Bistromathics
The Bistromatic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast
interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about
with Improbability Factors.
Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of
understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed
that time was not an absolute but depended on the observer's
movement in space, and that space was not an absolute, but
depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now
realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the
observer's movement in restaurants.
The first non-absolute number is the number of people for whom
the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the
first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no
apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up,
or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the
show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when
they see who else has turned up.
The second non-absolute number is the given time of arrival,
which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of
mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose
existence can only be defined as being anything other than
itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one
moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the
party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in
many branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy and
also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody
Else's Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of non-absoluteness of all
lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill,
the cost of each item, the number of people at the table, and
what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who
have actually brought any money is only a sub-phenomenon in this
field.)
The baffling discrepancies which used to occur at this point
remained uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took
them seriously. They were at the time put down to such things as
politeness, rudeness, meanness, flashness, tiredness,
emotionality, or the lateness of the hour, and completely
forgotten about on the following morning. They were never tested
under laboratory conditions, of course, because they never
occurred in laboratories - not in reputable laboratories at
least.
And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the
startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this:
Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of
restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers
written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the
Universe.
This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It
completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences
got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds
of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science
of maths was put back by years.
Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be
understood. To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too
much what the man in the street would have said, "Oh yes, I could
have told you that," about. Then some phrases like "Interactive
Subjectivity Frameworks" were invented, and everybody was able to
relax and get on with it.
The small groups of monks who had taken up hanging around the
major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect
that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were
eventually given a street theatre grant and went away.
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