If you're feeling guilty about the amount of time you waste at the PC watching clips like "Mishka I love you" (try it!) or all those "bungee cord snaps"/human flight clips (the latest one of the Dutch "birdman" is pretty cool), you can make up for it by browsing the Albert Einstein Archive and pretend that you understand phrases like "spacetime continuum".
This is intellectual time-wasting taken to new heights. Degree-level noodling.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is photographing all of the great man's papers and putting them online so that you can effectively walk around inside the head of a genius.
That's if you can get past his hair. Einstein grew his famously impenetrable thicket as a kind of personal security system to protect his intellect. His newly digitised notebooks reveal that in 1915 a team of Swiss scientists were caught trying to cut through these defences to reach that part of his brain where the General Theory of Relativity was held. One of them recalled it in his memoir, Nevermind the Follicles, Here's Albert's Cerebral Cortex.
But to be serious (always a challenge), faced with the homepage and the empty search for bar, you feel a rising sense of awe because you know you are but a few key strokes away from documents that still influence our understanding of reality and of how the universe is structured today.
To paraphrase Newton, it is as if you are about to climb on to the shoulder of a giant. Thus it is with a mounting sense of excitement that you place your fingers on the keyboard and type the words "Pipesmoking" into the empty bar. Sorry. You never quite got science at school, did you? Clearly, things haven't changed.
However, this turns out be an entirely valid search because it brings up "A E accepts life membership in the Montreal Pipe Smokers' Club", so there, stick that in your pipe.
Warming to the theme, keying in "Hair" brings reference to an item called Einstein fiddles – these are all true, by the way – written by his secretary Helen Dukas. So Einstein was not so far from the world of the trivial.
Clicking on "Gallery" brings up his original papers on relativity, full of lines like "matter tells space how to bend, space tells matter how to move". Which is just what you wanted. Is this the perfect excuse for not tidying up or what?
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