Chapter Six

Haven't written anything for the Doktorling for a while but here's an episode from a few years ago.

“You can’t bring that into my pub!” Ed growled. He had changed T-shirts. The new one was marked out in lines which divided his chest into Chuck, Brisket, Blade, Thin Rib, Thick Rib, Sirloin, Skirt and Flanks.

“Bring what? Ai, ai, aiKIdo!” Coleridge was a sneezing picture of innocence.

“That dog. That long-haired scruffy thing stumbling around at the end of that piece of string.”

Porlock fumbled in a top pocket for his cigarette case. He had been seated at the bar for some time, watching Polly playing with a set of cuff-links. “You will have to be more specific than that,” he pointed out.

“The scruffy long-haired thing on the other end of the string from Coleridge.”

“Ah, that dog,” Coleridge admitted. “I will have you know that Lassi here is a Nepalese Curry Hound, of the finest pedigree, borrowed from an Indian restaurant. Kunggg…FU!”

“Let me remind you of the ‘No Dogs’ rule in my pub, a rule which I enforce with unbending severity, because otherwise people would bring in talking dogs. And that would lead inevitably to a veritable plague of talking animal jokes.”

And live alone in the bee-loud clade

Last night's meeting of the Old Entomologist Writers' Group and Tagmosis in Basal Hexapod Taxa Working Party was standing room only, followed later by falling-down room only, for word had leaked out that Another Kiwi would be reading a newly completed chapter from his work-in-progress, Rise of the Cladists.

Historic events are seen through the eyes of two academic clans, entwined by intermarriage. While some siblings seek common ground with the cladists as they infiltrate editorial boards of influential journals and the election panels for endowed university chairs, others resist. So far in this magisterial re-telling of the cladistic revolution, the characters have little inkling that Hennig and his cadre of cladistic taxonomists -- with their ruthless ambition, their unbending discipline and their single-minded mastery of committee protocol -- will one day crush the old guard of Linnean systematists underfoot, and wield unfettered power over the field of biological classification. Academic politics and the workings of Wagner's dendrogram algorithm have never been more exciting!

Caminacules: Weir in ur punch-cards, eatin ur chads!

I have advised AK, however, to tone down his portrayal of the Fortey character. It would not be good if the real Fortey saw through AK's roman à clef, for the last person who dissed him was subsequently eaten alive in unexplained circumstances by anthropods from a class that went extinct 250 million years ago.

The atmosphere in the Old Entomologist was electric when AK reached the pivot of Chapter 7, in which Victor blurts out the taboo word 'symplesiomorphy' and the dinner guests react in their different ways to the shifting allegiances he has inadvertently exposed. The atmosphere would probably have been less electric without the Van der Graaf generators on the bar, but I had to put them somewhere while the Frau Doktorin was spring-cleaning.

Did someone say "Van der Graaf Generator"?

Fans will be delighted to learn that when it is completed, Rise of the Cladists will only be the first volume of a trilogy tetralogy pentalogy, with future titles provisionally including A Dance with Taxonomists and A Feast for Crown Taxa.

The Tetralogy of Fallot turned out to be not as exciting as I expected.

UPDATED with bonus yoga-pose slugs for Kathleen.
These are the Caminalcules, originally created in a cladist's laboratory for teaching purposes in the re-education camps, but they escaped into the wild and became a common pest of salted pineapples.

Also this post needs more Allegorical Paintings of Cladists Rescuing Taxonomy from the Decadent Linnean Establishment.

I've been searching, searching

Today's search terms bringing visitors to the sumptuously-appointed and recently made-over Riddled premises include:

• lancome julia roberts banned
• log splitter woodcut
• ophiocordyceps sinensis
• red deer cross
• erotic asphyxiation
• stilt costume

and the perennial favourite, 'penisworm'. Last week's surge of inquiries about 'mimic octopus' turned out to be a passing fad.

I blame Darren Naish for shifting Tetrapod Zoology from its old address to a new affiliation with Scientific American. Now all the Tet Zoophiles cannot find it so they congregate at Riddled instead hoping to assuage their cravings for cervid miscegenation and giraffe autoasphyxiation. We try not to be judgemental but you are all dirty dirty people.

At the same time we try to keep our customers happy, even the deer fetishists, so here's an inflatable reindeer orgy:
That's not something you see every day (unless of course you visit this site at 24-hour intervals).

Thank you sir, may I have some more?

