X-Message-Number: 17239
From: 
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 03:26:15 EDT
Subject: Visual Discoveries: The Microscope & Bikini

Louis,

You asked the following regarding parts of two of my recent posts:

QUOTE:
"Well, given that statement and the
message subject, would you please
explain the Cryo scale and why it's
better?"
UNQUOTE

OK, I confess.  Actually I had mentioned introducing and developing of the 
CRYO Scale just in jest, but just in case, I checked.  I found it.  So, 
here's the explanation for the use of the Cryo Scale as appears in the "New 
World Dictionary of the American Language"--Second College Edition (print 
date 1974):

*CRYOMETER* n. [cryo- + -meter] "a thermometer, usually filled with alcohol, 
for measuring lower temperatures than a mercury thermometer will register" 

While I am not sure it's actually much better or even how to read it based on 
the very meager instructions provided above, someone sure beat us to it.  And 
beat us to the "naming rights," too!  But I'll bet the farm it was that 
sawed-off egomaniac from Greece who had first started that silly fad, in days 
of old, of reserving and decreeing only a favorite part of one's formal name 
to one's self and to one's self alone--Plato---(a.k.a. Plato R. Cryometer, 
III).  Best hunch.

Note that there was no such listing for "Cryometer" found in "Webster's Ninth 
New Collegiate Dictionary" (print date 1985).

However,
*CRYONICS* [cry- + -onics (as in electronics)] (1967) is listed and defined 
in the former, but not the later!  (So much for Uniformity & Simplicity).  
Actually though, the definition strikes me as a hair (an engineering term) 
lame.  
To wit:
"the practice of freezing a dead diseased human in hopes of bringing him back 
to life at some future time when a cure for his disease has been developed" 

Yep, face it, kind of lame; and as has been discussed on this forum from time 
to time, a little sexist to boot with the "...bringing *him* back..."  and  
"...cure for *his* disease..." verbiage.  (We can do something about those 
oversights in just a minute though.)  But the word Cryonics is there and has 
been for at least since 1985. That's good.

Back to Temperature Scales, as you may have guessed, I don't really know ALL 
the facts, but if you will allow just a little "literary license" here and 
there to fill in an historical blank or two, I think I at least suggest an 
alternative Scale instead for discovery:

I guess we could still develop the bound-to-be-rediculously-overly-enigmatic 
Crypto Scale which to my understanding does not yet exist, while it appears 
to have been predicted for this century way back in the fourteenth by the 
Damus kids.  But I don't know why we would.  It is going to be needlessly 
riddlesome at best to figure out and use--particularly since that confusing, 
double-talking Nostra did most of the writing/incripting.  His twin sister, 
Nano Damus (so truly under appreciated), who was always much more direct and 
correct (but so rarely recognized or publicized) with distant predictions, 
would have done a much better job foreseeing that Scale to its proper timely 
arrival. True to her thoughts, she had envisioned her envisionment as a 
threat to lesser envisionaries and thus slipped into timeless obscurity after 
a state-catered hemlock tea for two with her favorite first cousin by 
marriage, Socrates (yep, Socrates Jones-Damus).

QUOTE:
Does this series of experiments have
the same college-girl-in-bikini factor
as the firefly investigation?
UNQUOTE

It would be difficult to decide where more ageless gratitude lies:

1. Anton van Leeuwenhoek for discovering the two piece light microscope, or 

2. (Herb) Aristotle for discovering the two piece light bikini

; )

Regards,

David C. Johnson

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17239