Friday, March 28, 2008

A Really Really Serious Letter

The whole idea of a technicolour cellphone has been blowing me out, not to mention the amount of research-constructed-risk it carries to eardrums, vocal chords, heart, genitals and the emotional self. In a few years we might stumble across a conspiracy theory that the whole far east has been plotting against us so that a harmless looking bio-hazard, like cellphone, can be slipped in. They also invented exploding batteries, a failsafe substitute that will go unnoticed due to it's harmless appearance.

Hence, instead of calling you I am writing this letter.

Here are the last four lines of Alfred Lloyd Tennyson's "The Vision of Sin" with all the punctuations included, including the hippie style use of colon.
Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the mourn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.


Charles Babbage (you might remember him as the guy who laid down the design of Differential Engine and Analytical Engine - precursors to the modern computers) wrote a letter to Tennyson, in which he correctly pointed out
"It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill...I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read - 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.'...The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.
I am, Sir, yours, etc.,
Charles Babbage"


I was enlightened to this fact by Simon Singh's "The Code Book". I also drew my own conclusions out of this whole exercise 8.37 deaths/1000 population equated to 20.09 births/1000 population in 2007 comes nowhere near 1 1/16 as estimated in late 19th century. We might even contact the Tennyson Society and suggest them to change 1 1/16 to 2 2/5, which I believe will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

I do believe that since Tennyson is a significant literary figure, people around the world must be working hard to construct better cellphones that will have improved capacity to risk the eardrums, vocal chords, heart, genitals and the emotional self. This will work in two ways - the crippled people will be genetically least sought after by the opposite gender while the effect on human genitalia will subsequently help in reducing the burden on earth. The researchers should work hard to ensure that more amount of psychological threat is induced in the population, with media lending a generous hand in mass distributing the results. It will be only a matter of time that we'll be able to satisfy Babbage's data and progressively reach Tennyson's results. I sincerely believe that modern research can come up with batteries having higher explosive capabilities and should send a 2 second, uninterrupted high pitch signal to the receiving end, yet remain oblivious to the sender side. This will ensure that the user, his neighbourhood influenced by a blast wave of sufficient radius of influence as well as the receiver accepting the deafening 2 second, uninterrupted high pitch signal are all affected.

And now (now now now... [echo]) for something completely different,

Frank : Did you know that "a la mode", in French, translates literally to "in the fashion"? A la moooode... It comes from the latin word modus to do or proper measure.
Richard : Frank shut up.

I am, Sir, yours, etc.
Sauvik

2 comments:

Abigail Alexis~ said...

:)

Vin said...

browsing for humourous blogs...found urs... good one..u sure have the funny bone