``` ============================= Dear Reader, It's been awhile. Or it will have. By now... ~The Founder. ============================= erg. (noun). (1) Quite possibly the worst machine ever created. (2) A unit of energy and work equal to 10^-7 joules. Derived from ergon (’έργον) a Greek word meaning work or task. ~Dictionary of the Standard Modern Dialect of Distributed Colloquial Vernacular. "Final Erg: We" ~One of many instances of cryptic nonsensical propaganda attributed to the terrorist organization known as Learn Different™ THEORETICAL TERROR MANAGEMENT ============================= In 1864, just one year before the end of the American Civil War, the German physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius did something which was entirely unrelated to America or civility or war. In 1864, Clausius proposed the Greek word ergon (ἐργον) to designate a unit of energy, work, and heat. Just one short erg... (I mean) er... I mean (dammit) year later (I think?), circa nearabouts the end of the unrelated war mentioned supra, Clausius would go on to dive (devise? (what's a legal word for give? (fuck it))) *do* the first mathematical definition of the concept of entropy. The landmark-ed...ly famous(-ish. is it? (christ, I dunno)) paper where he did so ends as (fuck what is *wrong* with me?) follows: For the present I will confine myself to the statement of one result. If for the entire universe we conceive the same magnitude to be determined, consistently and with due regard to all circumstances, which for a single body I have called *entropy*, and if at the same time we introduce the other and simpler conception of energy, we may express in the following manner the fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat. 1. The energy of the universe is constant. 2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. (Hey, that kind of got nice at the end. Anyways, back to whatever this is...) (Narrator: The increasingly sad scientist turns his thoughts back to whatever-this-is/whatever-that-was (which, in the present situation, appears to be "writing" (though honestly it's hard to tell.))) Having thus covered thusly (I think my brain's shutting down) the necessary mathematical prerequisites in as pedagogically transparently a manner as the current s*(uper + erious) s*(tatus + ignalling) s*(ausage + cience) format of a modern journal-bound academic p*(aper + ermits) (Keep your real thoughts in your head, fucker.) I (no singular) we'll (not that either) We May Now Turn to the sociocognitive/psychosocial/neurocomputational/ [other-words-the-attentive-reader-shall-note-are-all-fluff] type phenomen(uh...)on that we('re pretending to) wish to examine in the current (what the hell am I writing again? oh right) paper. (Narrator: The s*(ad + cientist) takes a drink... and a pause... and a breath... ) In social psychology, Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes a basic psychological conflict that results from having a desire to live but realizing that death is inevitable.[1] (ugh...) [Citation 1: The inter-fucking-net somewhere I forget.] Similarly, in formal-education/academia/science/basically-all-the-things-I-love, Merely Thinking Thoughts (MTT) is prohibited on paper (POP) unless one agrees to wrap said thoughts in (STI) a big obnoxious burka (BOB) of obfuscating jargon, thus leading to a reciprocal psychological conflict in which one has a desire to die but realizes life is inevitable... (Sorry... I'll edit that out later, I promise. Just trying to keep myself entertained while I'm still here...) As such (wait, hold on...), against that background (sure... *death* is inevitable...), on a very-much-related note (but no one's making us do all *this* to ourselves...), in the context of the current sentence (so, like...) and the ones down below (what the hell are we all doing here?...), Theoretical Terror Management (TTM (or TM, for short)) proposes that for christ's sake fuck all this let's just go be terrorists. I'll be the manager. Or founder, I guess. Citation: I don't know. All those sentences up there. Referencing whatever ends up getting written down below. (Bear with me...) FORMALITY FOLLOWS FUNCTION ========================== Okay... I don't know where this is going, so I'm just gonna... talk. I feel like there's really no hope left for the existing education system, at the high school level or college or graduate school and especially not for what this all becomes up above that... And like, I don't exactly feel "qualified" to do many things in this world, whatever that means, but I've been inside this weird universe of academia for awhile... not as long as some of the older folks or whatever, but shit I've been in these things we call schools since I was like 5 -- you probably were too -- and I'm starting to feel like the only way we'd ever have any hope of fixing this whole mess of a system that's just awkwardly sort of failed-itself-into-existence-without-our-consent would be to just stop trying to fix it... or at least to stop trying to fix it from the inside. We need to fix it by just going way way waay the hell outside of it. On the fringes of society. Way out in the periphery. Like we need some kind of terrorist group or something to form and then be like "Okay... uh... honestly, we're not really terrorists. We don't actually do any terror. We're actually just learning stuff. Over here. Where you guys aren't. And sometimes we teach each other things too. Not about terrorism. Just like, normal stuff. Science or whatever. And mathematics. And life. And when we're not learning, we do stuff that's not learning. For instance, sometimes we hang out together. If we want to, that is. But not if we don't. And we learn a hell of a lot more than you all do. It's not that complicated really. But we're not a school and don't you fucking dare say we are. We're terrorists. Cuz we know the horrible boring red-tape paperwork bullshit of a life you smother anyone in whenever they try to be an official school anywhere near you people. Okay peace. We're gonna go get drunk and learn about space. Love you always. Sincerely, the terrorists." (Side Note: I may or may not already be doing this. And if I wasn't, I'd have a strong interest in pretending I was. And if I was, I'd have a strong interest in pretending I wasn't. But knowing that you now know both those things cuz I mentioned them in this metacommentary right here, it would be in my social/mathematical interest (oh, and probably legal interest too) in either case to take us yet another step of obfuscation further for all n. (ad infinitum (forever (cuz induction (the end.))))) Or to summarize... think what you will. ```