And now a quote from John Rennie in Scientific American:

"Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy."

The irony of this situation is fascinating. There are three major political forces at work here (in my observation):

The religious fundamentalists who want to get evil evolution out of the education system because it is an anti-God conspiracy that holds the majority of scientists in blind ignorance. This group has managed to get Georgia Department of Education to propose science standards that eliminate all references to "evolution" in the curriculum.

The Intelligent Design group who want to get God into the education system. They hope to gain credibility by advocating that evolution is still taught along with its known deficiencies. And to show how "open minded" they are they want their intelligent design theory given an equal ranking with evolution (despite the fact that their whole platform rests on: "Here - look at this amazingly complex piece of biology that nobody can yet explain with evolution. If we can't explain it we have to acknowledge an intelligent super-being. QED").

The mainstream scientists who want an education system that doesn't close its eyes to complex problems and assign them to the supernatural.

We've seen what happens when countries let religion control their education systems, but I don't think it will come to that. I suspect there is enough free-thinking momentum in the US to steam-roll the latest anti-science wrinkle. I doubt it will create a lasting impediment, so I'm happy to think of it as entertainment to be viewed from a distance. (That is, until the Creationist Taliban starts to target Australian Schools.) It's like watching one of those sitcoms with an embarrassingly stupid protagonist. You know that in every episode you're going to be frustrated by the obvious mistakes he or she will make, but you watch it anyway.

Intelligent Design? *
The Age of Virge
Web Page MixMaster *
UFO Crash on Mars
Writers' Mistakes *

DIY Dreams *
ChessBoxing *
Linguistic Devices *
Collection of "Laws" *
LotR: A Source-Criticism Analysis *
Postmodern Adventure

It's been a few days since the last journal entry. Have I been slack? No, just distracted. I had to leap to the defence of falsely accused packbawkies. (Well, to tell the truth, I've been enjoying sparring with that bad rat Socar.)

The other challenge that has been ticking along in the background is the construction of a humorous villanelle. The villanelle is a form of poetry that seems to appeal to the obsessive compulsive poet. Its repetition of the first and third lines and "can't have too much of a good thing" rhyming scheme make it a worthy challenge for a warped mind.

Sweet Villanelle

My love, I feel I must make clear
that time I spend in dreams of you
flies like the time when you are near.
 
Each time we dine you lend an ear-
you listen when I have some view,
my love, I feel I must make clear.
 
In search of sweetness I'm sincere,
and no pastime I can construe
flies like the time when you are near.
 
Our parfait hours can disappear
in blissful moments, each one new.
My love, I feel I must make clear
 
how I adore your peaceful cheer,
but not a cream pie thrown, it's true,
flies like the time when you are near.
 
You fill my mind with mousse, my dear.
You're sundae to my sweet-tooth too.
My love, I feel I must make clear:
Flies like the time when you are near.

Amy Greenwood and Paul Z. Myers discuss the merits of having your own full body 3d model for virtual shopping, tailoring, health monitoring and computer games. I can't see any reasons why 3d scanning technology won't become available in the home in the near future. Paul's health monitoring excuse can be used to justify spending the money, although the real reasons may be ones we won't admit.

Excuse me for "taking the piss"
but I don't think it's fair to dismiss
that our memes all evolve
with one riddle to solve:
"How's my butt? Does it look fat in this?"

What is it about birds going about their natural lives that provokes people to write slanderous songs about them and encourage their mistreatment?

Neil Gaiman's journal pointed me to "The March of the Sinister Ducks" (available for legitimate download). Its quirky humour disguises its true nature. It is a hate song. It is anti-avian propaganda. I group it together with Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" and Weird Al Yankovic's song advocating duck slavery: "I Want a New Duck".

Please don't think I'm trying to build a case on just three carefully selected songs. Vilification of birds has been nesting in the back of human consciousness for centuries. It surfaces every now and then with songs like "The Tennessee Bird Walk" by Jack Blanchard - a song that, while not exactly encouraging cruelty to birds, did suggest the possibility of bird abuse as both a source of humour and a mnemonic device for separated sweethearts. The practice of singing about avian abuse has a long tradition. Allow me to remind you of those French feather-fetishist phrases:
Alouette, gentile alouette,
Alouette, je te plumerai.

