Tears in Reality

Writing that I suddenly realise that you can't tell whether I mean rips or little water droplets from your eyes. From the context I'm sure you can figure it out though. Stupid English.
I've been doing a "self-paced learning package" at army recently which is supposed to teach me proper english, so that I'll be able to write unambiguously for defence purposes. It's in preparation for an admin course I won't have to do for a while. You'd love it Jason, it tries to teach correct grammar and word usage (I've been doing a section on 'confusables', stupid words like practice and practise, among and between, and fewer and less, and when you're supposed to use them. I've so been using a lot of them wrong. Apparantly "fewer" is for things you can count and "less" is for things you can't, ie 'less sugar' or 'fewer grams of sugar'. Actually I probably used that one right, I just never knew why, just one of those things that sounds wrong if you use the wrong word. Among and between was interesting, though it makes sense when you think about it. Between has to involve only two things, while among must be more than two, ie 'between the post' or 'among the players'. 'Between the players' sounds right too, but it is actually only right if there are only two players.
I've barely done a third of the package, theres a lot left. It has increased my vocabulary a bit though, two of the words were 'elicit' and 'illicit'. Illicit I knew but elicit was a new one. Apparantly it means 'derive by reason; "elicit a solution"', 'to draw or bring out or forth; educe; evoke: to elicit the truth; to elicit a response with a question.' Bit confusing.

Anyway, enough of that. Perhaps you read Steve's blog a noticed he wrote an essay on M-theory. It's very interesting, you should go read it. I also wrote an essay for the same class, mine was on Cosmic Strings. These things are extremely cool (they may or may not exist) and are what my title refers to. They aren't exactly tears in reality, but they are defects in our 'reality' if you like, which have trapped within them regions of a previous 'reality', a high symmetry state the universe was in at the dawn of time. Anyway it's here if you'd like to read it.