Friday, September 29, 2006

What's in a name?

Has this ever happened to you?

I dwell online often in various online chat group, including the #physics channel on the Undernet server. Occassionally, we get a rather amusing incident that, while it is funny, it is also rather sad and pathetic. What typically happen is this: a user, whose nickname we have never seen before, would come into our IRC channel and asks for a "reading". This has happened a few times and most of us already know what this means. This person mistook "physics" for "psychic".

Being a smarty pant myself, I usually play along with this person and would say something like "Oh, let me see... I see some images..... hum. I can see that spelling is not one of your strong suit. In fact, you hate spelling when you were in school".

Inevitably, this person would express astonishment on how right on I was! After being led on by a few other people for several minutes, this person finally caught on that he/she was taken for a ride and left. However, a few of them actually did stay on and in fact, express their puzzlement on why physics is not the same as psychic since ".. don't they both try to understand our universe and predict the future?"

Of course, this was there things get ugly.

I often find it ironic that people who misspell "psychic" would get "physics" instead, since physics is a complete opposite of psychic, the latter being a pseudoscience at best, and crackpottery at worst.

Zz.

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