A "data cable" made from stretched nerve cells could someday help connect computers to the human nervous system. The modified cells should form better connections with human tissue than the metal electrodes currently used for purposes such as remotely controlling prosthetics.

"The nervous system doesn't like nasty hard metal or plastic"...

...Christopher James, who works on brain-computer interfaces at Southampton University, UK, gives the work a cautious welcome. "This approach does sound like a good idea," he says. "Although directly attaching electrodes to the brain has been shown to work, the long term effects are not known." - link

Pick your technology; click in a cable or two and you're away! Instant access! Artificial augmentation! Battery-powered perfection!

Human beings are the first creatures on this planet to live in symbiosis with their technologies, so why not break through the digital-barrier; push beyond the techno-horizon - moulding digital daydreams into a neural love-matrix between you and your favourite pocket calculator.

According to some, the day of our coalescence is already upon us, but where will it end? Can a data cable deliver more than a shock to the cerebellum? How about hate, joy, pain? How about love?

When sensations, emotions, and ideas become digital, it’s as easy to share them with a dozen friends, or a thousand strangers, as it is to send them to one person.... We’ll be able to broadcast the inner states of our minds.

~ Ramez Naam, More than Human

Are you ready for my inner-state?

01010111011010000110000101110
10000100000011000010010000001
10110001101111011000010110010
00010000001101111011001100010
00000110001001101111011011000
11011000110111101100011011010
1101110011...

(Convert my binary expurgence into homosapien speak here)

The problem here, as I see it, is in our idea of the brain. Sure enough, whilst a lot of our pre-programmed subroutines work in reflection of a million years of evolution, much of what we take for 'human thought' is uniquely sculpted into each of us. We may both see an image of Charlie Chaplin, but since my life and your life have had divergent inputs since before we were born, the likelihood of us perceiving the same Chaplin, whether logically or emotionally, has to be minuscule.

Sure, there are connections between the substance of our thoughts - cultural biases and archetypes which determine how we were both built - but who's to say that love for me and love for you are the same thing? To mediate our emotions via neurally extended data management would be like strapping a Super Nintendo to a Lunar Module and expecting the next moon mission to pass by unhampered.

I see what you see but not how you see. Do you see?

So here's today's Mu Haiku mission, plunging a 5 - 7 - 5 data stream into the heart of the techno-lovesphere:

Love looks not with eyes, but with the mind
(and a couple of brain-implants)

How about this little ditty for starters:

Send the heart reeling,
with a googleplex of love:
melt my motherboard.

Write your own Mu Haiku here and help a weblog reach its first ever online-orgasm...

What happens if the form of your brain took such a different path that you got a label as a consequence? Would you still find time to love in between psychological assessments? Sometimes it's the physical rather than the mental which makes all the difference:

[The patient] happened to be a schizophrenic homosexual who wanted to change his sexual preference. As an experiment, Heath gave the man stag films to watch while he pushed his pleasure-center hotline, and the result was a new interest in female companionship. After clearing things with the state attorney general, the enterprising Tulane doctors went out and hired a “lady of the evening,” as Heath delicately puts it, for their ardent patient.

“We paid her fifty dollars,” Heath recalls. “I told her it might be a little weird, but the room would be completely blacked out with curtains. In the next room we had the instruments for recording his brain waves, and he had enough lead wire running into the electrodes in his brain so he could move around freely. We stimulated him a few times, the young lady was cooperative, and it was a very successful experience.” This conversion was only temporary, however.

~ Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi, The Three-Pound Universe

Mu to that!

Categories: Science, Weird, Technology, News, Links, Love, Sex, Consciousness, Nature, Evolution, Internet, Future, Singularity, Human, Humour, Nonsense, Mu, Haiku

Labels: Mu Haiku

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All this talk of climate change; of the continued abuse of hydrocarbon bonds got me thinking. How are we expected to put our oil addicted world into perspective if we haven't got a perspective on the oily substance itself? It's all very well setting targets; cutting emissions; pretending we care. My iPod is made of zooplankton! And I want to know what you intend to do about it!

The universe manufactures new substances like you wouldn't belieeeeeve. Increasingly fiercer temperatures in ever larger suns turned a multitude of hydrogen, over billions of years, into the plethora of atomic nuclei we breathe in today. More than that, you are a carbon, hydrogen, oxygen derivative! The very texture of your compounds is a testament to the suns which exploded many billions of Earth revolutions before you were expelled; BEFORE THERE WAS EVEN AN ORIFICE FROM WHICH ONE COULD BE EXPELLED!!!

