Rhymes in poetry one doesn’t like seem silly whereas rhymes in poetry one likes don’t. Is my theory. And I’m gonna test it! By giving the rhymes without the poetry. The theory states that it’s difficult to tell which rhymes are stupid and which aren’t. Okay. You can do this in two ways: just guess which ones are “real” poets and which are trashy pop, or actually try to map the rhymes to the rhymers.

Rhymes:

1) ash / abash / clash / man / can

2) year / here / too / renew / age / page / join / coin

3) away / day / disappear / hear / night / right / fast / last

4) way / lay / say / ring / sing

5) knew / chew / doubt / out / cried / subside / losing / amusing

6) seen / been / hold / told / skies / eyes

7) run / sun / weep / sleep / deep

8) more / shore / still / hill / tree / me / farm / harm / gave / grave

9) me / free / shoe / through / rule / pool / drool

10) true / you / know / below / pay / away

Sources:

a) Keats
b) Byron
c) Britney Spears (lyric presumably written by someone else)
d) The Eagles
e) A. E. Housman
f) Leonard Cohen
g) D. H. Lawrence
h) Led Zeppelin
i) Paul Anka
j) Philip Larkin

Now that I look at these the task seems quite impossible unless you can actually recognise some of the poems/songs. The correct answers may be found here (so as not to spoil anyone reading the comments). Maybe I’ll do a Finnish one later.

Some guy running for senate in Idaho has changed his name to Pro-Life because he wants that phrase to appear on the ballot. Huh.

I’ve been hankering for a [dvd-]viewing marathon of some kind over Easter, but nobody’s called me and I can’t stoop so low as to call anyone so I’ve just been moping around the place drinking beer in my underwear. If this makes someone feel guilty, good. Although I’m almost certain it won’t. (I dropped New York for this?!)

If you’ve bought some other mämmi than Kymppimämmi for Easter, you should be ashamed of yourself. It’s people like you that keep lesser mämmis like Saarioinen and Oululainen from dying out. My local shop doesn’t have any defrosted Kymppimämmi – oh no, they’re stocking the abomination to God that is Saarioinen. I just don’t understand some people.

Fullerenes are one of the more shocking things in chemistry. They are extremely stable structures (spheres, spheroids, tubes, sheets) made out of carbon, an element that’s otherwise so complexly reactive that it’s the basis of organic chemistry which seems to constitute half of all of chemistry. Sixty carbon atoms can be organised into a tiny spherical fullerene shell of great tensile strength (relative to size) that can contain other things. The fullerene is practically non-reactive so it doesn’t react with what’s inside, and what’s inside doesn’t get out because the fullerene is wrapped around it. But that’s a pretty unusual situation – typically they’re just inert blobs that can be found wherever organic material gets burnt.

But fullerenes weren’t the crazy thing I wanted to write about. You know how radiocarbon dating works, right? The carbon floating around in the atmosphere is partly unstable carbon-14 because cosmic rays keep making it, so we can date dead things by looking at their carbon isotope distributions (which started diverging from atmospheric carbon when the thing died because it stopped exchanging carbon with its environment but the carbon-14 kept on decaying into stabler isotopes). And you’ve probably read about how you can drill through thick ice to find very old air trapped in little bubbles and analyze the gas distribution inside to figure things about what the Earth used to be like. This is like a combination of those things and fullerenes.

It’s speculated that the mass extinctions that separate the Permian period from the Triassic period were due to some cataclysmic event, like a big rock from space hitting the planet. When something like that happens there’s a lot of pressure and high temperatures at the place of impact, so lots of unusual things happen. Like atmospheric molecules minding their own business getting rammed into other things at high energies. One particular thing that can happen is a noble gas (which are naturally found in low densities in the air) getting trapped inside a fullerene ball. This is obviously a pretty stable combination – noble gases don’t react much with anything and fullerene doesn’t react much with anything. So at an old impact site you can find fullerene with some helium and argon trapped inside it. And as it happens, like with carbon, the isotope distribution of old, trapped noble gases will be different from the atmospheric stuff. So we can date the gas! The people who wrote this paper did just that, and found supporting evidence for the space-rock theory.

You gotta love how things come together in science. It works, bitches!

I’ve been reading King Harold’s Saga, a fascinating history contained in Heimskringla (“Orb of the World”), recorded by Snorri Sturluson. The paperback of King Harold’s Saga I have has a brief biography of Sturluson like it would of any modern author, with one cool difference:

Snorri Sturluson was born in 1179 and brought up at Oddi, the home of an aristocratic and cultured family in the south of Iceland (1181-1201). He then lived as a wealthy landowner, politician and lawyer, and was Lawspeaker of the Althing from 1215-18 and 1222-31. He visited Norway twice, 1218-20 (when he also went to Sweden) and 1237-9. In 1241 Snorri Sturluson was killed by his enemies.

I can’t think of a better way to end my life than to be killed by my enemies, but unfortunately my enemies are not very likely to kill me. They are weak! Maybe I could find better ones if I sweep on with thrashing oar and make my only goal the western shore.

