Some people after my own heart, and brain

Whilst searching for a clear definition of cork taint, I came across the blog of someone obssessed with Shiraz. His latest blog post pointed me to this web page that magically determines the reading level of a web site or blog referring to various levels of education such as high school and post graduate. Interestingly enough my reading level was that of postgrad, a pleasant surprise given the lack of polish, from a humanities perspective anyway, in my writing being an engineer and all.



Update: Well it appears after adding some posts I've been dumbed down to undergrad level!



Interestingly enough, Defence Industry Daily, which I have no trouble comprehending garnered a score of genius...

Evil Chicken, Weak French

Here's a causal link between the evil flesh of the chicken and the weakness of the French. According to this perfumer, Jean Claude Ellena, Parisians smell of chicken because of all the chicken they eat. Now the French, of which Paris is their capital city, are also lousy at fighting wars. Logic would dictate then that eating the flesh of the foul fowl is a major contributor to the propensity of the French to be girlymen.

Fight Back Against Rhetoric!

There are certain people in this world because of their job or lecturers think they can ignore the fact that "the geek shall inherit the earth". They think they can bamboozle geeks and plebs into submission, but I say fight those subjectivists and all that accompanies them (false product claims, moral relativism, deconstructionism blah blah blah). Blah, blah, blah was the gist of the cartoon by Jon Kudelka that accompanied Stephen Matchett's article on the back page of the current edition of the Weekend Australian's Review section. A superb insight into rhetoric (yes, that includes humanities and sales bullies) and defence mechanisms to deploy against them. He cited a few good resources and books which I'll list here:

Matchett, S. 2005, Schope out your rivals, The Weekend Australian Review, 19-20 March, p. 40.

Burton, G. 2003, Silvae Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric [Online, accessed 20 Feb. 2005]. URL: http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm

Schopenhauer, A. 1896, The Art of Controversy, trans. T. B. Saunders [Online, accessed 20 Feb. 2005]. URL: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/controversy

Cialdini, R. B. 1998, "Influence: The Pyschology of Persuasion", Perennial Currents.

These people have gotten away with belittling us geeks and proletariat for too long, let's fight back against the self-proclaimed "intellectuals" and bourgeoisie. Yikes now I sound like one of them, anyway we need protection against these professional nihilists so let's use some of their tricks on them.