Columns

Dear Editorbeing,

This article is submitted by Doc Logger(163/110) who has spent the week remembering why he hates programming. The cause of this renewed realization was an attempt to simulate the collapse of a galactic cluster.

Roll da flic, Zorch...

Dear Reverend Visage,

This has been a relatively slow week in Fidoland. Bob Kohl remained true to type and made his exit as RC10 into a singularly petulant and ugly event. In his last gasps, he offered to post an archive of messages with Satti to demonstrate god knows what. What is amusing about Kohl's threat is that he seems to be one of the few labouring under the delusion that Satti's incompetence would be a revelation or a surprise.

The discussions in the ZIC echo have been interesting. Just when we thought we'd smoked most of the skunks out of the woodpile, we were treated to a series of messages from Darryl Gregorash who first asserted that he "owned" his net's nodesegment, and then heard him exclaim that he would cast a vote against the expressed wishes of his net if he thought they were wrong. What makes Gregorash even more remarkable is that while espousing his totalist vision, he took time to make some jingoistic comments about Ward Dossche. It is a pity that the threat of democracy causes these cretins to mischaracterize Dossche. If Gregorash was keen to find a fascist prototype, he need look no further than some of his own posts concerning the Divine Right of *Cs.

In North America, we were treated to the spectacle of a deranged gunman barging into the U.S. capital building and killing a couple of police officers. What amazed me was that while five channels of live coverage were devoted to the incident, a raft of talking heads were asking the question: "Why does such a thing happen?" It seems none of them guessed that such things happen exactly because the insane and the deranged know that their acts will get five channels of live coverage. Unfortunately, the next person with a few screws loose will have to outdo the previous attempts. Perhaps as a public service, the cable companies could offer a special "psycho" channel where the exploits of the insane are regularly featured. I know, I know, it can be argued that the Golf channel already fulfills this mandate.

My reading list this week was prompted by a suggestion by Don Cox (Canada's finest eccentric) who thought that I would be enthralled by a book on cosmology making a case for anthropic destiny. (For Dallas, "cosmology" is the study of the formation of the universe, and "anthropic" is that which involves the study of life.) Since the book that Cox suggested was full of absurdities, I read several others to ascertain whether physicists hadn't gotten any smarter since the last time I was tortured by their tedious lectures. The major flaw that I can see in most of the writings was one of causation. They suggest that if the original universe had been a tiny bit more dense, if there hadn't been a slight granularity to the initial primordial soup, and if magnetic monopoles hadn't been consumed; that life as we know it couldn't have existed. This form of argument is akin to saying that 100% of the people who ride school buses will eventually die. There is no causal link(in general) between death and riding school buses, but experimentally it can be ascertained that one event will follow the other with scientific certitude.

Where the physics weenies leave me behind is where they assert that since the Big Bang required such narrow parameters in which to eventually express a world that would involve humans, then there had to be a Plan of Divine nature. Anyone who turns up an ace and a king during a game of Blackjack could make the claim to Divine intervention but really, they are simply the beneficiary of random probability. If cosmology was so Divinely determined, why was a world created where you couldn't x-ray an elephant?

I must go Visage, Moravsik's Dr. Strangelove finger is twitching to type the word "budfoon" in characterization of this week's article and I wouldn't want to disappoint the lil' tater-tot. Since you weren't around, I let Walloonetta accompany my teenmonsters to the Warped Tour concert in Montreal last night. You'll be sooo pleased to know that the best song of the night was "Cook Your Father" by a band called "Dahmer's Diner."

Regards,
Doc Logger,
Furlang Island,
South Pacific