And so the darkness touches the links, and the darkness tastes their power, and the darkness broods and breeds in its desire. The dragon of the night rises, corporations tangled in its wings. It leaves the links powerless, the search-engines crippled, and the readers lost as the rankings swell like rivers and the paths of cyberspace are flooded.

The name of the darkness is marketing economy, and all it touches turns into tinned, cold meat. —Torill MortensenRagnarok will see no blogs (Thinking with my fingers)

Amusingly oblique but poignant prose.

I shake my angry fist at tinned meat!

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  • I've occasionally used the example of the time in my high school calculus class, when my teacher filled four walls of blackboards by deriving the equation for the area of a circle (or was it a sphere?). After almost a year of calculus, my brain was primed to follow along and understand -- and I was amazed that such a simple equation conceals so many other verifiable truths about geometry. I guess anything can be simple or difficult, depending on the resolution you're using at the time.

  • "...mathematicians labor tirelessly to simplify the world around us..." Dennis, you haven't read my papers, have you? There is a whole mathematics book called, "Maths Made Difficult." It takes 45 pages to get to 1+1=2 :)

  • Yes, Josh, while you mathematicians labor tirelessly to simplify the world around us, we humanities types think up really complex and oblique ways to say simple things!

    In my defense, yesterday was "Blog in Blank Verse" day in my Intro to Literary Study class, so I had to think of some way to fill out the syllables. (That "tinned" is two syllables, by the way.)