Archaelogy

The fundamental question for the archaelogist is: Why do the inhabitants of ancient civilizations feel the need to set up elaborate booby traps at their most interesting archaelogical sites?

The Economy

The economy is the exchange of IOUs.

Here's how it works:

One person makes a IOU because some other person did them a favor.

The person with that IOU trades the IOU with someone else, so then it becomes an IOHim or IOHer.

Then that person trades that IOHim/IOHer, with another person...and so on and so on.

Pretty soon the government gets involved to keep track of these IOUs, and starts printing official looking IOUs for everyone to trade. The government starts takings some of these IOUs for themselves, because they need some favors so they can do things like making official IOUs, roads, bombs etc. etc. things that they get done by giving people IOUs.

Well, soon enough bankers, the government, financiers, and other people too smart for their britches start figuring out ways to make up fake IOUs without anyone noticing. The ways they do this are varied and complicated, but all methods essentially start by taking an I and a U, and inserting something that looks like an O but is really more like a zero. One day everyone realizes that these I0Us don't mean much, because it's likely nobody actually did anything for it, and therefore nobody actually O's anything. So these I0Us now lack any O, and the zero isn't worth anything, so we are left with I and U.

The upside is now that the O is gone we get a chance to decide what we want between I and U.

Synthesizers

Synthesizers were invented in the dawn of time, when a monkey started beating on a log and realized it made kind of a cool sound. Later some other monkey invented a thing called a log-a-rhythm to figure out how this sound worked. Another monkey named Maxwell used this log-a-rhythm to come up with some equations which in turn allowed another monkey named Tesla to invent the home wall-socket (which a monkey named Edison stole credit for), and one day a monkey named Roland or Moog or something plugged a log into a wall socket and, in his own words: "OMG OMG, THAT SOUNDS SO FREAKIN' AWESOME...ITS TICKLES MY BRAIN...AHHHHHH!!!"

Geosociology

Geosociology is a branch of social/earth science which studies the effect geology has on the behavior of individuals and populations of individuals. (Not to be confused with Sociogeology, which is a unrelated field of earth/social science that studies the effects individuals and populations of indivduals have on geology.)

I took a sociology class once, and the proffesor related the following discovery (I must take credit for filling out the details about the circumstances of the discovery which I found out by deducing from some logical deductions):

There was a town in Texas that had low domestic violence rates. Being Texas, this anomaly peaked the interest of a sociologist who happened to be watching an episode of Nova about geology while pooring over domestic violence stats that was related to the doctoral dissertation they were doing. His or her wristwatch alarm went off, signaling it was time to take their daily lithium dose, and one of those Eureka moments happened that changes the world forever, except for the changing the world part. It occured to this artificially well-adjusted sociology grad student that there must have been a natural geological source of lithium in this Texas town that was leeching into the water supply, hence the lower domestic violence rates.

And thus Geosociology was born.

Inca Empire Postal Service

The Inca Empire included among it's citizens the handsome, fast and nimble mailmen of the Inca Empire Postal Service (IEPS); a carrier that predated the United States Postal Service by a few centuries. Incas preffered tying knots to writing letters, but knots didn't make great devices to write home with, so an Incan sent a letter by telling the mailman the contents of the letter. The mailman then ran like hell to get to the recipient before he forgot it.

IEPS Creed: Rain, Sleet, Snow, Forgetfulness or Mail-Man-Eating-Llamas:


Unfortunately the motto didn't anticipate European germs or Francisco Pizarro, and after the former arrived followed soon after by the latter the IEPS was made defunct.

Since then attempts have been made to get the IEPS up and running again. But it's yet to return to it's former glory, which means I can't send packages to Lizette because the chances of the package actually getting to her are not that great.