. Hmm. I considered. My tests had used a smooth spiral. It occurred to me that Nature's Burger had a sort of fractal-level jaggedness to it, that this might affect the spiral shape's evil-retention properties more than it did the circle's. I was trying to figure out if it was worth my time to try to rigorously disprove this idea which this guy had probably just pulled out of his ass. I got pretty upset.

And then I was wide awake and it was 3:30 Monday morning.

Union

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