indessed roscivs

Another one of my all-time favorite short-short stories:

http://www.sumware.com/creation.html

Enjoy!

Just a quick post today, to share one of my favorite short-short stories:

http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html

Enjoy!

I discovered a delightfully prescriptivist web site the other day, called barelybad.com. In characteristically prescriptivist fashion, the site rails against such incorrect usages as “downhill from here,” or phrases such as, “noticed a suspicious parcel,” and terrible atrocities like, “green salad is part of a healthy meal” or “a nominal fee”.

The author continually says such hilariously stereotypically prescriptivist things as,

Yes, this is another one of those distinctions in which I don’t care what the dictionary says, because I’m right.

and

Losing a special, useful vocabulary word to misuse is never desirable.

Take a peek. Even the most prescriptivist among you might find something to chuckle at.

How much do you know about world-renowned cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier? Did you know that Bruce Schneier’s discrete logarithms are uncountable and continuous? Or did you know that Bruce Schneier writes his books and essays by generating random alphanumeric text of an appropriate length and then decrypting it?

These and more wondrous, astounding, and supremely geeky facts about Bruce Schneier can be found at geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts.

Is DST WORTH IT? Boy, Let me tell you a story about the place I come from.

I live in Indiana (a midwestern US state). Up until last year, we’d never done DST before at all (with a few exceptions in towns whose economies were linked to cities across the border in other, DST-observing states).

Before we had DST, it was HELL. All year, it got dark at like 2:00pm. There was no Little League Baseball, no football (American or otherwise) for the kids. Most of our youth joined gangs, who roamed the incessant darkness in large, heavily fortified bad-mpg SUVs, kicking puppies and beating up old ladies just for fun. There was no Christmas and no birthdays, and if we saw the Easter bunny we ATE HIM.

Though many people had the misconception that we were “America’s Breadbasket”, in fact the darkness prevented us from raising any sort of sustenance crops and most of us resorted to cannibalism to survive. Most Hoosiers (that’s what we’re called, it means “land of eternal darkness” in a Native American tongue) eventually starved to death, which was viewed as a welcome respite from the hellish, unstoppable night. Dogs and cats, living together, you get the picture.

Then, we elected a new Governor who brought us into the light (literally). With the introduction of DST, and the seemingly random (almost whimsical, really) distribution of our Counties between two time zones, our lives were changed forever. Now, it’s light outside pretty much twenty-four-fucking-seven. Our kids are all on at least six sports teams and never shoot each other anymore. They call you “sir” or “ma’am” (these words were not used before, as it was difficult to discern gender in the darkness), shine your shoes for you, and present you with ice-cold lemonade from stands with amusingly misspelled signs. We discovered oil everywhere, we grow more crops than the world could ever possibly use (which has ended hunger globally) and we’re all filthy, stinking RICH. All the women have big perky boobs, all the men are RIPPED, and everybody has an IQ of at least 160.

Yes Sir, I don’t know what we’d do if it weren’t for good ol’ DST. I have to assume that with the new DST-extending rule from our good friends in the US Congress, we’ll probably just evolve to a higher state of being and shed these silly, out-dated husks to become super-intelligent beings composed of pure energy.

Shamelessly appropriated from Slashdot.

Isaac Asimov explains Daylight Savings Time:

It turns out that as the days grow long, people sleep through several hours of sunshine in the morning, and then stay up after sunset and consume energy in order to light hours of darkness. If people got up earlier in the summer half of the year and went to bed earlier, some of that energy would be saved.

Can you imagine the American government ordering everyone to wake up an hour earlier and go to bed an hour later just to save desperately needed energy? Why, the American people in their proud independence and individuality would rise as one person and denounce those Washington bureaucrats who tried to tell them when to rise in the morning.

So the government sets up “daylight-saving time” and shoves the clock an hour ahead. When it now says 7 A.M., it’s really 6 A.M. The clock is lying and everyone knows the clock is lying. However—

While Americans would scorn to be slaves to the government, they are pathetically eager to be slaves to the clock. An earnest, well-meaning government may tell them to get up at 6 A.M. instead of 7 A.M. and get a Bronx cheer in return, but when a lying clock tells them to do so, up they get like good little boys and girls.

I’ll leave it to you to work out the moral of the story.

Shamelessly appropriated from concocted glimpse.

Some of you may not have heard the recent debacle in Boston regarding a marketing campaign gone wrong. I’ll give a quick recap here.

There is a TV show on Cartoon Network called Aqua Teen Hunger Force. In January, Lite-Brite style images of one of the show’s characters started showing up in ten major cities such as Portland, Chicago, LA, Seattle, and Boston. These devices were intended to be part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for an upcoming movie based on the show.

