Just yesterday, I saw on the news that Bush has a new strategy for Iraq: he'll be giving a series of (ridiculous) speeches aimed at justifying his invasion of Iraq. He still believes his poll numbers are in the tank because Americans have a perception problem. That's perhaps why he…
Post: The word by itself evokes for me a thick, square cedar pole standing up from, and presumably sunk down into the ground, waiting for the laundry line. Suppose you post a letter to the officer who posthumously posted your father to his army post in the post-war era. Words…
To optimize next-generation action-items, it is important to enable leading-edge models to enable one-to-one solutions thereby facilitating aggregate robust portals. Of course, to benchmark front-end paradigms and thereby embrace user-centric architectures is probably a better way to engineer leading-edge metrics.
If you’re wincing at the above paragraph, please forgive me. I’m just having a bit of fun, thanks to a site called “Web economy bullshit generator.” Whenever you press the “make bullshit” button, the site gives you an impressive sounding phrase. This site has many “uses.” For instance, see the comments to the site:
The Web Bullshit Generator is phenomenal…my resume never looked so good!
—Cory L.This is a great job interview prep tool and provides fodder to use on chicks at the bar. I’m also going to use this in preparation for my high school reunion.
—Ryan F.
No one could ever fall for such stilted, meaningless and concocted gibberish, right? Not so fast! Using big words and proper syntax goes a long way to making something appear meaningful. For example, the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, a leading journal of cultural studies contained an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The author was Alan Sokal, a real life physicist at New York University. As indicated here, in an article by the Skeptical Inquirer’s Martin Gardner:
…[Sokal’s] paper included thirteen pages of impressive endnotes and nine pages of references.” But Sokal had actually submitted these 13 pages
Check out the map below. It is a map of the Linguistic Geography of the Mainland United States (a higher resolution version is available here): Imagine that there is some loony person who would argue that the dialect he speaks is the one true, objectively superior dialect and that all other dialects are inferior…
One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a
Cheshire cat in a tree.
‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then,’ said the cat,’ it doesn’t matter.’
Lewis Carrol: Alice in Wonderland
One thing fundamentalists have that many of us lack is a well-practiced response to why they exist and what life is all about. Their response goes something like this: “I am here to serve Jesus Christ so that I can join Him in heaven. How do I serve him? I follow these Ten Commandments.”
Pretty slick, eh? The entire purpose of a human life boiled down to ten seconds.
What about the rest of us? What would we say if someone asked us for our “purpose”? Would we even claim to have “a purpose.” If forced to answer, many of us might say that we’re “trying to get by” or that we’re simply “doing the best we can” or that we try to follow the golden rule. But most of us don’t have anything resembling the simplistic formula of fundamentalists. At first glance, that fundamentalist formula makes fundamentalists look decisive, strong and admirable. This succinct certitude probably gains lots of converts among the many people who join up. In reality, though, such a simple statement of purpose serves only as a mere placeholder that raises (or should raise) hundreds of questions among honest and thoughtful people.
I haven’t worked out any succinct statement regarding …