When Threads Leak Into Each Other

In comments, Brian C.B. writes:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Another Welcome New Recruit to the Order of the Shrill: You know, I think take the dramatic rise in Arkham house prices as a solid sign of a real estate bubble. I mean, $750,000 for a 'starter cottage with 3BR, 2B, carport, and inhabitation by ritually-murderous Native American deities at each new moon' seems a bit much, proximity to shopping and schools notwithstanding...

Comments

[Joe S.]

Ahhh, but the deities pay rent!

[Captain Button]

But with all this transdimensional non-euclidean geometry around, shouldn't the amount of space be unbounded?

[tante aime]

53 Onlookers Injured during Defense Anti-SAM Test
By Harold Webley
Las Cruces Sun-News
June 9, 2005, 03:22 pm

White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico - In a first test of the Boeing
prototype aircraft-mounted anti- surface to air missile laser weapons
system performed here last week, the defense weapon successfully
disabled an attack droid test simulator, according to military reports.

Several onlookers may have been injured by the test. There were reports
coming in from medical facilities in the area of emergency patients who
complained of retinal burns and unusual skin damage. One 24-year old
man has been blinded, however his condition is still undergoing testing.

Range Commander Brig. Gen. Roger J. Reeves says nothing of the kind
could have happened in the carefully controlled test, designed to perfect
a laser defense system against terrorist shoulder-launched missiles,
such as the type that have been used to shoot down civilian airliners.

"Everything is monitored by both JTTC and the FAA," Reeves spoke from
White Sands. "It's possible the onlookers have became sunburned and
may have stared up at the sun too long while waiting for the test to occur."

Dr. Syed Iqbal at the Las Cruces Clinic said his patients show some,
"remarkable burn patterns, like a hot brand passed across their torsos."

The laser weapon system operates in the infrared band, and is invisible
to the human eye. Because a laser uses powerful collimited light beams,
it can be tightly focused enough to melt sand into glass, even from altitude.
Critics of the test claim the military's aiming and target acquisition software
is not sufficiently robust to maintain tight aim on a target, and the downward-
pointing laser beam may have wandered across the desert floor during the
attack test simulation, possibly striking onlookers without them seeing it.

Larry Farrow, Chief of Public Affairs at White Sands, said they are
investigating scattered reports of collateral damage on the ground.
"We had some grass fires, but that's normal for this time of year."

There is no official word yet on the condition of the injured onlookers.

[Barry]

But they're **quaint** 'ritually-murderous Native American deities'!

[P.M.Lawrence]

Ah, but, Captain Button - the topology of space might have weird convolutions folding back so that space both is bounded and has a hyperbolic geometry. The Scientific American and New Scientist have each mentioned variants of this. I particularly like the one with a sort of narrowing infinitely long tube of finite volume that wraps back onto itself at its periphery like a projective plane. Who knows what lurks in the depths of the tube?

[Jon Meltzer]

And one thinks Arkham is bad. Good Cthulhu, has anyone been to Innsmouth lately? The old Esoteric Order of Dagon building is now a community theatre and art museum, with a Starbucks on the ground floor. Devil Reef - excuse me, "Plum Reef" - has daily whale watch tours. And all the degenerate batrachian fish-men have been forced out of town by the high rents. Rumor has it that Y'ha'nthlei will be converted to luxury condos soon.