This article is classified "Fictional"
Christopher Smith (shmed@acs2.bu.edu) once gave a recipe for cookies, which culminated in the formulation of a principle most people have never thought about: : Cookies even you can make: : Take a 12 oz box of Nilla wafers and mash them into little crumbs. You : can do this with graham crackers too. [Directions deleted... but do not delete when cooking, or you'll have lots of little crumbs and not much else...] Chris's cookies arise from other cookies. We may apply this to the general Principle of Conservation of Cookies, which postulates that at any given time in a closed system, the number of cookies in said system remains constant. The corollary is that cookies can neither be made anew nor destroyed. The addition of other ingredients in Chris's cookies (e.g. condensed milk, chocolate chips, coconut) is required for two reasons: first, although the number of cookies in the system remains constant, the size of said cookies need not. Chris, being a cookie fan, obviously wants cookies bigger than the Nilla wafers from whence they sprung. The second reason for adding additional ingredients in the cookies is that in every cookie transformation process, there is inevitably some irrecoverable loss of cookies. In this case, some crumbs will fall on the floor and get stepped on, and there is no way to avoid this. An extrapolation of this theory suggests that, barring the addition of extra ingredients (condensed milk, chocolate chips, what have you), the cookies in a given system will eventually degenerate to greater and greater crumbliness, culminating in a completely flavorless pile o' crumbs. Some may object that we see new cookies in the stores every day, and that the number of cookies must therefore be increasing, rather than remaining constant. My reply to this is that the grocery store, and indeed, the city, is not a cookie-dynamically closed system, and therefore additional input of cookies does not violate this principle, as long as they come from somewhere where the number of cookies is decreasing at the same rate. With the NCJS grant I will be receiving some time next week (rent is due this week at Rosenthal-by-the-Bay and cash is short), I will continue to investigate the theory and implications of this powerful new paradigm. Feel free to drop by Wake, offer criticisms and ideas, and bring me oatmeal cookies.