The newest poll of New Zilders, shows that the god-damned National party is perceived by 49% of the voters as having a good economic plan. Which is crap, the National parties plan for the economy consists of burning down the house after flogging off the few remaining trinkets.
These are the economic geniuses who are facing the biggest ever debt repayment in November (mainly because of..wait for it, wait for it...TAX CUTS!!!. In case you missed it that's the biggest debt repayment ever.
Whilst we have a shrinking public service and the risk of a jobless recovery at the beginning of the year turned out to be no risk, a dead certainty, actually. And even the usual rabid badgers can see That unemployment isn't working to steal an '80's slogan.
But still 49% think that these arseclowns deserve another go at the economy because that's it what it will come down to and they might just kill it off this time. And the mean spirited, arsehole side of NZers will like it.They are not the ones who will suffer and it is at least, not giving in to the radical Maori which is where the real threat to NZ lies.

Another exclusive Riddled Interview

Also shouts at clouds

Good morning, Viscount Monckton.

If you think it's morning then you are blindly accepting what the papers tell you. You have not invested anything like my own independent investigation of the question.

You are in Australia to promote the House-of-Lords-Membership Denialism cause, is that correct?

That is outrageous balderdash!*

But...

'Denialist' is a loaded pejorative term, made up by people who are afraid of debate. It implies that there is a consensus among peerologists and lordologists as to who belongs to the House of Lords; and that dissent is confined to a tiny minority of cranks with easily-discounted opinions. This impression of consensus and unanimity does not stand up to rigorous inspection for one moment. For every so-called 'expert' with a vested interest who says I am not a member of the House of Lords, there is another expert, equally-qualified, who says I am. The latter group, however, has no representation in politics or journalism. That is why I am touring this benighted country to set the story straight.

Surely the appropriate experts on whether you belong to the House of Lords are the House of Lords themselves --

Don't call me 'Shirley'.

-- and they say No, your viscountcy entitles you to call yourself 'Lord', but you are not one of the 92 hereditary peers who sit in the upper house of the English Parliament.

Poppycock and balderdash. There is no credibility to the views of an elitist, self-selected group who have inherited their position through accident of birth. My own position -- supported by experts chosen by me -- is that I am entitled to be part of that elitist self-selected group.

They quote the 1999 House of Lords Act.

That law does not have the import that the House of Lords and various judges have given to it.

Do you have legal expertise, Viscount?

That law does not have the import that the House of Lords and various judges have given to it.

Viscount, there are also divided views as to your membership of various other organisations: the Velvet Vice Gentlemen's Club (of Old Compton St., Soho); the Air Baltic Frequent Fliers Club; the Ooky Spooky Fan Club. The organisers maintain that you have not paid the dues or met other criteria for membership, while you say --

As a member of these groups, I have as much right to set membership criteria -- which I happen to meet -- as the organisers do. Why are they trying to shut down debate?

---------------------------------------------------

Balderdash anders

Viscount Christopher Monckton also espouses unconventional views about climate change (not to mention his cure for AIDS, and sundry other disputes about reality and history). Australian journalists continue to interview him as if he were a sane person, and quote his speeches against carbon-emission legislation... possibly his speaking tour is credible because well-funded institutions are paying for it. Sadly, he is not extending his tour to include New Zealand so we miss out. We didn't get the Yes 35^th Anniversary tour either.

* No relation.

There’s a complete lack of rigor involved in the mining exams

Didn't have the Latin for judicial inquirin'

The first phase of the judicial inquiry into the Pike River Coal-mine disaster has ended,* after so many eyebrow-raising revelations that my forehead has RSI. It appears that the mine company was cash-strapped,² operating a money-hole rather than a mine. Corners were cut; the legally-required emergency exit was placed in the "Nice to have one day" file; urgent warnings about explosive gasses were placed in the circular filing cabinet. The company CEO testified that he never heard those warnings from any of the six people who served as mine manager in two years. All this was possible because a previous Tory government had removed the onerous, innovation-stifling hand of bureaucratic regulation from the mining industry in 1993, and subsequently sacked safety inspectors in 1999, making mining companies responsible for their own health-&-safety (under the oversight of a central inspectorate that at the time of disaster had been reduced to a single person).

We might as well be living in Eastern Europe the US.

Disappointingly, no-one has defended the mine management against the methane-neglect accusation by claiming that the subtle aroma of methane is exactly what distinguishes a productive excavation from one that is mediocre. Thus I am robbed of the opportunity to remark that "great mines stink alike". Also, the Riddled Ethics Committee informs us that it would be exploitative and wrong to make political capital from the Pike Creek Mine disaster inquiry. "You are all loonies," she went on to say.