The long and the short of the matter is that Boston freaked. They shut down the northbound side of I-93 and parts of the public transit system, sent out “an army of emergency vehicles”, and ended up blowing up the devices with waterbombs.

Meanwhile, the other nine cities were dealing with this obvious terrorist threat in a surprisingly peaceful manner. “At this point we wouldn’t even begin an investigation, because there’s no reason to believe a crime has occurred,” said a Portland Police Sergeant. In Seattle, “To us, they’re so obviously not suspicious,” and “[P]eople don’t need to be concerned about this. These are cartoon characters giving the finger.”

The media stations hyped up the event (particularly upset at the press conference where the “perpetrators” refused to answer any question unless it was related to hair). But online, Boston became the laughingstock of the world. One blog went so far as to create a Bomb or Not? quiz, featuring devices such as shoes and smoke detectors.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end here. Last week, Boston discovered this suspicious-looking device:

Interestingly enough, this was the first question on the “Bomb or Not?” quiz. Also interestingly enough, Boston had a different answer to the question.

There were some tense moments in Boston’s financial district Wednesday morning as police were forced to blow up a suspicious device. The bomb squad shut down busy Devonshire Street after someone spotted a green box chained to a no parking sign. The box turned out to be some kind of traffic counting device and was completely harmless.

Yes, it turned out to be a completely harmless “traffic counting device”! What a big suprise. Watch the Fox News Report, where they show the bomb squad evacuate the area and blow the traffic counter to smithereens. Welcome to “this post-9/11 world.”

The name “roscivs” I’ve used since high school, where one of my Latin classmates gave it to me. (The “v” is pronounced like a “u”, just as it is in Latin.) I’d always assumed that he’d just made up the name, but in my recent googlings I’ve discovered an ancient Roman denarius with an inscription bearing the name of an “L. Roscivs Fabatvs”:

In case you’re wondering where “indessed”—the other half of my blog’s name—comes from, its story is not nearly as interesting. It came from GPW, a program which generates fake words that look as if they should be words by analyzing the frequency that certain combinations of letters exist in real English words (or any other language’s dictionary you analyze). The stated purpose of the program is for generated passwords that are easy to remember, but I typically use it for generating usernames, domain names, and the like.

Thus was born: indessed roscivs.

Speaking of art, sonnets, kwansabas, and more, I particularly love Dinosaur Comics:

Why do artificial constraints on artistic works tend to make them more interesting?

I occasionally read a blog called The Language Log, which is for language nerds what Slashdot is for computer nerds. A few weeks ago I came across a post there (interestingly enough via a Slashdot comment) which had as its final paragraph:

It seems clear to me that nearly all strings of English words you can construct are ungrammatical. Try writing down any random sequence of words (a fully grammatical one if you want to bias things against my claim), either with repetitions or without, it doesn’t matter. With a very few peculiar exceptions, for any string of words you will find that almost every one of the orders in which those words can be arranged will be ungrammatical—exponentially many more are ungrammatical than are grammatical.

The readers were, of course, very curious about this seemingly throw-away comment about the “very peculiar exceptions”. What strings of words could you possibly rearrange arbitrarily and get grammatical sentences? One obviously this not.

Thankfully, the next entry revealed one of these peculiar exceptions: the buffalo sentence.

“Buffalo” is one of those peculiar words that has multiple different meaning. For example, it can refer to the city of Buffalo, New York (home of the Sabres, incidentally, currently the highest-ranked team in the NHL). It can also refer to the animal, the American Bison, either in the singular or the plural. And, finally, the word can be used as a verb meaninig “confuse, deceive, or intimidate”.

So, for some examples:

• Have you ever seen the Buffalo NHL team?
• Did you see the buffalo on their jerseys?
• Did you see Martin Biron get buffaloed by that clever deke?

And now we can start combining them together:

• I don’t think there are any Buffalo buffalo. They’re mostly found further west.
• If one bison got tricked by another bison, do you think you could say that the first buffalo buffaloed the other buffalo?
• If the first bison happened to be from New York, would you say that the Buffalo buffalo buffaloed the other buffalo?
• If this occurrence was routine, would you say that Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo on a regular basis?

It turns out that not only the sentence with four instances of the word “buffalo” happens to be grammatical; in fact, all sentences containing only the word “buffalo” are grammatically correct, no matter how many words they contain. Wikipedia has a few charts and diagrams explaining how this can be the case and provides a few examples. In fact, you don’t even have to rely on the New York meaning of the word in order to produce infinite sentences this way. The previously-mentioned Language Log post even supplies paraphrases for the skeptical. Ah, the joy of homonyms!