By now you have likely seen Congresswoman Michelle Bachman’s Tea Party reaction to the State of the Union Address. And probably some of the reaction to her brand of revisionist history. If not, the couple of videos here will get you up to speed.

I think I have the whole thing figured out. Bachman has a crush on the founding fathers. She’s got a journal somewhere where she has written “Michelle Adams”, “Michelle Madison”, “Michelle Jefferson” and “Michelle Washington” over and over and over… you can tell she gets excited by the way her quill pen sometimes runs out of ink when she forgets to re-dip it, and the exquisitely curled script becomes illegible. I suspect she ran for Congress when she saw definition 7 while looking for definition 1:

I’ve had broken bones
And kidney stones;
Had migraines wrack my brain
I’ve been cut; I’ve been burned,
And eventually learned
That it doesn’t help much to complain.
I’ve got scars I can trace
Where a dog bit my face
(Well, there’s really no good place to bite us)
Ah, but son of a bitch,
I just can’t stand the itch
Of this damned contact dermatitis!

In the “true tales from the life of Cuttlefish” files, I am going nuts! My hands are shaking with the effort of not scratching (which effort fails miserably), and I can think of nothing but the itching. I want to take a belt sander to my torso, and I think amputating my arms at the shoulder is worth considering. Yes, I’ve called the doctor.

Oh, and all the stuff in the verse is true. The dog was a german shepherd, and it was going for my throat while its owner pulled it back, so it only bit my face. Sitting here, itching, that seems like the good old days.

I’ve had broken bones
And kidney stones;
Had migraines wrack my brain
I’ve been cut; I’ve been burned,
And eventually learned
That it doesn’t help much to complain.
I’ve got scars I can trace
Where a dog bit my face
(Well, there’s really no good place to bite us)
Ah, but son of a bitch,
I just can’t stand the itch
Of this damned contact dermatitis!

In the “true tales from the life of Cuttlefish” files, I am going nuts! My hands are shaking with the effort of not scratching (which effort fails miserably), and I can think of nothing but the itching. I want to take a belt sander to my torso, and I think amputating my arms at the shoulder is worth considering. Yes, I’ve called the doctor.

Oh, and all the stuff in the verse is true. The dog was a german shepherd, and it was going for my throat while its owner pulled it back, so it only bit my face. Sitting here, itching, that seems like the good old days.

This post is likely not going to stay up for long.  I just had to say something somewhere.  So if it vanishes, it doesn’t mean you were hallucinating.  Or, to be honest, that you were not.

I want a special planet,
One created just for me;
I want a perfect paradise
A garden, can’t you see?
That waited through eternity
For my exalted birth—
But Eden is a myth, so I
Will settle for the Earth.
It’s not so bad, as planets go,
I’ll do just fine with Earth.

I want a special status
Where I’m more than just a beast;
With godlike comprehension
Or intelligence, at least;
Created sui generis
And not evolved from goo—
But rather than be fictional,
Humanity will do.
I’m going to have to face the facts;
Humanity will do

I want a special function,
Or a purpose, or a plan;
I want to be much better than
The ordinary man;
I want to be a shining star
Whom everyone can see—
The odds are astronomical;
I might as well be me.
The product of my history,
I might as well be me.

I want a special talent
That’s the product of my mind;
I want to be a genius
Of the greatest, grandest kind;
Where Shakespeare, in comparison,
Would just give up and curse—
But dreams are not reality;
I think I’ll write this verse.
I’ll never be a Shakespeare,
But at least I wrote this verse.

Why “The Mediocrity Principle”? Here. Cuttlecap tip to PZed.

Crack reporters at The Bugle, each notoriously frugal,
Thought they’d stoop to using Google for a verse-translation chore;
Past the ordinary deadline, hoping vainly for a headline
To at least avoid the breadline, where they’d eaten oft before
They were poorly paid reporters, so they’d eaten there before,
And had promised “never more”

Google searches through for matches; when it finds one, it attaches—
If it doesn’t work, dispatches it as something to ignore
Matching syllables and timing, more than this, it looks at rhyming,
Though its crude syntactic priming may yield verses you deplore
Mind you, many human poets give you verses you deplore,
Though we warn them “nevermore”

In this time-intensive screening, Google focuses on meaning,
And the finely tuned machining is the only guarantor
That computerized translation isn’t mere abomination,
And will win the acclamation of the critics by the score
Though the human poets shudder, thinking “critics by the score!
Let them visit never more!”

But a mere computer stripling, it can imitate a Kipling
Though the output may be crippling, and may leave your eardrums sore
Though it lacks a human passion, it’s a poet, in a fashion,
Not exactly Ogden Nash-ian, still it’s nothing you’d abhor
And a lot of modern poetry, the public does abhor
So they read it nevermore.

