Amusing: October 2008 Archive Page

One of my freshmen recently submitted a paper about how to overcome writer's block.  It reminded me of this story, which I came across many years ago and was able to find again fairly quickly with Google. Fun stuff.

The purpose of this sentence (which can also serve as a paragraph) is to speculate that if the Declaration of Independence had been worded and structured as lackadaisically and incoherently as this story has been so far, there's no telling what kind of warped libertine society we'd be living in now or to what depths of decadence the inhabitants of this country might have sunk, even to the point of deranged and debased writers constructing irritatingly cumbersome and needlessly prolix sentences that sometimes possess the questionable if not downright undesirable quality of referring to themselves and they sometimes even become run-on sentences or exhibit other signs of inexcusably sloppy grammar like unneeded superfluous redundancies that almost certainly would have insidious effects on the lifestyle and morals of our impressionable youth, leading them to commit incest or even murder and maybe that's why Billy is strangling his mother, because of sentences just like this one, which have no discernible goals or perspicuous purpose and just end up anywhere, even in mid

Bizarre. A sentence fragment. Another fragment. Twelve years old. This is a sentence that. Fragmented. And strangling his mother. Sorry, sorry. Bizarre. This. More fragments. This is it. Fragments. The title of this story, which. Blond. Sorry, sorry. Fragment after frag- ment. Harder. This is a sentence that. Fragments. Damn good device.

The purpose of this sentence is threefold: (1) to apologize for the unfortunate and inexplicable lapse exhibited by the preceding paragraph; (2) to assure you, the reader, that it will not happen again; and (3) to reiterate the point that these are uncertain and difficult times and that aspects of language, even seemingly stable and deeply rooted ones such as syntax and meaning, do break down. This sentence adds nothing substantial to the sentiments of the preceding sentence but merely provides a concluding sentence to this paragraph, which otherwise might not have one.

This sentence, in a sudden and courageous burst of altruism, tries to abandon the self-referential mode but fails. This sentence tries again, but the attempt is doomed from the start.-- David Moser

From Wired:

During play, the screen background was solid black with a white border, with one color line representing each player.  We displayed the game score in a horizontal strip at the bottom of the screen.  It wasn't the most graphically advanced program, but it was simple and fun.  It looked something like this:

[...]

"Both the AI and the humans had three missiles they could use during the course of the game. When a missile hit a wall, it would create a mini 'explosion' that would erase the color on the background back to black as it faded out - thereby eliminating sections of the trail left by previous cycles."

Soon we had players and computers firing missiles to shoot their way out of tight situations. Nonetheless, Tron purists may scoff, since the movie programs didn't have such luxuries as missiles to get them out of a bind.

[...]

One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to trap itself between its own walls and the bottom game border.  Sensing an impending crash, it fired a missile, just like it always did whenever it was trapped.  But this time was different - instead of firing at another trail, it fired at the game border, which looked like any other light cycle trail as far as the computer was concerned.  The missile impacted with the border, leaving a cycle-sized hole, and the computer promptly took the exit and left the main playing field.  Puzzled, we watched as the cycle drove through the scoring display at the bottom of the screen.  It easily avoided the score digits and then drove off the screen altogether.

Shortly after, the system crashed.

Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen.  The computer had found a way to get out of the game.  When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory - just like in the movie.

Our jaws dropped when we realized what had happened.  (Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs)

I'm saving this for the next time I talk to my journalism students about surveys. Language Log.

Do you think surveys asking for people's opinions about the way things are, rather than verifiable things they have done, are an even more extreme form of stupidity, resulting in nonsense like "43% of employees believe managers may be snooping on them" being passed off as news or even social science?

__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

Does it sometimes occur to you to just refuse to do any more surveys until the morons who make them up show some signs of getting their act together?

__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree