Interesting terms found on the Web today

1. Cat therapist. (From New York; not California as you might have expected.)

2. Sexually Satisfying Events. It's a medical term used in trials of libido enhancing drugs, apparently. I wonder if there’s a requirement that two people be involved?

Once a certain age is reached, perhaps a more relevant term is needed, such as "Sexually Satisfying Event Equivalent." (I expect most of mine to involve cheese.)

3. The Theory of Exclusively Local Beables. This is from arXiv, which is a bit of an obvious source for novel phrases: every second paper has a title with a term I haven’t heard of before. Anyhow, “beables” is a charming sounding word, and is described as follows:

J.S. Bell introduced the term “beables” (a deliberate contrast to the vaguely-defined “observables” which, he thought, played too prominent a role in orthodox, Copenhagen quantum theory) to name whatever is posited, by a candidate theory, as corresponding directly to something that is physically real (independent of any “observation”).

The paper talks of “pilot wave” theories to explain the quantum world, and is of some interest, especially in its introductory explanation of how such theories to explain the dual particle/wave characteristics of light were considered from the beginning by Einstein, but they lost out to the “tranquilizing philosophy” of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation. (The paper goes on to suggest that there is merit still in the pilot wave idea.)

4. Everyone has two puberties. Recently I link to a list of very dubious ideas Kant had about life, yet today while reading a bit of a rambling article in The Guardian about marriage, I found this:

I think Elizabeth Gilbert gets somewhere close to it when she quotes Kant in his assertion that we humans are so emotionally complex that we go through two puberties in life: the first when our bodies are mature enough for sex, and the second when our minds are.

Sounds about right; good on you Immanuel. (But having reputedly died a virgin, I wonder how he assessed his own preparedness for it.) *

* At another blog earlier this year, I imagined a movie involving Kant (who, apart from alleged sexual inexperience, also never travelled more than 100 miles from his home town of Konigsberg) as actually being a secret prototype James Bond character, involved in political intrigue and bedding femme fatales all over Europe and the Americas in the 1770's. (Wikipedia says he had a "silent decade" in his 40's.) I await the grant for the script from the Australian Film Commission: God knows they haven't funded enough films involving improbable historical fantasies based in Prussia.