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It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Difference between revisions

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{{examples}}
== [[Advertising]] ==
* Flying Horse released this award winning commercial based on the Buttered Cat Paradox in the "Other" section[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8yW5cyXXRc].
 
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** And we must not forget about the one drive that functions on the principle that bad news always reaches places before anything else. Too bad nobody would allow it to dock.
** If you've done [[Alice in Wonderland|six impossible things this morning]], why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways - Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
* ''[[Discworld]]'' dabbles in this from time to time.
** ''[[Discworld]]'' dabbles in this from time to time. For example, inIn ''[[Discworld/The Truth|The Truth]]'', it's explained that the dried frog pills the Bursar takes to keep him apparently sane are actually hallucinogens, the idea being that a proper dose will cause him to hallucinate that he's sane (just like everyone else does).
** In ''[[Discworld/Hogfather|Hogfather]]'', when Hex (a non-electronic computer composed primarily of ants marching through glass tubes) becomes unstable, its rationality is restored by by ''typing the words'' "dried frog pills" into it. (This may have been inspired by the [http://www.multicians.org/cookie.html Cookie Monster virus], one of the first computer viruses.)
** ''[[Discworld/Guards! Guards!|Guards! Guards!]]'' introduces the concept of L-Space, where large collections of books warp time and space based on the principle that knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is matter, matter has mass, and mass warps space-time. Thus, the reason why owners of independent book stores tend to be so eccentric is that they're actually from an alternate dimension.
** Then there's the time in ''[[Discworld/Sourcery|Sourcery]]'' the characters travel across the sea in a magic lantern. This works because one of them is holding the lantern, and they're all inside the lantern. The trick is to complete the journey before the universe catches on... oops, too late.
** In a footnote in ''[[Discworld/Mort|Mort]]'', there's a passage regarding the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle's theory of kingons (or queons), the elemental particle of monarchy, that he believed traveled faster than light; there could only be one king at a time and there couldn't be a gap between kings, so monarchy must travel faster than anything else in the universe. His plans to use this discovery to send messages by carefully torturing a small king to modulate the signal never came to fruition because at that moment the bar closed.
* The novel ''[[The Holy Land]]'' claims that extraterrestrials are taller because of relativity. They've been flying in spaceships for generations, and since everything in the universe is shrinking (the ''real'' reason for the redshift), the time dilation means that they've shrunken less.
** James Blaylock used the same premise in ''Land Of Dreams'', mostly as an excuse to include time travelers' giant shoes and spectacles in his novel alongside little men disguised as mice.
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* In an episode of ''[[Krypto the Superdog]]'', tiny aliens land on Earth to refuel their spaceship, the fuel in question being ''sugar''. And they're rather sickened to discover humans eat what is their equivalent of gasoline.
 
== Other Media ==
* The tongue-in-cheek idea of building an anti-gravity or perpetual motion device by attaching a piece of buttered toast to a cat's back and dropping them from a height. According to the [[wikipedia:Buttered cat paradox|buttered cat paradox]], the cat must land feet first and the toast must land butter side down, but both can't hit the ground at the same time.
** Alan Moore played with this in ''[[Tomorrow Stories]]'', where kid supergenius Jack B. Quick buttered cats to create antigravity devices. His parents quickly reminded him, however, that the cat would eventually lick off the butter and fall, which they did just in time to fall on the [[Shout-Out|mutated pigs who had had a]] [[Animal Farm|Communist revolution]].
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