So I look around my elongated living space, every glance intensified by the shimmering materials I take for granted. And in the shit encrusted remains of the bird's nest of civilisation which material strikes the greatest chord in my being? That elusive, bendy, snack-crackle-plastic of course, which spreads itself like butter on the surface of society. Innumberable teeny-weeny ancient sea-critters, squished in droves for many a millennia and deposited on the doorstep of mankind in a glorious, oozing mass of black, toxic waste. We plunder the Middle East for zooplankton baby, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

But what of this organic mush, this expensive organ soup? How can we, the hydrocarbon generation, fiddle with our iPods, our smart-cars our Dyson Super-Vortex-Mega-Vacuum-Cleaners without a smile and a wink at our microscopic brethren?

Are we so arrogant as to forget the little guys?

ARE WE NOT SQUISHY TOO?!

Let's write a Mu Haiku...

In Honour of Ancient Ocean-Detritus and its Dark, Oozing Legacy:

Ancient Ocean-Goo,
clogging up the Middle East,
makes iPods shuffle.

You better write one too...

Project yourself, right now, into the middle of the middle of the Middle East. A tanker is guzzling the black gold right from the ground, its driver loads himself into the cabin, fires up the engine and trundles his way through the devastated oil fields. In the back of his tanker he holds more than a gallon or two of the black stuff. He holds a billion years of organic produce; a gut load of Earth's own belly juice; the legacy of a zillion sea critters with a million Earth atmospheres baring down on them. Do we fight these wars for more than profit? Sure we do... It's enough to get the guys in power real excited:

"If they turn on their radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs. They know we own their country. We own their airspace...We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."

- Brig. General Looney: Washington Post, June 24, 1996

Mu to that!

Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, News, Links, Images, Biology, Future, Technology, War, Society, Environment, Mu, Haiku

Labels: Mu Haiku

Next time you go for the proverbial dump consider the process involved in turning one plate of badly cooked meat and veg into a self perceiving, website reading, procrastinating you. It occurs to me that the chance of atoms, manufactured billions of years ago in suns long since expressing their life cycles, would end up as the tip of a runny nose or the coating of a swollen spleen must be nigh on gargantuan. Are humans best understood as the creative intermediary between abstract amino-acids and piles of rotting faeces? 6 billion humans turning a rocky planetary outcrop into festering worm compost via the action of merely thinking.

But let's not let our microbial egos get too big here; your bowels are a lot less you than you may think:

The human large intestine is a 5-foot long, dark, dank and twisting corridor whose repetitive contractions function to squeeze the last remaining drops of water and the final bits of nutrient from feces before expulsion from our bodies.

Aiding the large intestine in this task are trillions of microbes that reside in the gut, where they help digest foods we would otherwise have to avoid. In this way the bugs contribute to our overall health.

Some of these tiny settlers are with us from birth, imparted from our mothers, while others gradually colonize our bodies as we grow. This microbial community is as diverse as any found in Earth's seas or soils, numbering up to 100 trillion individuals and representing more than 1,000 different species.

"This is the densest bacterial ecosystem known in nature," Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience. "The density of colonization of the distal gut is just enormous." - link

You are an ecosystem my friend, and the trillions of bacteria lodged in your gut are merely a miniscule representative for the trillions more which compose your substance.

Take a nose dive straight into self-denial, for without the microbes there's very little you left to claim:

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses...

...scientists concentrated on bacteria. More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too. - link

...it's time to stop thinking of yourself as a single living thing at all, say the scientists behind the new work. Better to see yourself as a "super-organism," they say: a hybrid creature consisting of about 10 percent human cells and 90 percent bacterial cells. - link

You're a walking, talking Petri-dish. An anatomical configuration. Even the fungi have more claim to your soul than you do... And all the loves you have lost, the human abstractions, each an enduring flutter across the surface of your stream-like life, each of them is an ode to biological ecosystems too. For microorganisms, in multitudinous symbiosis, have helped mankind to give birth, to love, to create, to expel the soul of beauty we hold so dear and rot us to nothing post rigor mortis. The little ones are more important than you...

Get over it and write a Mu-Haiku!


Ode to a trillion unicellular love-machines:

Oh eukaryotes!
Abdominal fungal growth,
digesting my soul.

Write your own Mu-Haiku here...

How in our arrogance we forget the beauty in the insignificant. Their numbers are plenty, their residence on this Earth far exceeds our own and yet in selfish circumstance we believe that we have outgrown them. This arrogance hides their wondrous impact on our lives. Their simple beauty obscures our deepest contemplation daily:

Why is there a 13 to 20 second delay between farting and the time it starts to smell?

Actually, the fart stinks immediately upon emergence, but it takes several seconds for the odor to travel to the farter's nostrils. If farts could travel at the speed of sound, we would smell them almost instantly, at the same time we hear them.

- Facts on Farts...

Mu to that!

