Ouroborosaurus

The Algorithm

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The chalkboard was downright ancient.  Even the old smartboards with touch and gesture interface had been consigned to antiquity, but hanging around her academic focus like an enzymatic odor was Phyllis Ducklett’s fascination with the dusty analog.  To her they were thematically associated to math since as long as she could remember, and the ones she employed here were huddled around a table covered in open books like tribesmen around a campfire.  Like the cartoon boards in her elementary school interactive education software, the chalkboards in her studio were covered in chalk equations, and Phyllis flitted between them and the books like a bee, turning the raw pollen and nectar from the books into solid wax and nourishing honey on the boards.  A major difference between these boards and the ones in the cartoons is that first graders would likely not recognize a transform of the Riemann-Zeta function, much less the convergence of such to the first harmonic- assuming the Riemann hypothesis -of Phyllis’ walnut of a function.  The limestone equations rested upon some thousand ghosts of their previous iterations as Phyllis read and wrote and scribbled and calculated, steadily pressurizing her grip and eventually, hopefully, cracking her walnut.  She worked this particular nut in the crushing alligator jaws of her mind, gnawing away at it with her inexhaustible supply of ivory white chalk sticks.  She was certain that at the meat of this impervious morsel was the key to mastering that most tyrannical lord of the universe: time.  

Phyllis had always felt she had faced a myriad of challenges in understanding mathematics.  Times tables, for one example.  While she found the tabular iteration of the products of the first twelve whole numbers aesthetically pleasing, she felt unable to recognize the usefulness of this tool, which was required by the teacher.  Her classmates took to it rapidly, using it to solve the multiplication equations on assignments and exams. It made Phyllis feel like she was missing something when the answers were already there in the questions.  She failed utterly to use the reference and was regularly punished for cheating, and so blatantly. It was quite depressing for her, being unable to grasp the most basic tools, and she put aside all interest in the subject for many years, merely getting by in classes.  In college she was introduced to a fast friend, the steel drum.  Enchanted by the sounds it could produce, she immediately bought her own set and much literature on the self-education of playing the instrument.  After a month of study, she joined the college band.  A steel drum sits demurely among the furniture in her studio with a quiet sense of purpose.  Through the band, Phyllis’ social circle expanded and she found herself in the vicinity of conversation more often then in the past.  

An old interest reignited when she heard two physics students discussing homework.  She involved herself and, after a small learning curb to step, she was finally riding gloriously bareback on her black stallion, all pointless fetters from before cast aside.  Math now proved to be completely open to her.  After a major change she was in the college of mathematics and wading at a steady click through the drudgery, compelled by the intermittent glimpses of clarity obtained when tough problems were solved and new concepts introduced like the charismatic actors of her favorite serial.  When the concept of harmonics was covered, the heavens opened.  The force of revelation was like drugs in her veins.  That day she had sat in her room next to her drum, dazed, tapping it at intervals to sustain the rush.  It was then she had picked up the nut to which she had sacrificed platoons of chalk sticks, and the shell was starting to give.  The principle was sound…literally.  The timbre of the steel drum, by the Ducklett hypothesis of temporal harmonic transform, currently in development, was ideal for subsuming a data matrix into a four-dimensional vector with magnitude N located at a trivial location where t = 0.  In short, the door to the past had a lock that she could pick with her steel drum.  At the end of drawing the final character on the final chalkboard with the final piece of chalk, Phyllis heard a crunch.

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Henry's kids were home for the holidays.  He liked the chance to see his grandchildren, it goes without saying, so he hosted a summer grill-out with hot dogs and hamburgers.  He felt it made up for some of the time he wasted on work instead of being with his kids, and in a way, even the time he didn't spend with his own parents before they passed.  Free food was also good incentive to come.  All the days he spent trying to get the world community to listen, to make a lasting impact, we're now a debt he owed his family.  It hadn’t worked anyway, and he had eventually given up.  It's hard to shout for the rest of a lifetime.  The paleontology community was still in turmoil over how to handle the sudden and rapidly increasing discovery of ancient future artifacts, but it was no longer a major concern of his.  

He still loved dinosaurs and always would.  Right now, the most pressing thing was to get his grandchildren interested in them.  Not a difficult task.  For the boy, he got a stuffed T-Rex.  With a little more showmanship than the child would have preferred, he produced the plushy. He roared as he brought it around, which the child found a little funny.  Unperturbed by the open mouth, jagged teeth, and angry eyes, he hugged the soft predator tightly, feeling out the long word “dinosaur” before looking to grandpa for approval, winning a smile.  “When I grow up,” he mumbled haltingly, “I want to see a dino-saur.”