I found this highly amusing

[Enforcer Talen]

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

I don't get it. Perhaps if you tell me the funny part, I'll laugh.

[DPDarkPrimus]

[BLINK] Does it work on SD.net? [/BLINK]

[SPOOFE]

I don't get it. Perhaps if you tell me the funny part, I'll laugh.

Schroedinger's Cat is a thought experiment used to easily explain how electrons can sometimes behave like waves, and sometimes like particles.

The thought experiment goes like this: Put a cat in a box, along with a vial of toxic gas and an atom that has a half-life of one hour. The toxic gas is released into the box - thus killing the cat - when it detects that the atom decays.

After one hour, there's a fifty-fifty chance that the atom has decayed (and that the gas was released, and the cat is dead). However, we can't know whether the cat is alive or dead until we open the box and see. Ergo, the cat is both alive and dead (or half-alive, half-dead, depending on how you interpret), stuck in a state between the two, and it doesn't "pick" a state until we actually open the box and look at it.

Bottom line: The cat is both alive and dead as long as the box remains closed. The joke with the blinking word "not" reflects this dual status.