There is some great funny stuff that makes the rounds on the Internet. Occasionally, some of it is both clean and about the computer world. When we find those rare gems, we will print them here for everyone's enjoyment.

The authors of these pieces are generally unknown and reach us as a forward of a forwarded message. We would be pleased to identify and credit any original author who sees his or her work (and wants the world to know who he or she is).

For years, it has been believed that electric bulbs emit light, but recent information has proved otherwise. Electric bulbs don't emit light; they suck dark. Thus, we call these bulbs Dark Suckers. The Dark Sucker Theory and the existence of dark suckers prove that dark has mass and is heavier than light.

First, the basis of the Dark Sucker Theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. For example, take the Dark Sucker in the room you are in. There is much less dark right next to it than there is elsewhere. The larger the Dark Sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark Suckers in the parking lot have a much greater capacity to suck dark than the ones in this room.

So with all things, Dark Suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the dark spot on a full Dark Sucker.

A candle is a primitive Dark Sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You can see that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark that has been sucked into it. If you put a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, it will turn black. This is because it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle. One of the disadvantages of these primitive Dark Suckers is their limited range.

There are also portable Dark Suckers. In these, the bulbs can't handle all the dark by themselves and must be aided by a Dark Storage Unit. When the Dark Storage Unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before the portable Dark Sucker can operate again.

Dark has mass. When dark goes into a Dark Sucker, friction from the mass generates heat. Thus, it is not wise to touch an operating Dark Sucker. Candles present a special problem, as the mass must travel into a solid wick instead of through clear glass. This generates a great amount of heat and therefore it's not wise to touch an operating candle.

Also, dark is heavier than light. If you were to swim just below the surface of the lake, you would see a lot of light. If you were to slowly swim deeper and deeper, you would notice it getting darker and darker. When you get really deep, you would be in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats at the top. This is why it is called light.

Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in a lit room in front of a closed, dark closet, and slowly opened the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet. But since dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.

Next time you see an electric bulb, remember that it is a Dark Sucker.

What's the history of Dark Sucker Theory?

Dark Sucker Theory, or "D.S.T." as we like to call it around here, has a long and sordid past. Throughout most of recorded history, the myth that "light" is some kind of magical substance (and that darkness is the absence of light) has permeated human thinking.

Why has this myth been perpetuated, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? It may have something to do with various Biblical passages that go like this:

"O Lord, shine thy light upon us."

The Bible has been used by the Establishment to insist that the Earth is flat, that pi is exactly 3, and that the universe is only some 6000 years old—and now they're turning the Bible against Dark Sucker Theory.

How does dark transfer energy?

Experimentally, we know that "shining" a "light source" onto any surface will cause that surface to get warmer. This is called radiative heat transfer. D.S.T. must be able to explain these observations, as well as the Photon Conspiracy theories, to be a useful theory.

Space around us is naturally dark. Free darkness exists everywhere. Only through the actions of Dark Suckers (such as light bulbs, stars, fireflies, etc.) can this natural state be changed, and Dark Suckers have to expend energy continuously in order to operate.

The reason for all this darkness is: All objects have darkness embedded within them. Every time a dark sucker operates, it pulls this intrinsic darkness out of all surfaces that are in an unobstructed path to the dark sucker. This removal of intrinsic darkness is an action-at-a-distance; the forces that cause this are not well understood, but we do know that this action propagates at the speed of light (or should I say, the speed of dark) from the dark sucker to the incident surface.

This intrinsic darkness is bound into the electrons of the surface material. We might even call a surface a "host material" for darkness. The more dulled ("darker" looking) the host material is, the more readily it gives up darkness in response to a dark sucker. (A perfectly reflective material, if such a thing existed, would give off no darkness at all.) The reason host materials get warmer as they release their intrinsic darkness is that there is a binding energy between darkness and its host material. Sucking out darkness releases that binding energy in the form of heat. The stronger the dark sucker and the duller the surface, the more darkness gets divested from the host surface and the hotter the surface becomes. (Incidentally, the retinas of your eyes contain special pigments that send signals to your optic nerves when dark is sucked out of them -- sucking out yellow-frequency darkness is experienced as seeing yellow light.)

Eventually, the surface can become so hot that it glows with incandescence, and becomes a dark sucker itself. It should be noted that objects that glow due to their own heat, called "blackbody radiation," always cool off as a result of this radiation. This cooling off is merely the darkness being sucked into the blackbody radiator (hot dark sucker) and making the dark sucker itself into the darkness’ new host material. The darkness-to-new-host binding process consumes heat to form its new bonds, each of which has its own binding energy, and the blackbody gets colder as a result.

What about "light pressure"?

It is a known fact that very strong light sources (dark suckers) will exert a very small, but measurable, force on objects they are shining on. Photon Conspirators maintain that light itself has momentum, and it is the transfer of this momentum to the object being "shined" on that causes this force. Mathematically, the magnitude of the so-called "light pressure" force on a perfectly black object is:

(h / wavelength) * surface_area * light_intensity

where h is Planck's constant. It is exactly twice this large for perfectly shiny objects. Comet tails and solar-sailing vessels are examples where this force dominates. But worst of all, this force is directed away from the light source (dark sucker), not towards it. This would seem to be in direct contradiction to D.S.T., which maintains that dark is being sucked toward the dark sucker.

In fact, the movement away from the dark sucker is exactly what one would expect, assuming that dark has momentum. If dark is being drawn away from the host material, it will act like a small rocket engine—the hot exhaust gasses (or darkness) moving in one direction will drive the rocket vehicle (or host material) in the other. This would be experienced as a kind of "dark sucker pressure."

Does the photoelectric effect mean dark is quantized?