…is that “the people” don’t get it, like it or care about it. I’ll complain more about this later, but now I just wanted to quote the following tantalising nugget the BBC offered on yesterday’s pi day:

While there are many infinitely long numbers in maths, pi is the only one in which an infinitely simple idea – the circle – unfolds into an infinitely complex value. This paradox drives many people to distraction.

When you combine infinite simplicity and infinite complexity you get infinite stupidity. And of course to round off the article there has to be a “the world is mystical and unfathomable even to scientists so no need to feel bad about being stupid” moment supported by the existence of irrational numbers:

In this age of high-tech precision instruments, where we assure ourselves that perfection is attainable, pi is an ever-present, sometimes grating reminder that there are puzzles that can be solved and there are mysteries that, perhaps, can not.

Damn those irrational numbers, getting in the way of our secular conspiracy to understand the world! If it weren’t for them, we could measure everything! EVERYTHING, I tell you!

For several hours today Paavo Väyrynen acted as prime minister in the absence of Matti Vanhanen. Leading opposition figures have evacuated to Åland and declared a sovereign Finnish state there. The police is urging the public to remain calm. Suicide pills are being distributed in preparation of a recurrence.

I feel so dirty! There should have been a warning of some kind.

Some comedian I once saw had a bit about the phrase “adult language”, bemoaning the death of it. He said that the words we consider “adult” aren’t really adult at all, because kids understand words like shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits perfectly well. Adult language should really be the type of language adults use to talk about serious and complicated things; that’s what kids usually really don’t understand.

“Action movie” is a bit like that. Action movies are considered to be movies with lots of fighting, driving and exploding – but that’s really a rather small subset of the action that goes on in the world. I recently saw There Will Be Blood, and it was an action movie in the more literal sense: not much dialogue (or: big long sequences without any dialogue) and almost everything described by showing people doing things, ie. by action. Probably a quarter of the footage was of men doing some sort of physical labour, albeit most of it in the first half. Everything of value on the screen suggested the absurd amount of work people have had to do to produce it, not to mention the work historically needed to technologically get to the point where it’s possible to produce. It was the action that gave meaning to everything else, including the dialogue.

Also: There Will Be Blood has one of the most interesting and appropriate scores I’ve heard, ever. Great film.

Eugenics is one of those words I knew to be terrible before I even knew what it actually meant. Something disturbing and creepy, invented by people who hate humanity. The first two things that come to mind from the word now are the Nazi holocaust and the compulsory sterilisations of insane and mentally retarded people in Sweden – both sinister events that continue to cause feelings of shame. Of course, eugenics is now happily buried and forgotten. Except that it isn’t. Most people who get pregnant have their fetuses screened for certain developmental problems, and most (as in over 90%) people who get confirmation of something like Down’s choose to abort their babies. Morally, this turns out to be a lot more acceptable than allowing the baby to live and sterilising it – for reasons I don’t entirely understand.

Why exactly does a prospective parent choose to do that? I’ve understood it’s because they feel that having the baby would cause both their lives and the life of the baby to be more unpleasant than is desirable. That’s understandable. Down’s causes a variety of health problems – but I suspect only one of them is at issue here. Wikipedia says “most individuals with [Down’s] syndrome have mental retardation in the mild (IQ 50–70) to moderate (IQ 35–50) range”. That really is problematic. Nobody cares that people with Down’s look different, and I’m pretty sure parents could take the general health problems (increased risk of heart problems, hearing problems, low fertility) in a baby with normal intelligence. But the thought of having a child that will never be much good at anything, who one couldn’t have a conversation with, who will be determined to be inferior on sight by almost everyone he ever meets is heartbreaking.

So we as a society have determined that fetuses that can be identified in the womb as having sufficiently low intelligence are ok to abort. That’s a kind of eugenics, although it’s really done more for our general comfort – institutionalised retarded people don’t procreate very much anyway (then again, that’s a specific goal of the institutions). What about the heavy-duty stuff, like Nobel-winner William Shockley’s suggestion that people with low IQ’s (he suggested < 100) would be paid money in exchange for getting sterilised? People have a far stronger negative response to that idea, but I'm not sure why. After all, it would be totally voluntary. If there were a law that offered just me, personally, money for getting sterilised, that would just be a bonus. If I ever wanted it, it'd be there. But people are more offended by some group they identify with being targetted than by personal targetting. (Sidenote: someone recently told me that there are private abortion clinics in the US that you can donate money to to be used specifically for aborting fetuses of a certain race, typically blacks. Pretty sick, but curiously something we all seemed to think should not be illegal.) People who I've mentioned the Shockley idea to have tended to reject it on grounds of social justice: rich stupid people wouldn't need the money, so this would be biased against poor people having children. (Interestingly, they don't bring along the supporting argument that poverty and stupidity are strongly correlated, but such are the requirements of political correctness.) But there's already a strong disincentive against poor people procreating. If a billionaire has children, the effect on the wealth he can spend on himself is unchanged. If a wealthy person has children, it will be the most significant drain on his financial resources during his entire life. If a poor person in a country without social benefits has children, he's pretty much accepting that he'll be poor forever and that this way he'll have someone to feed him gruel when he's senile. Actually, the implications of this are known also to people who aren't Nazi zombies: one of the stated aims of most aid programmes in the poorest parts of the world is to reduce fertility by educating the women, and sometimes by other means. A couple of generations on, the poor of the world would do well to focus on improving their lives and societies instead of having lots of children as a kind of pension system. We're currently waging an existence war against the poor - the eugenicists want to wage one against the stupid. Then again, as I said earlier, we are already waging one against the stupid, just with a rather low lower bound for intelligence. The Down’s situation suggests that we don’t want people with IQ’s lower than about 70. It’s chilling, but it’s also true. Or do you feel moral outrage against the pregnant couples who make these choices? It’ll be interesting to see what “feels” moral with genetic engineering and another five billion people on the planet.

Normal service suspended – enjoy this rubbish cultural retrospective instead

B.B. King:

As long as payin’ I’m the bills, woman
I’m payin’ the cost to be the boss

I tell you I’ll gonna handle all the money,
And I don’t wanna no back talk
‘Cause if you don’t like the way I’m doing,
Just pick up your things and walk

Paul Anka:

Well she always knows her place
She’s got style, she’s got grace, she’s a winner
She’s a lady – whoa whoa whoa, she’s a lady
Talkin’ about that little lady, and the lady is mine

Well she never asks for very much and I don’t refuse her
Always treat her with respect, I never would abuse her
What she’s got is hard to find, and I don’t want to lose her

Led Zeppelin:

Working from seven to eleven every night,
It really makes life a drag, I don’t think that’s right
I’ve really, really been the best of fools, I did what I could
‘Cause I love you baby, how I love you darling,
How I love you baby, how I love you girl, little girl
But baby, since I’ve been loving you I’m about to lose my worried mind, oh yeah

Please don’t pay attention to the chronology. Just absorb the truth.

Or: the world has traded stylish scoundrels for stolid ones. Think about it, man! But more on that later.

They say only boring people talk about the dreams they’ve been having, so here (and yes, I’ve been sleeping a lot better):

1) At one point during a long and complicated dream I was in a hurry somewhere. I want to get across a street but it’s full of cars. The traffic eventually comes to a halt, but there’s no gap between the stopped cars. For some reason I think the normal way to act in this situation is to get in a car by the back door and then get out through the other side, but as soon as I do this, the car starts moving again and I realise this wasn’t the normal way to act after all. I realise that the car is in fact a taxi, but the driver nevertheless knows that I was just confused and don’t actually want a ride in the taxi. He doesn’t say anything for a while, just drives the car for a couple of blocks, stops the car and says that it’s all right and that I can just get out. As a consolation, he hands me a gift wrapped in brown paper. It’s very embarrassing.

2) Last night I had some difficulty getting back to sleep after I’d woken for some reason and I kept checking the time to see how little sleep I was going to get at best (yes, this is totally pointless). Suddenly I realise it’s actually late in the morning and I’m going to be late for my exam! Then I wake up, feeling exactly the same as in the dream with everything around me looking exactly the same way, and the clock on my phone says it’s still night. This was strangely creepy. Also: a dream about insomnia. I think this is a first for me.

3) Later in the same night I had a dream in which I was supposed to be auditioning to be a singer in a band. I was very nervous about it because I can’t sing, but when I turn up the band says that there’s no need to bother with the audition and that they’ll take me anyway. This makes me feel even more nervous. All morning after waking up I thought about taking singing lessons.

And now for a brief salvo in my ongoing personal vendetta against Suvi Lindén, from her interview in the mtv3 news:

Toimittaja: Kuitenkin nämä tämän lain kriitikot sanovat sitä, että laki sinänsä ei auta sitä perimmäistä asiaa eli sitä että, että lapsen seksuaalinen hyväksikäyttö tai tämmöisen materiaalinen levittäminen estyisi. Mitä te siitä ajattelette?

Viestintäministeri Suvi Lindén (puhelimessa): Olen kyllä heidän kanssaan siinä mielessä vähän eri mieltä, että tämä laki on tehty toisaalta estämään, estämään lapsipornografian levittämistä tuolla netissä, mutta myös estämään, sanotaanko, lasten ja nuorten surffatessa netissä heidän pääsy, pääsy tämän tyyppisille sivuille. Ja, ja siinä suhteessa uskon, että se lain tarkoitus jota varten se on säädetty ainakin osittain toteutuu. On varmasti paljon muitakin keinoja joilla, joilla tätä, tätä asiaa hoidetaan ja näitä keinoja tulee käyttää ja se on paljolti kiinni poliisin yhteistyöstä sitten kansainvälisesti ja, ja niin edelleen, mutta uskon kyllä, että tällä lailla on oma paikkansa tässä kokonaisuudessa.

I knew it! The justifications for the censorship legislation have all been lies and they’re not even embarrassed. Youth of Finland, you’re in safe hands. Now bite them.