Randomly Flexible Modalities

When you are a student at MIT and you are in the mood to play a trick on someone, you can’t just Vaseline their doorknob or fiddle with the settings on their spell checker. People expect a little higher grade of tomfoolery from future code writers. So, when these two MIT chums got more bored than usual they decided to play a hoax on the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics! No, seriously!

They sat down and wrote this nifty program that randomly generates scientific research papers, including charts and diagrams and tech-speak so jargon-bloated and convoluted that it’s difficult to distinguish from REAL scientific gibberish (I learned a little of this kind of thing myself, when I took a seminar in Grant Writing) and their paper was accepted for presentation at the conference!

They are now trying to raise money to travel to the conference and give a randomly generated talk on their paper. The event organizers aren’t too excited about that, though, and may not let them in. The paper is hilarious to read because you know it’s fake, and the story also has a link you can follow to randomly generate your own scientific treatise!

GET THE STORY.

The Best Defence…

Already conservatives are on the defensive, trying to calm the irrational fears of the fringe (theological) left of the Church, assuring them that Pope Benedict won’t be that bad. Even FOX News has been sucked into this. Just now I saw a piece all about the concerns of "many American Catholics" that the new Pope is too authoritarian and traditional.

Hel-lo-o-o-o? You could just as easily frame the story this way: "Many American Catholics Elated at Conclave’s Outcome" or "Many American Catholics Eager For New Pope’s Likely Reforms". Why let these shrieking harpies set the agenda?

I confess, I did check in at BeliefNet last night just to revel in Andrew Sullivan’s perplexed rage. His most telling comment was comparing Benedict XVI to JPII. How does Sullivan think the new Pope will stack up against the most beloved figure of modern times? He laments that he will be "even more hardline" than JPII.

Let’s hope pray so!

READ SULLIVAN’S RANT HERE, if you can stomach it. I found it most enjoyable.

Hillary: Less Than Advertised?

HillaryHillary Clinton is being treated as if she’s a political supergenius.

Y’know, you hear all those stories in the press about how she’s "cleverly repositioning" herself to fool voters into thinking that she’s not a shieking, hard-left harpy in anticipation of the 2008 elections, in which she will be a virtually unstoppable juggernaut because she’ll have pulled the wool over the American public’s eyes so completely that we won’t remember she was ever a hard-left harpy and won’t notice all the hard-lefties supporting her in 2008 giving each other all the "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" signs as she says things to further her non-hard-left harpy image.

What a supergenius politician!

OR IS SHE?

Ratz!

Ratzinger_1That’s what I’d be saying if I was disappointed.

But I’m not!

I’m delighted!

YEE-HAW!!!

God bless Benedict XVI!

Man, he wasn’t even done with the Urbi et orbi and I was wanting his first encyclical already.

Good money it’ll be on relativism and hook directly into apologetics.

Habemus confusion

So sometimes the smoke, it’s not so clear whether it’s grey like black or grey like white.

Yesterday’s first appearance of smoke led to cheers in St. Peter’s Square until it became clear that the smoke was black.

Back in 1978, the opposite happened, when the white smoke was initially mistaken for black after the election of John Paul II.

So John Paul II, he said, we should do bells now, not just smoke. You don’t hear bells — no habemus papam.

Okay. But there’s this little problem.

The bells in St. Peter’s Basilica, they ring at noon.

Every day.

This morning they rang at noon as the cardinals were breaking for lunch — after another unsuccessful vote.

While smoke was billowing from the chimney.

Nobody at the Vatican thinks, maybe during the conclave we shouldn’t ring the bells at noon, when people are listening for bells to see if habemus papam?

GET THE (NON) STORY.

Why Dems Losing Culture Wars

On the other hand, not everyone is as comfortable with unrestrained vulgarity as South Park conservatives are.

One particular group that feels less than joyful when vulgarity is being pumped through their TVs are parents with children at home.

Whether South Park conservatives will get less comfortable with filth as they morph into parents is an open question at this point. But what is certain is that an awful lot of parents out there are not comfortable with the tidal wave of filth that is crushing their children thanks to the crudification of TV, movies, and music in our culture.

That kind of thing can have negative political consequences for you if you’re a political party cozying up to Hollywood and other culture poisoners.

SO SAY ONE DEMOCRAT REGARDING HIS OWN PARTY.

EXCERPT:

If the Democratic chieftains in Washington really want a window into why heartland residents are tuning out our party, they should stop huddling with loopy linguists from Berkeley like George Lakoff and just start reading Frank Rich’s commentaries in the New York Times. There they will find a perfect distillation of the arrogance and narrow-mindedness that typifies the cultural thinking of our elites–and turns off red-state voters.

In the view of Mr. Rich and his acolytes, freedom in our culture has been "under attack" ever since 9/11. Indeed, Mr. Rich has argued that this attack is being led by "new Puritans" who want to "stamp out" all that is "joyously vulgar" in American culture and who are fomenting a "government war against indecency" to get the job done.

Once you get past the absurdity of Mr. Rich’s hyperbole–vulgarity, joyous or otherwise, is hardly in retreat–the implications of this mindset and the battle lines it establishes are clear. On one side are the forces of freedom, tolerance, diversity, modernity; on the other those of repression, intolerance, conformity and zealotry. And if you’re not exactly enamored of watching titillating stunts and ads at the Super Bowl with your 6-year-old, you’re part of the TV Taliban.

GET THE STORY.