In a word, yes. For the uneducated, the so-called "photo"-electric effect (we prefer to call it the darkoelectric effect around here) was the tool Einstein used to verify Planck's prediction that light occurred in tiny, indivisible chunks (or "quanta"). If you shine a source of light above a certain threshold frequency at a metal plate, you'll get a measurable electric current. The stronger the light source, the stronger the current. However, if your light source is below the threshold frequency, no current will be produced no matter how strong your light source is. Classical theory, in which light was just one big happy continuous wave, offered no explanation for why this should be so. Einstein pointed out that if light were quantized, these "quanta" (or "photons," as he relabeled them) might knock electrons loose within the metal if the energy bundled in one photon were greater than the binding energy between an electron and its metal-atom. He won a Nobel Prize for this conjecture, too.

D.S.T. also has to explain this darkoelectric effect. Why should a low-frequency monochromatic dark sucker (such as a red laser beam) not induce an electric current, when a higher frequency monochromatic dark sucker (such as a blue laser beam) will induce a current? The answer we are inevitably led to is the same one the Photon Conspirators dreamed up at the end of the last century: Dark must, indeed, come in little indivisible chunks, which we call "darkons" by analogy with photons. A darkon sucked free from an electron will push that electron away in proportion to that darkon's frequency. The higher the frequency of the darkon—i.e. the "bluer" the background light that this individual darkon masks out—the more energy it will impart to the electron it just abandoned, and if this energy is greater than the amount required for the electron to escape its atomic orbit entirely, then the electron will zing around freely and contribute to an electric current.

Incidentally, this leads us to the notion that there is no such thing as "black" darkness, any more than the Photon Conspirators would claim that there is such a thing as "white" light. Each darkon is capable of masking out only one color of background light, corresponding to that darkon's frequency. "Blackness" means being surrounded by a sea of darkons, at different frequencies, which cover a continuous spectrum of all the frequencies one can see.

How does D.S.T. explain reflected light?

A reflective surface is one that does not give up its embedded darkons to a dark sucker very readily. A perfect mirror would give up no darkons at all. Yet, even though a reflector (such as the full moon) is not actively sucking dark itself, darkons seem to get sucked out of your retinas when you look at it. What gives?

Simple. The dark suction force is a force that Just Can't Say No. If it can't suck the darkons it needs out of a reflective surface, then by golly, the dark suction force will just bounce right off the surface and keep going in a new direction until it hits something that will give up its darkons!

What is the Dark Ether hypothesis?

Some malcontents are not satisfied with mainstream Dark Sucker Theory. They point out that Mainstream D.S.T. predicts that a blackbody (such as a hot horseshoe) will not cool off until its Dark Suction Force reaches a nonreflective surface and the darkons propagate back to the blackbody; in other words, there should be a round-trip delay time of 2*distance/c. Experimentally, this delay does not show up—a blackbody seems to cool off immediately, before its Dark Suction Force even reaches another object. The Dark Ether hypothesis is an attempt to "explain" such perceived holes in D.S.T.

The Dark Ether hypothesis claims that space is chock full of darkness at every point. When a Dark Sucker sucks dark, claims the hypothesis, it doesn't suck it from a distant surface, it sucks it from this plenum of dark in its immediate surroundings. This creates a "low pressure zone" of dark next to the dark sucker, which has to suck in some dark from its immediate surroundings. Essentially, space itself becomes a dark sucker. This "low pressure darkness wave" propagates out until it hits something which is nonreflective, and this something will yield some intrinsic dark (see question 2) to plug the gap and restore the "Dark Balance" to the universe. Reflected "light," according to the Dark Ether hypothesis, is nothing more than this rarefied darkness wave bouncing off an unyielding surface.

The problems with the Dark Ether hypothesis are too numerous to go into here. But for starters, it doesn't explain the darkoelectric effect very well, and it totally fails to take special relativity into account. Suffice it to say that only lunatics and morons still believe in the Dark Ether hypothesis. Mainstream Dark Sucker Theory is really the only logical choice.

How about interference patterns?

Interference patterns are those funny patterns of bright and dark spots you get when you shine a dark sucker through two or more adjacent slits. (The same thing can happen even if you use one very narrow slit, in which case it's called "diffraction.") The size and shape of the pattern depend on the distance between the slits (or the width of the single slit) and the wavelength of dark being sucked.

This implies that not only must darkons behave like waves, so must the Dark Suction Force. And my guess is that if you were to put a "photo"-electric detector on the wall receiving the interference patterns, they would only respond to dark suction above a threshold frequency—meaning that the dark suction force, as well as the darkness itself, must also be quantized.

Therefore, we must broaden our particle zoo (or, technically, our wavicle zoo) to include not only darkons but also suckons. The suckons leave the dark sucker, pass through the two slits, hit the wall in an interference pattern, liberate some darkons, and then those darkons travel back to the dark sucker along exactly the same path as the suckons took. Perhaps there is an underlying mechanism similar to the way lightning strikes work, where the downstroke lays the ion trail and the return stroke follows the path in reverse. (It is the return stroke that contains most of the energy in a lightning bolt. No, really.)

And the Poisson Spot?

No different from interference or diffraction. The Dark Suction Force behaves like a wave, and bends so that darkons are sucked out of a spot in the center of an object's shadow.

Just substitute "darkons" with "photons" in the conventional theory and reverse the directions.

And radio antennas?

Just substitute "darkons" with "photons" in the conventional theory and reverse the directions.

And positron/electron pair creation?

Haven't you figured it out yet? Just substitute "darkons" with "photons" in the conventional theory and reverse the directions!

So, does D.S.T. predict anything that photon theory doesn't?

Uh ...