The way things wrok

Science and technology are a mystery to many, but they're really quite simple. The problem is that scientists have a vested interest in keeping their subject obscure. At last, danon.co.uk brings you a guide to science that is:

for people who don't know anything about science
by someone who doesn't know anything about it either.

So let's get cracking and explode a few myths.

Measurement of electricity

Under the imperial system of weights and measures, which reached its height of world-domination under Queen Victoria, the recently British-invented electricity was measured in Alberts (Æs). However, in a French-led plot to undermine the UK's industrial and scientific

hegemony, the Napoleonic Système Incompréhensible introduced a mystifying array of electrical units. Whereas a certain number of inches always made a foot and so many feet invariably made a yard, it was never made clear how many ohms there were in a volt or how many milliwatts there were in a microfahrrad (a type of miniature bicycle).

The inscrutable continental practice of randomly measuring electricity in a range of apparently incompatible units brought about Britain's industrial decline. While president of the board of trade, Herbert Henry Asquith tried bravely to accommodate the new system by measuring electricity with meters (a custom which persists in Britain to this day), but the Académie Française told him he had spelled it wrong. Asquith would not be moved and the opportunistic Americans seized their chance, changed the way they spelled metre and thus usurped Britain's position as ^#1 industrial and military power.

Television standards

In order to allow for the maximum dissemination of entertainment and information to the greatest number of people across the globe, the television industry has developed three mutually incompatible technical standards. The customary abbreviations for these standards are shown below with their meanings.

PAL	Pictures At Last
NTSC	Never Twice the Same Color
SÉCAM	Système Éléctronique Contre les Américains

"Electric" trains

The earliest locomotives had to carry bulky loads of coal and water with them to make steam. Trains that were supposed to be expresses made long and unexplained stops between stations and, occasionally, in them. Albert Herbert Hawkins, the visionary American inventor of urban mass-transit, hit upon a brilliant way of obviating the need for trains to carry such supplies.

Instead of the combustion's taking place in the locomotive itself, it was performed in massive power-stations, customarily located at the maximum possible distance from where the energy was required. The resulting steam was then piped to lineside supply-points from which it would be delivered to the trains: Joachim Andreas Himmler's steam-pantograph

either through thin, wire-like overhead tubes and down steam-pantographs into the carriages
or along hollowed-out rails from which the steam was scooped up with so-called "shoes".

For underground working, Hawkins would lay a fourth rail in the middle of the track to collect the surplus steam, thus keeping the tunnels clear for mice.

Although this kind of traction revolutionised the way trains worked, parliament insisted (through §6 of the Main Line Railway (Delays) Act, 1952) that express-trains should continue to make long, unexplained stops between stations, even if the line ahead was clear. The drivers of the new, coal-less trains were also required to evoke the glorious days of tenders and water-troughs by periodically taking their eyes off the signals and causing spectacular rail-disasters.

Gravity

Vacuous explanations involving the evocation of huge, Peggy Mount-like midwives have been advanced to explain gravity. The transparent dishonesty of these paltry attempts to explain this invisible force are shown for the myths they are upon the simple observation of magnetism. Plainly, non-magnetic items are affected just as much by the earth's gravity as magnetic ones. There must be another explanation.

The way things wrok can exclusively reveal that gravity is, in fact, something which the council does. Close-up photography of the recently-bombed MI6 building revealed that, in 1989, the Thatcher cabinet, having already sold off virtually all other government "services", seriously considered a paper from deranged free-market economist Sir Hans Klapper, 91, which proposed the privatisation of the country's gravity. The newly-created British Gravity plc would have had the necessary powers to cut off service from householders who did not pay their gravity-rates.

Both America and Russia had carried out extensive televised experiments on the consequences of such gravity-disconnection, which they passed off as being part of some kind of fatuous The crew of Challenger mission STS-6. Picture on the NASA website. space-exploration programme. The sequences were, in fact, filmed in remote parts of Nevada and Kazakhstan where council-officials periodically isolated futuristically-furnished premises from the gravity-mains. The participants greatly enjoyed the experience and used to spend hours flicking balls of orange-juice at each other. Government officials became worried that citizens would deliberately have their gravity cut off just so they could horse around with tubes of homogenised beef stroganoff, so the idea was quietly dropped from the Conservative manifesto.

The internet

Commonly called "a network of networks of networks of networks", the internet is actually a vast kind of collective sort of brain thingy which allows you to connect your gas-stove to the TV aerial and tell the heater in the greenhouse to switch on the cigarette-lighter in the car. I mean its potential is mind-boggling. The internet was started at the vast underground European Ear, Nose And Throat Research Complex (EENATRC) which straddles the border between Austria and Belgium. Here, a humble British scientist called Timbo Nersley hit upon the idea of running a piece of bare copper wire from the earphone-socket on his pocket calculator to the coin-weighing mechanism in the Coke machine along the hall. With trembling hands, Nersley cautiously pressed a random selection of buttons and within minutes there appeared on the screen the message: "Error 404. DNS lookup failure.". Simultaneously, the floor of the research centre began to swim with foaming brown soda and all the lights went out. The internet had been born and the world would never be the same again.

Evolution

Similarities between species plainly point to the fact that everything is, actually, the same species at different stages of development. The world is richly populated with specimens—alive and fossilised—of plants and animals which represent creatures in transition from one species to another. There is a marked similarity between, for example, the literary, artistic and industrial achievements of chimpanzees and those of human beings. Gibbon automobile production threatens soon to outstrip that of North Korea and ant poetry took last year's Edinburgh festival by storm.