Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable History Breaching Space and Time.

Ah, plan A. It has a storied history amongst The Scholars. Back in the days when Geoff, Art, and I used to play WoW every week, Plan A was Art’s signal to us to just go in and whack on things until they died, because his character was so perfectly tuned that it could compensate for all of our amateurish flailing. Geoff was a lot better at that game than I was, but still, next to the consummate gamesmanship of Art we looked more like Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and Ginger than anything else. Still, we had fun, and I’d like to think that, deep down, our woefully tangential antics gave Art a bit of amusement too.
Say, APE is coming up in less than two weeks!!! DO come and see us, won’t you? It will probably be our only California appearance this year since WonderCon seems like it’s going to be in damn Anaheim again, and between the chance to get your own free historical sketch and take a picture with us while dressed in a 19th century Prussian helmet, how can you lose?
– Count Dolby von Luckner

If you haven’t read Feynman’s QED yet, you simply have to. It’s one of those landmark experiences that a human must go through to say to himself, on his deathbed, that he made his best shot at understanding the world. My favorite part of Quantum Electrodynamics is the sheer room it leaves for the full use of imagination and possibility. The theories and predictions get better and better the more you stretch your grasp of the possible. The famous example in the book is that of light bouncing off a mirror. If you limit yourself to the idea that light simply rebounds with the angle of incidence equaling the angle of reflection, you will get answers that are accurate in the main, but that fail to predict many of the stranger things we can do with mirrors. Only by taking all possibilities into account, factoring in their probabilities, and cancelling out terms according to the rules of Quantum Electrodynamics can you get an accurate view of what happens when particles and photons interact. The more possible outcomes you calculate in, the more you can do to actually figure out what could bring the most far-fetched results to fruition. By scraping strips off a mirror, you can eliminate outcomes that normally cancel out desired oddball results and thus create a mirror that entirely disobeys the classic angle of incidence formula in every physics textbook. This opens the door to a realm of creativity that has always been there in the pursuit of science and math, but never so tangibly and alluringly as in Feynman’s words.
QED still reigns as the most accurate picture of the world that we have, and it rests on the principle that nothing is so confining than common sense causality. Which is of course very useful for causing problems for giant anthropomorphic harps.
– Count Dolby von Luckner