Complex Numbers

The Step-Parent of Invention

They say necessity is the mother of invention. I say laziness is the milkman.

Leave it to Cracked to point out a third option: comedy.

    4 Very Important Ideas That Started as Jokes  

Have you ever had a moment where you’re, say, shopping for pants, and you find a barren pocket field where the pockets no longer grow. So you say, “I guess I’ll just stick my phone up my butt.” Someone overhears, and the next thing you know, intra-anal wallets are a billion-dollar business?

No, because I'm a man, and our trousers have pockets. Hell, I won't even buy sweats that don't have pockets.

Still, that idea would go a long way toward reducing pickpocketing.

4. Schrödinger’s Cat

I always had a problem with this thought experiment, and no, that problem wasn't "that poor cat." It was, after all, only a thought experiment. Austrian or not, torture wasn't Erwin Schrödinger’s thing. No, my problem is that it gives primary focus to the role of humans as observers, when there is one sentient observer who knows if he's alive; to wit, the cat.

Physics in the 1930s was a wild west, or at least as wild as a bunch of nerds can get. There was all this quantum shit going around, things that can be nowhere and everywhere until you look at them, and not everyone was on board.

For a dick joke site, this is a remarkably thorough but succinct summary of the situation in physics in the 30s.

In response, he developed the “Cat Paradox,” which was supposed to illustrate what Schrödinger regarded as a flaw in the theory in the most ridiculous way possible. Obviously, a cat can only be either alive or dead, not both, and it doesn’t particularly matter who’s looking at it. Any cat owner can tell you they couldn’t give less of a shit about the actions of humans.

That, too.

But the joke was on Schrödinger. Quantum mechanics is now a pretty uncontroversial theory, and we’ve differentiated the behavior of quantum particles and non-quantum, catty objects, but that hasn’t stopped physicists from taking Schrödinger’s supposed paradox as a challenge.

But still haven't actually involved real cats, to the best of my knowledge. Anyway, QM is indeed uncontroversial in its description of effects, but there's still debate about interpretations thereof. But yeah, it's all because one physicist was trying to get cute with a gedankexperiment.

On a somewhat related note, the term "Big Bang" was coined by someone who didn't accept the idea of an origin for the universe.

3. America’s (Possibly the World’s) First Female Mayor

To be fair, lots of politicians are jokes, regardless of gender. Or party.

In 1887, when women were only kind of considered people, the ladies of Argonia, Kansas had just won the right to vote in local elections but still really only had the power to be mad about drunk dudes.

I'm not going to blame the evils of Prohibition on females alone. The Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) was passed before the Nineteenth (chicks can vote). But seriously, it's shameful how long it took for women to be able to vote even locally.

...they did underestimate how much local Republican Party officials disliked election tampering.

Contrast that to today, when that party has it as an official platform plank.

2. Pickering’s Harem

Unfortunate name for the surprising discovery that women are people and can do jobs.

Pickering was well aware that Williamina Fleming, the immigrant single mother he’d recently hired as a maid, was brilliant. His wife, the daughter of a former Harvard president, had even previously told him he should hire her to do more than dust. He eventually reached a point where doing so seemed advantageous on a number of levels. For one thing, women could be paid a lot less than men, but as an added benefit, her success would humiliate all those guys he just fired.

How... progressive.

It turned out Fleming and the other women on the team she oversaw, grossly referred to as “Pickering’s Harem,” really were much better than the men they’d replaced. They were only supposed to do tedious clerical and computation work based on photos of the night sky, “but they were very bright, so they drew their own conclusions and made several important discoveries."

Imagine that.

1. Trickle-Down Economics

I can't even see that phrase without imagining Reagan and Thatcher pissing down on the general public. Or without getting spitting mad about it.

...but the man who articulated it best was mostly in the business of dancing around in silly cowboy costumes. No, not Ronald Reagan — humorist Will Rogers.

Like I said, comedy.

Like many of the comedy greats, Rogers was mostly talking out of his ass. He was a vaudeville performer with a 10th-grade education, not an economist. But he turned out to be right: Trickle-down economics has been a disaster for the American economy.

No, it hasn't, not for the ones doing the trickling.

Despite my blinding rage at the entire concept, it is a concept, and it started (unintentionally) with a comedian.

Yet another reason we really should watch what we say.