Virge's blog

OEDILF Stampede

The BBC mouthed the man's words
To its regular erudite nerds.
As limericks were sampled
Our server was trampled
By fun-loving pun-hungry herds.

(When I went to bed last night the site was loaded beyond capacity. It's usable again this morning.)

Time-travelling elephant

Ever wish you were on the other side of the world?

Just looking at the pictures creates a full-body smile.

Joy, intrigue, awe.

Morning Coffee

Is your work environment tediously professional?

Enjoy the frivolous froth of life with paper, scissors, and your coffee maker.

Significant Moment

A moment of significance in an arbitrarily defined numbering system passed me by last night. I forgot to celebrate/commemorate/observe its passage. I'll pay lip service to the instant by recording in this public place what I was doing at the time.

At 01:02:03 on 04/05/06 (Melbourne, Australia), I was reading a book, in bed, possibly being distracted by the interactions of a variable number [0..4] of cats. (Be thankful that I didn't encrypt this message using Arethusa with the date as a seed. Yes, I was reading Cryptonomicon.)

Scifaiku

My first attempts at Scifaiku

Petasynaptic
Robots learn rules from their peers,
Meaning from patterns.

Vested networks of
Degenerate wetware wield
Vast robot legions.

No parity check;
Will your calculator find
Silicon Heaven?

Geeks attempt global
Mutual understanding;
Church leaders protest.

Viral marketing
Campaign used effectively
For selling MemeShield.

Patent English

It's an idiom all of its own,
Undergirt by a cant overblown,
Ambiguity free
If you pay the right fee.
Relation to English: unknown.

As I write up (or attempt to write up) a patent application, I feel the urge to try to hide a limerick or two within the prose of the background or description. I squash the urge. Any phrase I write has a better than even chance of being translated by the patent attorney from English into Haute Patentese. What chance a complete limerick? And what would the distorted partial limericks look like after legal digestion?

Team Fiction

How Kaavya Viswanathan got famous.

I'd say that there's more to this story
Of KV's reuse of priori.
Forty passages found
Makes 'internalized' sound
More like 'ripped off for personal glory.'

Say "I stole it. It's time to come clean,"
or "My book's from a chick-lit machine"?
No, instead, hide behind
The mystery of mind:
"Take pity, I'm only nineteen."

To admit that she deliberately plagiarized would be an extremely bad career move.

To admit that she didn't write the passages herself, and that she wasn't so much an author as a young attractive iconic front for a profitable prose machine, would be better for her but would be bad for the book packaging company (who would then have to admit that their company provides stolen material).

Her least dangerous path is to blame an untouchable source--the mysterious workings of her mind. People can say that they find it completely incredible, but who can prove or disprove it? So, there are identical wordings? An amazing memory could be expected for a talented writer (forgetting of course that she can't remember what belonged to someone else). Maintaining a shred of plausibility is all she needs to do to be able to profit from the extensive exposure.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily)

(More discussion at newsmericks)

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