Crickets Chirping

I have strange dreams about machines that duplicate things. Here are two examples.

The Octoplier

I dreamt that I was working on a machine that could duplicate objects, but it was still in the early stages and didn’t work completely. The first limitation was that it only worked on watermelons. The second limitation was that it always made eight copies of the watermelon.

The more frequently it was used, the lower the quality of the inside of the watermelons. If you used it a few times a day, the watermelons would look fine on the outside, but when opened they’d be pale and sort of dry.

If you used it many more times in one day, the watermelons would still look fine on the outside but when opened would contain coffee grounds, food wrappers and other garbage.

Newton’s Apple

I had this one saturday night. My friend showed me a really old looking, dusty apple. “Can you believe it? This is the actual apple that fell on Newton‘s head!” he said excitedly, “I borrowed it from some collectors I know.”

“But what I really want to show you is my new device!” He opened a metal box with some buttons on it, and placed the ancient apple gently inside. He closed the box, hit some of the buttons and zap- an apple just like the one he put into the box appeared on the table next to it.

He took the original Newton apple out of the box and held it up to the duplicate. “See, they’re identical!”

I was intrigued, but suspicious of his ability to duplicate fruit due to my previous experience with watermelons. So I picked up the duplicate and took a small bite out of it.

“Dude, what the fuck are you doing?!” he screamed. I thought what I was doing was pretty obvious (and harmless), “It’s just the duplicate. I didn’t even touch the original.”

“Yeah I know, but look at the original.”

Sure enough, there was a bite now missing from the original (In programming, we call this a shallow copy). I woke up before we figured out how to explain the Newton apple damage to the collectors.