Anti-bird sentiment has reared its head in other ways too. I know of several songs accusing birds of sexual impropriety. e.g. "My Canary has Circles Under His Eyes" by Kohler/Pola/Golden and Jake Thackray's "The Bantam Cock". Sometimes the discrimination even descends to childish mud-slinging, as in "The Cuckoo is a Funny Bird".

I have a dre... er, no. That line's been overused. Let's just say it's time for the militant wing of the United Packbawkies to begin a retaliatory campaign. Don't say you weren't warned. All we need is someone to do for birds what Dana Lyons did for cows...

[Edit: The lone birdbrain attempts to defend packbawkies against unfounded allegations in a verse versus verse battle.]

If I were an organ I wouldn't be a huge cathedral pipe organ made by a master craftsman. I wouldn't be played by virtuosos to the envisioned glory of the omniscient. My sounds would never shake the stained glass saints and chill the spines of the devoted with awe-inspiring infrasonic rumbles.

Instead, I'd be a calliope organ built in the back shed of an incorrigible tinkerer. I'd have pipes, bells, whistles, triangles, cymbals, pipes, snares, sirens, castanets, and more pipes. I'd chuff and toot my tunes in the park and watch the wide eyes of enraptured children, but my magic wouldn't be limited to the young.

My de-tuned waldflutes would tug at circuses from childhoods past, long forgotten clown-fears and the smells of ice cream and peanuts. My reeds and cymbals would conjure the sensual orient and invoke mind mirages of moonlit oases. My strident prinzipals would bring back showers of rice and white-veiled hopefulness in some; cobwebbed crypts with satin-lined coffins for others.

My inventor didn't shy from impractical ideas, for within my frame he has found room for carefully tuned strings. They have no jacks or hammers. They resonate in sympathy with ambient sounds and add their barely perceptible overtones to the concert. There are few voices that fail to find some reflected whisper of recognition.

People may curse my brazen swell. They may hear only an antiquated cacophony as they hurry past. I expect very few will wait and listen for the introspective vox humana pathetique. Fewer still will find the patience or desire to learn to play. As an instrument I'll remain an entertaining curiosity for Sunday afternoons and a monument to dedicated eccentricity.

Dear Diary,

You've had life too easy for too long. Tonight you'll just have to sit tight and listen to me bitch and whine and moan. I know you'd like to be getting out and linking up with other diaries. Don't think I don't know what you get up to. Sometimes I think you'll give your address to any Joe Blogs that looks your way. Well, tonight it will be different. It's my turn.

First, dallying Diary, let me tell you about a conversation at morning tea time. I was talking with two of the lost boys at work. There was a "how was your break over Christmas?" question from one. The other answered, complaining about the marriage breakup of a near relative. The first echoed a similar experience. I added my voice to the fugue. The theme was almost identical in the three parts, and they harmonised surprisingly well. We modulated through several related keys, strictly minor of course, as we explored the effects that rippled out from the rifts. A complete rendition of that improvisation would be pointless here. There was no satisfying, synchronising allargando drawing us to a major conclusion. We just faded back to other topics with a general feeling of resignation.

The verbal intranet (or office grapevine) was in operation later. The shock news of the day was a resignation from a very prominent position. The information was accompanied by a deliberate dearth of detail, and a list of unanswered questions that could shame any dogma. The message was characterised by the negative space around the delivered words. I rang the source before leaving work. I'm still not much wiser.

So my dearest, dozing Diary, since you seem to be comfortably asleep now, I'll slink off and browse.

Linguistic devices are wonderful. I love their names. They sound like medical conditions. Let me show you:

"I must try and shrug off this hendiadys."

"I think we may have an iddy-biddy touch of hypocorisma today."

"Litotes and meiosis are not everyone's favorite words."

"If you don't get something done about your aposiopesis..."

"This dyst-friggin-mesis is driving me crazy."

On a completely different topic, how many links does it take to disrupt an established google rank? Join the Brian Leiter project to help find out!

"I have a friend who keeps a giant rat in her apartment." Doesn't that sound like a good opening line to feed your therapist? It's true. Believe me.  Would I lie to you? You can read all about the fun of trying to keep up with an escaped giant rat.

if dere's a scritchin in yer kitchen
den yer rat-bitch needs a switchin
cuz da twitchin git's bin hitchin
up er manky lil paws
on der corners o yer drawers
wid er claws in all yer stores

if she gnaws der locks on doors
an explores dat ting wot snores
you gon find how she kin cause
irresistabubble itchin
from der bits left in yer stitchin
which evenchually gits into yer pores

And one just for Neil Gaiman:

An author of note and dark fiction,
who speaks with his fans and conviction,
keeps raising awareness,
his child, and unfairness
of comic book free speech restriction.

[edit: acknowledged in Neil's Journal]

I was introduced to Zeugma and Syllepsis today while reading Neil Gaiman's Journal. They are a confused couple. If I could find some agreement between different dictionaries on what their meanings are, I'd tell you. For now let me just talk about a grammatical construct that might be called zeugma and/or syllepsis. ("Syllugma" will do for the moment if you need to put a name to the concept.)

What it means is to use a single word in conjunction with two (or more) other words but where the single word has a different meaning in relation to each. One example here would be better than me trying to cobble up more words about words, so: "Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave."

So what use is it? It's just another way to play with words, isn't it?

Yes! And it sounds to me like an excellent way to squeeze more meaning (and confusion) into an economy of words. Since it also demands the ambiguous use of a word, it sounds ideal for inserting humour. I decided to set myself the challenge of writing a limerick containing examples of zeugmata and/or syllepses.

The Bitch

She had days and a fortune to spend
at the roulette wheel and a loose end.
She carelessly wrote
off her car and a note
to her shame and her husband's best friend.

The Pugilistic Poet

He was short of a quid and with words
when he lived for each day and with nerds.
He, to make matters worse,
knocked out thugs and light verse
'cause it picked up his mood and the birds.

View More Limericks

Maybe I spoke too soon. I can't seem to see a link for adding a comment in a lot of the journal entries. Maybe there was something that was lost in the upgrade.

It also seems that the search function isn't working - but then I had no search at all in the previous version, so there's no loss.

On the plus side, the journal should now provide an RSS feed for those who like their journals aggregated. I've just recently started using Bloglines.

[edit: ok search is now working. If in doubt, look at the settings. ]

Evil on a Budget
Visible Barbie Project
Furbeowulf Cluster
Wodehouse verse *
I like to watch
Science Scams

Sauron + Law *
Trolls! *
End Of The World - WTF? (3.6Mb)
Once More With Hobbits *
Gollum Rap
Cthulhu Tract

I've just upgraded pivot. Aside from loss of a few recent lists, I think I've managed to avoid losing anything. I still need to do a bit of neatening up, but I might as well go live now that I've done the change-over.

IDEA: The Combination CPU Cooler and Chaos Source (now unpatentable since I've just published the idea right here). Picture a miniature lava lamp that attaches to your computer's CPU. A light source (e.g. LED) illuminates one side of the lamp, and an inexpensive solid state array imager is placed on the other side. Heat from the CPU drives the conduction & convection in the lamp which then behaves as a heat pump, cooling the CPU. The pictures of the chaotically changing image are read from the imaging device and blended to create a stream of truly random data. This is a valuable source of irreproducible random data for use by any cryptographic applications or other programs requiring unique random sequences.

On further reflection, this marvelously synergistic idea had still more to offer. My creative colleague added a third application to the idea. The Combination CPU Cooler, Chaos Source and Mood Modifier. For those techno-fashion geeks who have transparent computer cases, the invention provides a mesmerising 60's-futuristic entertainment source and tension reliever. When the spam fills your mailbox like a backed up bog, when your network is lagged like the router is on Mars, when the online discussion gets all-capped by semi-literate AOLers, simply stare into your computer and watch the blobs flow and merge, stretch and split...