Tuesday 31 May 2011

Manifold Destiny

   I drove three hundred miles today, encountering the usual depths of ignorance from those obnoxious cell colonies presuming to qualify as thinking beings.  I initially chose to restrict my locus to the customary four dimensions, the other seven being a bit of a tight squeeze: but - Yauser! - imagine my surprise when I discovered that a spatial anomaly had manifested halfway down the A423.  I suspect that certain pranksters from the Utnepi sector had been at work: only they could have pulled it off so effectively.

   The thing was magnificent, protruding out of the Cotswolds like a Julia set on acid.  An obvious seven-dimensional manifold if ever I saw one.  Others were driving past, oblivious to the new formation in the rocks; but I saw it immediately, and pulled over to have a look.  Highly amused, I leaned against my port side wing and watched as a sheep ambled down the hillside and underwent a translation via what I guessed was a pair of homogeneous 8-matrices.  As it passed overhead all its entrails flickered around me in an incredible display of ovine innard acrobatics, and I could even see the normally-infinitesimal fields of the standard forces stretched out in a scintillating web of rippled spacetime.  The animal was oblivious, and ended up happily trotting away in a field on the other side of the road.  I chuckled for a moment as I contemplated the forthcoming reaction of the farmer to this mystery.

   Whipping out an envelope, I did a quick sketch and calculated that there was a Point of Universal Projection.  I derived its location, and extracted the entry point for my destination.  It turned out to be just beyond the hedge where I was parked.  Thinking I would save some time getting home, I opened the gate and drove through, closing the gate behind me (I may be an insane incognito Cosmic Lord, but I know my Country Code).  Driving quickly up the muddy field, I found the entry point and accelerated into it.

   And that's where I made my blunder.  I am writing this entry from Indonesia.  Kdapt knows how I'm going to get home.

   Dammit!  I never could integrate by parts with eight variables without dropping a term somewhere.