Now with German, French, or Russian verse, it’s worthy of discussion:
Will we notice repercussions from this poetry galore?
With a software package Babel fish eventually able
To re-work a verse or fable, might it save us all from war?
If we understand each other, will we still believe in war,
Or agree to “never more”?

NPR reports that Google is developing an artificial intelligence Poetry translator.

“It’s what we call AI complete,” says Dmitriy Genzel, a research scientist at Google. “Which means it’s as difficult as anything we can attempt in artificial intelligence.”

Programming a machine to simply understand language, after all, is a task IBM spent four years and millions of dollars to accomplish with its Watson computer, which competed on Jeopardy last week.

Watson understands human speech. But for a computer to understand and translate poetry, there are added problems of length, meter and rhyme.

Tell me about it.

Well, actually, they do tell us about it, in a paper on the Official Google Research Blog. And, damn them, they parodied The Raven before I did, which I’d have known if I’d clicked that one link. Oh, well. They only did one verse. But the paper is well worth reading; I’ve often said that what I do can be accomplished by an adequately trained monkey… looks like Google is raising the ante.

Growingly, showingly,
Ancient environments
Influenced trees, and the
Growth of their rings;

Centuries later, the
Dendrochronologists
Use this to tell us what
Climate change brings.

Verily, scarily,
Climate-change scientists
Warn us our actions en-
Danger us all:

Climate effects can be
Geopolitical,
Sometimes portending an
Empire’s fall.

Via the BBC, just published online in Science, a report on 2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility. First, ya gotta find a lot of wooden artifacts. Analysis of growth rings from a large enough sample of such artifacts allowed Swiss, German and Austrian scientists to piece together an historical record of good and bad seasons over the past 2.5 millenia. Turns out “good and bad seasons” holds true both for weather and for the relative prosperity of empires.

From the BBC:

Once they had developed a chronology stretching back over the past 2,500 years, they identified a link with prosperity levels in past societies, such as the Roman Empire.

“Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from 250-600 AD coincided with the demise of the western Roman empire and the turmoil of the migration period,” the team reported.

“Distinct drying in the 3rd Century paralleled a period of serious crisis in the western Roman empire marked by barbarian invasion, political turmoil and economic dislocation in several provinces of Gaul.”

I wonder if future dendrochronologists will see us as yet another example.

At times like this, the nation pauses
Long enough to look for causes.
That’s not quite so. It’s true we pause,
But only look for One True Cause;
Multiple determination
Only leads us to frustration.
When something horrible is done
Our search for blame is all-or-none.

The comment threads of major news outlets (you know how much I love to read those!) are as predictable as they have ever been. One commenter calls for a ban on handguns; several others immediately point out that they are, themselves, law-abiding gun owners. Hate-filled rhetoric? Millions of listeners were able to listen to the stream of invective and were somehow not moved to express their outrage in the form of a spray of lead. Video games? Again, millions of players are a far greater danger to their couch than to any human being. Even the old standby, mental illness, is defended, and we are reminded (unexpectedly, says the cynic in me) that mental illness is in no way predictive of such actions.*

And then, conclusions are drawn. Not the right ones, but conclusions nonetheless. We could have recognized that determination of ultimate causality of human action is never, ever going to come down to one factor, and recognized that our task is not to snap our fingers and make “the cause” go away, but to see which of the many causal elements we can tweak to make the world incrementally a better place. And we could have recognized that, sometimes, big effects don’t necessarily have big (and immediately identifiable) causes. Instead, we conclude that since there is always an exception, there is no rule, and that human behavior is not determined by environmental influences. That the rules that govern the rest of the observable universe somehow don’t apply within the boundaries of our skin, or our skull. If we can’t see one cause, our default fallback position is that there is none.

I do recognize the irony of making this observation, and [overly?] simplifying the behavior of tens or hundreds of thousands of commenters across scores of sites. All I can hope is that my readers will not see one or two examples that don’t fit my observation, and conclude that there is no truth to it at all. We are complex creatures, granted, but some very complex and complicated effects can come out of a combination of very few, comparatively simple, inputs.

*I have seen, unsurprisingly, the very expected post-hoc diagnosis of mental illness. While in this case it may be very probable that he is suffering, I have yet to hear a single qualified commenter make such a pronouncement. I suspect that the use of the label reflects much more our need to distance ourselves from the shooter, and to make sure he is the other; to think that normal people commit horrible acts is, well, horrible. This self-serving tendency is part of what leads to the belief that persons with mental illnesses are dangerous.