In contrast, exploiting disasters for commercial gain is in the finest NZ traditions. With that in mind, here at Riddled Research Laboratories we have been working on safe new technologies that can potentially replace traditional mining procedures completely. Here is a peak preview of our Subterrine or Bathyscrape.

The one-man subterrine is cheaper and more maneuverable than the two-man version. However, there is less elbow-room for the operator to chip away at coal once he has encountered a rich seam,³ and a smaller payload to bring back to the surface. Also the rock does not flow around the sides of the subterrine as easily as we had hoped but these are mere teething troubles.

Tea-thing Troubles

* ...It’s safer work, judging, than mining. You’re not troubled by falling coal, for one thing… You get judges remarking on it. They say, “Hello, no much coal falling these days!”

2 The confluence of conspicuous consumption with the S&M scene is not a pretty picture.

3 Then there’s running at the coal face with your ‘ead – one of the worst methods, know as the Bad Method of getting out coal. There there’s scrabblin’ at it with you bare ‘ands, the Almost as Bad Method of getting out coal. And there’s myriad others.

UPDATED with bonus illustration from De re Metallica. Which is totally not a heavy-metal fan site. Also, Agricola is not the name of a rival caffeinated fizzy drink.

Run around in the radiation; run around in the acid rain

Sound-track for Jennifer:

Inquiring minds cannot help noting how closely Andrew Eldritch has modelled his style in Dominion upon that of the blogger of Random Babblings.

You cannae break the laws of physics, Jim

When some reality-challenged transhumanist tells us that within two decades the human/computer interface will consist of injecting our brains with a swarm of subcellular-sized nanobots to stimulate neurons at the molecular level, Jerry Fabin is the person who comes to mind:

Giant Cell invades Earth

It is hard to decide where the gap between the transhumanist vision and the physical constraints of microscopic scale is greatest.* Transhumanists really seem to imagine cellular biochem as if scaled up to the size of a room you can walk into (I blame Will Burtin), with molecules made up of colour-coded balls-&-sticks like they are in high-school chemistry, so the nanobots can use visible-light wavelengths to identify the molecules that surround them.

Evan forbid that the nanobots should have to blunder around blindly, with no way of sensing their neighbourhood other than making and breaking chemical bonds, and no helpful "You Are Here" maps printed on each cell membrane to label it as a cell and help them tell their dendrite from their axon. Without such information, perhaps they would not perform any better than the chaotic, unplanned, thermal-noise-driven processes of normal cell biology; and that would clash with the central assumption that engineers can do better than four billion years of evolution at designing a rational biology.**

Not making this up:

“By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain, that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries, will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment. So this will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses.”

Going into all the conflicts with reality here would involve the Explaining Voice. Fortunately, a neurobiologist has already done the work, pointing out that the brain is not in fact full of empty space through which nanobots might float serenely like so many flying cars converging on the roof-top helipad; but rather is as tightly-packed as a holiday suitcase, with even the gaps between cells filled up with working parts. His like-minded commenters wonder how these myriad nanobots will be powered, and whether a working brain can handle their waste heat (given that the human brain is already pushing the cooling capacity of cerebral circulation, and has no margin for double-clocking).

Other commenters, more optimistic, argue that these concerns are nugatory if the brain in question is already dead, and the nanobots are only destroying it in the process of recording its condition (in order to revive its erstwhile owner's consciousness as a computer emulation). Readers may or may not find consolation in this.

It sounds as if the transhumanist (one Ray Kurzweil) is having belated doubts about the adequacy of existing human/computer interfaces like Dragon Systems.

Ray Kurzweil was disappointed by the absence of catsuited Raquel Welches within the brain's microanatomy.

----------------------------------------------------------

* On-line poll possibility!

** Do you think it could be a control fantasy? Let's ask Old Uncle Bill!

White on white translucent black capes

Here's Ludwig Wittgenstein, getting it wrong on the subject of colour transparency:

(it appears from #146 and #153 that Wittgenstein had never encountered fog).

You know who else had strong opinions about coloured transparency??
The evidence is overwhelming that de Selby and Ludwig Wittgenstein were the same person. Both were obsessed with mirrors and "had some interesting things to say on the subject of houses". Certainly they were never seen together in the same room.
Is it about a zombike?