Categories: Biology, Weird, Humour, Nature, Science, Fun, Life, Nonsense, Health, Human, Mu, Haiku

Labels: Mu Haiku

Aliens! Wide-eyed, short-statured, extraterrestrially-elongated aliens!

In a universe as vast as this one (assuming you aren't one of those un-evolved creationist types) alien life of some form or other appears to be a statistical certainty. Yet, in an imagination as narrow-minded as this one (assuming you are human; a species carved neurological intelligence by evolution mere cosmological moments ago) bipedal, communistic, space-faring, master races are ten to the dozen. What's the likelihood we're talking extraterrestrial bollocks here?

In an attempt to find a systematic means to evaluate the numerous probabilities involved, Dr. Frank Drake formulated The Drake equation in 1960. While it was formulated after the objections raised by Fermi's Paradox, Drake's equation has become a common and respected means of estimating the frequency of occurrence of interstellar civilizations.

The Drake equation has been used by both optimists and pessimists, with varying results. Dr. Carl Sagan, for example, suggested as many 1 million communicating civilizations in the Milky Way in 1966. Another published estimate from Frank Tipler in 1982 placed the value at just one e.g., human beings are the only extant intelligent life.

Critics of the Drake equation claim that since the variables cannot yet be determined with any real confidence, estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations based on it is methodologically flawed, an idea which the wide diveregence in estimates seems to support.

Even given the scale of the Milky Way galaxy alone, the abundance of life out there must be beyond our comprehension. Thing is, the form this life will take and the ways in which evolutionary forces will carve out niches for it in abstract realms of reality we have no chance of ever witnessing, is also far beyond our comprehension. Once you get past the human revolving varieties of physiology, psychology and neurology available to our memetically governed intelligences there ain't no Ologies left! Give it up space-cadets, eat yourself some terrestrial fried chicken, spawn a bipedal offspring or two. The universe'd think better of you if you did:

• The Martians aren't Coming
• The Psychology and Neuroscience of Alien Abduction
• Prototypical Alien-face a hallucination?
• So, why do we believe in aliens?
• Who's Out There?
• Why we haven't met any Aliens
• Internet Killed the Alien Star
• Unidentifiable Figmental Organisms?
• Crypto-Terrestrial?
  

But throughout every conspiracy, every mathematical impossibility, every Star-Trek rerun and drab George Lucas extravaganza a voice calls at me from across the deepest voids of space, a whispering vibration in the fabric of space-time cast across the Milky-Way long before humans had the capacity to understand its phraseology. Appealing to my anthropically mediated mentality; the battle cry of all intelligent life everywhere:

Keep looking, space-baby...

So today's Mu Haiku, if you choose to accept it - why aren't they here yet?

'Cos Aliens got better things to do!
The 5 - 7 - 5 ideas veritably flood my monkey-like cerebral cavity:

Martian relief from
this Galactic loneliness?
Space-Tentacle porn...

Go create...

But still, if that excuse doesn't cut it for you, I won't take offence if you reach for the tin-foil helmet and Lucas-affiliated sound effects sword. You have every right to wish the aliens upon us, just don't let your imagination dwell too deep my friends; you're gonna need your conspiracy-nut wits about you if they do turn up:

In one case, before thought screen helmets were available, an abduction was thwarted when a victim had her husband wrap her with string. Her husband hid the scissors, and the aliens could not remove the string so they did not take her. They were very angry. Some abductees report that aliens try to remove their helmets and cannot do so when the helmets are secured with tape or string. - link

Mu to that!

Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, Sci-Fi, Links, Reality, Human, Evolution, Nature, Aliens, Space, Universe, Nonsense, Fun, Mu-Haiku, Mu

Labels: Mu Haiku

Mu Haiku is back!

If infamy is a viral infection then Jesus is surely the memetic common cold, clogging up the nostrils of civilisation since year nought. This guy was such a fly in the ointment of empire that simply killing him was not enough for the Roman legions. They decided to nail his ass to a wooden cross beam, expose his manhood to the universe, and bar his virginal followers from ever touching his holy person again. Something inside me yearns for a medical exposition of this event:

The actual cause of death by crucifixion was multifactoral and varied somewhat with each case, but the two most prominent causes were probably hypovolemic shock and exhaustion asphyxia. Other possible contributing factors included dehydration, stress-induced arrhythmias, and congestive heart failure with the rapid accumulation of pericardial and perhaps pleural effusions. Crucifracture (breaking the legs below the knees), if performed, led to an asphysic death within minutes. Death by crucifixion was, in every sense of the word, excruciating (Latin, excruciatus, or "out of the cross").

- link to detailed, medical outline and another scientific perspective

If that wasn't enough, recent evidence increases the potential pain of the condemned. