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)

Dan Brown, Artiste!
Lego CD Gun (via)
Ninja Chipmunk Video (via)
Da Smithy Code (via)
L'Affaire Potter (via)

 Tom Standage puts some perspective on The Culture War (via Boing Boing). A quick sample of the quotes:

1790: "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth;"

1816: "The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz"... "forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion."

1909: "but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the 'moving pictures.' "

1926: "Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?"

1954: "All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers"

1956: "The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers;"

2005: "The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children"

Read about Ann Coulter's new book.

O Ann, I am your only faithful fan.
Conservatives may buy your books, but they
Don't see your ploy, your pocket-lining plan

To market pseudoscience to your prey
By tugging on their xenophobic fears.
I love the way you gather what they say,

Then sell it, packaged—all they want to hear.
But Ann, my love, the thing that stokes my lust
Is seeing you, so confident, sincere,

Presenting crap, but getting them to trust
Like babies. Through your ballsy lies I can
Adore the noxious dreck that should disgust.

Naively, they respect you as a man;
O Ann, I am your only faithful fan.

(Crossposted from PhaWRONGula)

On 3 Quarks Daily (quoting The New York Times) I see that Finland is entering a metal band in the Eurovision Song Contest. 

I don't know what to think. Does this make Eurovision better, by cutting a slash into its saccharine blancmange? Does it take away the one redeeming feature of Eurovision, its unapologetic bouncy campness? Or does Lordi fit right in, another I-can't-believe-it's-not-plastic fabrication? 

I expect that it will do little to change the image of Eurovision, but it does help to reposition Finland. For some reason, this quote made me smile: "Lordi represents a rebellion by Finns who are saying, 'Hey we are not all the Nokia-wielding people the government would like you to think we are.' "

Do you fear the rise of the machines?

For decades writers have been predicting the subjugation of humans to robots, or to a super AI. The created slave becomes the master. We lose our freedom, our enjoyment of life. Would I be stretching the bounds of credibility if I suggested that the robot revolution is already proceeding as predicted? I had to ring up a bank today.

Evil upon evil upon evil. First, take a run-of-the-mill pop-love-twee-gush-song from the '80s. Next, create an emotionless cover of that song with extra dollops of soporific. Then shred it through a band-mangled tweeterless wooferless telephone audio system, and then butcher it into four and a half bar chunks between adverts for bank services, canned messages to acknowledge that you're still on a queue, regular reassurances that your call is important, and messages to suggest that you dial 1 to try a customer self-serve abomination to avoid the further embarrassment of this phone queue. Admit it, loser: if you hang around waiting for a real human to talk to, you're a frightened luddite, unfit to enjoy the sparkling future of automated banking services.

Why did I have to subject myself to such debasement at the "hands" of a machine? I could have hung up at any time. I could have wandered away from the phone and left it off the hook in a symbolic gesture of defiance. But, I needed information. They had something I wanted. The machines have inserted themselves between providers and consumers. They've found that perfect leverage point. Drive your wedge between vendor and customer and you can control the world. The rise has begun.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

O girlish poets
Poetry lesson
iTunes home video
Maggot Cheese
Pokemonetisation (via)
PBF Archive (via)

What if, instead of teacher, farmer and botanist, Robert Lee Frost had been a software geek?

I have been one acquainted with the code.
I have debugged, with sources and without.
I have recursed and watched my stack explode.

I have outsourced through times of talent drought.
I have despaired when projects overrun
On schedules pert with hope and gant of doubt.

I have denied the pigment of the sun
And bested night on caffeine pulse and will.
This exponential journey I've begun

(As kiddies swarm, precoc'd with leeter skill,
Uncultured by the baggage that has slowed
My uptake rate) may seem quixotic. Still,

I come with nerdy aptitude bestowed;
I have been one acquainted with the code.

Last day before freeze;
Feel the fragility of
Unguided design.

This should have been written a couple of days ago. Now that the software in question is frozen there's time to stop and rant at the unbelievably inept interface design that caused last minute defects.

How to know when your religion is a fabrication:

• When your omnipotent deity, for some reason, relies heavily on fallible human followers to perform physical actions.
• When the natural events that you attribute to your deity affect believers and unbelievers alike without discernable favour.
• When you know it must be true because of all those other intelligent people who believe it.
• When you interpret people's dismissive reaction to it as being proof that you're onto something.
• When the only way you can understand modern science is to assume all scientists are conspiring against your deity.
• When the only way you can understand other religions is to assume that a malevolent entity is blinding or influencing their followers.
• When the only place you need to look to improve your understanding is within your religion's published literature.
• When you know that scholars who share your religion are inherently more trustworthy than other scholars.
• When you think that a few provably true statements in its teachings validate the rest.
• When your unchanging deity, on record as having demanded complete slaughter of an unbelieving tribe (including babies) is your definition of love, mercy, and justice.
• When the other religions are based on stuff made up by people, but yours is based on divinely inspired teaching delivered through divinely selected prophets.
• When there are definitely no inconsistencies in it, but it does have difficult issues that are beyond mere human understanding.
• When you know that its teachings were misapplied in the past with horrible consequences, but believe that your current interpretations and their social implications are correct.
• When figures claiming to speak for your religion express foolish and intolerant views, but you won't publicly denounce them for fear of either (a) presenting a divided view, or (b) being seen as having less faith or piety.
• When it teaches you to ascribe all happy experiences to your deity, and all unhappy experiences to other sources.
• When any good you do is merely an expression of your deity's goodness, but any evil you do is of your own sinful nature.
• When speaking against it would break your relationship with your parents.
• When it tries to make you happy about a loved one's death.

If any of the above signs are evident in your religion, seek advice from a freethinker.

I just saw the first episode of the new Dr Who (New Earth). It was pathetic, shallow, filled with plot holes, inconsistencies, and glaringly stupid "science". It didn't let me suspend disbelief with fun science fiction. It kept hammering impossibilities at me without any covering pretense of futuristic technology. There was so much in that episode that fell so far short of the standard set in the previous season that I'm guessing that whole episode will turn out to be a dream, a fantasy going on in Rose's head. If not, then the BBC must've made an executive decision to target the 6-9 year old market.

20 Worst Agents (via)
Back to the Garden
Sleep retardant
The Essential Man
Area51 on April 1st
Full time line (via)

I tip my hat to Dan Brown. He's got some of the longest reaching publicity machines in the world spreading the word about his book, The Da Vinci Code. And they're doing it for free. What more could Dan ask, than the very public personal disapproval of head of the Anglican Church, Rowan Williams.

Opening the cover of The Da Vinci Code (via Amazon), we read, "All of the characters and events in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."  But, since the story is set in a world we know (or think we know), with a recorded history that is patchy at best and written by people who had the power to write it, Dan had the liberty to create a backstory for his page-turner that matched a number of our "generally accepted historical facts", and interpolated the rest to fit. Readers are left to decide what is fiction and what is real. Dan mentions enough historic places that readers can visit to verify that his story setting is real. He knows how to spin a good story.

Why does the church disapprove? Not because Dan's version of history is provably wrong, but because it sounds at least as plausible as the traditional religious interpretations. It forces inquisitive people to start asking questions about the origins of the teachings they'd been taught not to question. It points to the problem of "revealed" stories: who did the revealing and why should we trust them? What's amusing is that everytime a religious authority speaks out against a new heresy, they promote the existence of the heresy. Things were so much easier in the early days when books (and heretics) disappeared when you burnt them.

Let's not stop with Fibs, or with prime numbers or pi digits for syllable counts. John Conway's Audioactive Sequence provides a simple syllable pattern for writing incredibly natural poetry that simply overflows with the idealistic purity of mathematical structure. It's simple. It's elegant. It's geeky. Therefore we must use it.

Here are the first six strings in the sequence:

1
11
21
1211
111221
312211

Dude!
I'm a
techno-geek
who's never thought of
why one should bother learning how
poetry can convey feelings in words.

(or Finding Fibonacci through Apophenia)

I looked at the recent rash of Fibonacci sequence poems on Slashdot. After a very short time it became apparent how ill-suited the monotonically growing sequence is to syllable counts in a poem. Were I to write in ever-increasing circles, beginning in stark poetry and fading to unbroken expanses of prose, then the mathematics of Fibonacci would be ideal. I don't write like that. Nor does any poet who wants to communicate. There is no naturalness about this mash up of geometry and verse, no mystic meshing of platonic form with concrete lyric.

The limited form suggested by Gregory K. (1/1/2/3/5/8) has a certain elegance, but to begin with two single-syllable lines strikes me as artificial (even pretentious), and the final eight-syllable line lacks any conclusion; it leaves the thought dangling. Compare this with the cinquain (2/4/6/8/2), where the final two-syllable line completes the poem. I find the cinquain far more satisfying.

There are many increasing sequences of syllables that would do just as well as the Fibonacci sequence. It fits a pattern that we associate with stories. The initial short lines give little information, thereby asking a question and begging the listener to anticipate an explanation. The gradual lengthening of lines builds steadily to a climax (and hopefully a resolution). The fact that the first few terms of the Fibonacci sequence seem to fit this pattern is attributable to the law of small numbers. I view it in the same vein as the supposed match between Fibonacci and limericks.

Fibs do have a number of redeeming qualities: catchy name; easy structure to remember; high geek-factor; and they're an alternative to haiku. I guess that means they're destined to spread through the blogosphere.

Easter Sunday
The Last Dalek
Persinger's Hat
Neurotheology (via)
Wombat!
Fashion footwear (via)

It's fun to go through the miscellaneous notes that I've jotted down while browsing and musing. In most cases I remember what triggered the thoughts, so they don't seem really weird to me. For your entertainment, I shall present a selection from the past few months in chronological order, but completely without context. Voila! Instant illusion of weirdo.

• She sings her Truth into the spotless cradle
• PR wins. There is no penalty for unapologetic dishonesty.
• Some products work by good luck rather than good management.
• Here you go, little world--a nice comfy handbasket. Enjoy the ride.
• "You are mine"--words that never express love
• The humourless are on the warpath.
  Time to rally to the defence of irreverence.
• Consciousness is the recognition of self as a continuing entity
• See, this lad who had thought about thinking,
  then thought about what he had done--
  he had an aversion to boundless recursion
  so made the mistake of assigning a fake
  sense of self to reflections and deep introspections,
  finding hierarchies where there were none.
  
• I love the complex interplay of prude and lewd,
  the greying borders of might and right and rite,
  of foreign and fear,
  the religiously sharp perimeter of empathy.
  
• Punctures are red,
  Bruises are blue;
  I'd colour your world
  If it wasn't taboo.
• TV series: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement--The Next Generation
• I went to the classroom of science,
  And heard what I could not believe:
  An argument wholly of holes
  That only the holy perceive.
• Neologism of the day: Ununderestimable.
• To foster evil: assume that your neighbour's current life is less important than what will follow it.
• DD word: Swashbucklectomy
• Hacking night through harrowed lungs
• Dear Teddy, your left ear must Gogh.
• Bernice Binturong
  

Fart rocket patent (via)
Just another target (via)
Lucky Kentucky
Brits don't panic
Faerie's Aire
Schrodinger's War (via)

Dancing cat (via)
Kittenpile!
MtG Redemption (via)
Tiktaalik
Satan's helper (via)
Embryo taphonomy

This morning I stayed in bed and read. Lazy Sunday morning. April Fool's day was over for another year. Our (Socar, myself, and some help from Sica) prank had run its course and entertained a few. We'd managed to get our mythical Howard Glassman interviewed on a popular weblog. We'd drawn comments (both bemused and annoyed) from Neil Gaiman's fans in a number of web communities.

But, we'd failed. Neil hadn't shown the slightest inkling of awareness.

A little after 10am, I wandered over to the computer, bearing coffee and reheated leftovers for breakfast. My Sunday morning changed in 30 seconds when I opened my browser and chat windows. Neil blogged our prank... NEIL BLOGGED OUR PRANK! Poisson d'Avril, and other interesting dishes. (No, I don't believe Neil swallowed our hoax at face value and was completely taken in. If you're a regular reader of his journal, you'd know that he remains skeptical about what he reads on the web. His entry title should give you a clue.)

Socar (the one with the inspiration and wonderful Howardly writing) has a selection of responses. Here are a couple more:

From Robin Slick: In her own write

Neil! Susan! We've been duped!
...
Me sulking and then totally perplexed altogether

Wow. And just a few hours ago I was sulking that Neil Gaiman had linked Susan Henderson in his blog instead of me --the self-proclaimed Empress of Cyberworld -- as concerns the lunatic I told you about who was eating all of Neil's books.

But the story has now taken a strange, bizarre twist.

Guys? We've been duped.

In fact, we have been hornswoggled.

Ha! Brilliant!

From film ick

Strange Man Eats The Compleat Works Of Neil Gaiman
I saw this link on Neil Gaiman's blog. It seems like a brilliant marketing ploy, and I don't know for sure that it isn't.

But it might just be the work of a complete and utter lunatic.

Or maybe, to be fair, an odd-witted performance artist who needed a little more fibre in his diet.

When catching up on some delayed blog reading over at tisiwoota, I noted Shameless Adulation of Virgil and Socar.

...Unlike those wannabes who think they’re being sooo clever by posting on March 30 rather than April 1, these pros get their pranks rolling a full month in advance. And boy are they elaborate...

Google Romance

Here Be Dragons

President Bush Beyond 2008

China Buys Google

Euclid's Fourteenth Book

Summary of April 1st on Wikipedia