Have you wondered exactly why it is that potato chips and microchips are both "chips?" There's more, too – chocolate chips, of course – but we don't have time to go into that whole mess today. The secret will terrify and amaze you, and you'll probably go home with a new-found respect for the humble semiconductor fabricator and their down-home farmfolk attitude.
Back at Bimbo University, I used to be an undergraduate slacker attending the courses of many brilliant professors. Chief among them was Dr. Spud, who had a kooky theory that a potato could serve as a universal Turing machine. I'll save you the boring explanation of just what a universal Turing machine is, we're all friends here, but the important thing to know here is that Dr. Spud eventually went to hospital after getting an acute case of math poisoning.
As his least promising student, the most promising students left the duty of documenting his research to me. Research, as you may already know, is very exciting. You get to find out cool new things, do wacky experiments, and tell everyone at parties that you're uncovering the mysteries of the universe.
Documenting that research, on the other hand, sucks what the kids are now calling "ass." It's monotonous, boring, and you often get about halfway into a sentence before you realize that you never actually collected the data that backs up the words you are saying. So then you have to go back and do some more experiments, and your faculty advisor starts mentioning how bad it looks for you to be not publishing, and then eventually they give you the guillotine. Yeah. Bimbo University is a research school, kids, and Dr. Spud's entire enterprise was going to be in some deep shit if I couldn't at least coauthor a paper out of his stuff. He'd probably end up at Uptight University, a party school that has no chance whatsoever of getting a fat stipend from IBM.
The secrets of exactly how I managed to get that paper published will go with me to my grave. Like all undergraduates, I entered a special state of being upon becoming sufficiently sleep-deprived and drunk while in the presence of an imminent deadline. In that flow state, I was able to produce hundreds of pages of some absolute rockin' horseshit. This desperate last-minute paper was in fact so impressive that even the brown-nosing students felt like I should get co-author on it. To make a long story short, that's why I'm now head of research at the government department that makes Star Wars real. In case you're curious about the assertion from the prologue, both potato chips and microchips are called that because they're a chip off of a large block of material, like potatoes or silicon. You're welcome.
