Scientific Discoveries

It turns out that if you place a monkey with a typewriter on a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, it will necessarily produce the entire works of Shakespeare excluding Macbeth. This curious fact is known to probability theorists and physicists as "The Macbeth Exception," and has been documented a number of times since its discovery several years ago. It just goes to show you that no matter how much we learn about math and science, there will always be more surprising things out there waiting to be discovered.

The Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth_Exception

a recent article in Time Magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9671,1597441,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar

and several occurrences in Popular Science:
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2006-09/new-discoveries-in-math
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2007-07/monkeys-at-light-speed
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2008-06/the-future-is-now

Big Ass Thimbles

The word "thimble" is very rarely used to indicate a large size. As in:

• Ew, the mole on that man's neck is the size of a thimble!
  
• So he asked if I wanted salt on my fried egg, and I said yes, and he proceeded to dump an entire thimble-full of salt onto it! I was so mortified!
  
• The visible hair on the outside of his nose couldn't be comfortably crammed into a thimble!

Also, with good reason, you never hear the suffix "-ass" attached to adjectives that represent absolute properties. For example

• That's a true-ass statement!
  
• You don't have time to watch that, it's a school-ass night!
  
• Don't worry, it's only a temporary-ass tattoo.

Additionally, as we all know, you can only use the "-ass" suffix with adjectives placed right before the nouns they modify. Forbidden usages include:

• Your window is open-ass.
  
• I wanted to paint my truck red-ass, but I couldn't find that color.
  
• I'll only eat the mayonnaises if it's lite-ass.