Lusers...?

You know, now I work full-time in corporate IT support, I'm realising that some of the things we get asked are just...well...stupid. I mean, at the moment we're getting a rash of people asking why they can't get into their email, despite the fact that a message went out to all of them days ago telling them to change their password before today or it would expire.

I have a theory, however: it's not that people are stupid. Not all of them, anyway. No, it's that the radiation from computer screens that we suspected for so long would have some nasty side-effect has been secretly making them stupid.

Extra dimensions

Have you read Flatland? No? Well, you should. It'll give you a kick in the brain. The reason I mention it is because the idea of extra-dimensional beings keeps cropping up in the books I'm reading.

How many are there? Four? Five? Eleven? And if there are more, do we exist in those dimensions or not? Flatland asks these questions within a framework we can understand, since it deals with the inhabitants of Flatland and, specifically, a Square who meets a Sphere from Solidland. He sees the Sphere as a circle, since the part of the Sphere which exists in Flatland is a circular cross-section. The Square, enlightened by his journey with the Sphere into the third dimension, suggests there might be four dimensional beings whom the Sphere cannot perceive, but the Sphere is unable to grasp this concept despite his own lecturing to the Square.

So...what if there were creatures who existed in more than three spatial dimensions, and who could insert themselves into our world such that their extrusions looked like human beings? Well, that's one of the ideas in the book I'm reading. It's weird. And interesting.
Maybe we exist in dimensions that we also cannot perceive? It seems likely to me that all things exist in all dimensions; after all, even a circle drawn on a page has three dimensions, though one of them (depth) is exceedingly small. One- and two-dimensional objects are entirely theoretical, just like a fourth-dimensional one (like a tesseract, or hypercube, which has equal width in all fourth dimensions). So we might just be very "short" in the fourth spatial dimension, so short we can't see it...

Anyway. It made my mind work for a minute or two.