Euclid in the Rye

I kind of knew that plants had their own categories just like animals, but it doesn’t seem like you run across it like you do the animal kingdom all the time, and then, let’s face it, plants all look pretty much alike. But I am pleased to hear that trees are more closely related to each other, this begins to make some sense to me. And now I have gone off to wiki and there is a pretty good illustration. There we go from ferns to cones to flowering plants like from fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals. Seems like most trees are in the flowering plant category, but Christmas trees are surely in the cone category.

Seems like most plants we eat and grow are in the flowering category. I think that is where you have to have a flower and a fruit, although not ones that we would necessarily recognize. Like grasses I think they have some kind of flower or fruit we can’t recognize. But the Beagle in the Rye would know about that. Why rye? Why not wheat, alfalfa, millet, or one of those other guys? My guess is it has something to do with growing in a cold wet area.

I’m a big fan of rye myself. I think it is the best bread. You go to the store and there are like fifteen kinds of whole wheat and one lonely kind of rye. Whole wheat, what is with that, like dirty white bread if you ask me. And now that we live in the golden age of beer, there are rye beers, and I am a big fan.

Sorry, when I start talking about beer I forget what was talking about before. For species I meant not only something that could interbreed, but that the product would also be able to interbreed. Mules are famous for being sterile, don’t know about ligers. Funny thing about cats, they come in so many sizes, and they all look alike. Bears have a pretty good range, but I don’t think any other animal species comes close.

By Einstein’s time, I assume you mean that time that passes at faster and slower rates depending on where you are looking at it from, like the guy in the spaceship appearing to move like molasses to the viewers on Earth and they looking like a sped up movie to the guy in the spaceship. Yes many experiments have proved that is true and it is something they have to take into account when calibrating those GPS devices.

You know scientists never really prove anything, the way that mathematicians do. Things start out as conjectures, and then they move slowly towards laws as they keep being confirmed by experiments, but it’s all a relative thing. God could appear on a mountain tomorrow, and say “Hey, I made all this stuff,” and evolution would go right down the sinkhole.

Euclidian geometry is dependent on the axiom that from a point not on a line, A, you can draw one and only one line that is parallel to A. That was always the odd man out among the axioms because the rest of them were so simple. Mathematicians, bothered by this, have tried to exclude it from the axioms and prove it from the remaining axioms but never could.

Then a couple wise guys came along and one changed the axiom to you can’t draw any parallel line, and another guy said you can draw an infinite number of parallel lines. And when they plugged those into their geometries they came out with all kinds of different results in their theorems (like a triangle can have more than 180 degrees), but they didn’t come across any contradictions, so that even though their geometries didn’t describe the world we knew they were consistent. Later on somebody realized that one worked on the surface of sphere and the other worked on that mysterious saddle shape which is the opposite of a sphere, concave to the sphere’s convex, but I have never understood that last one.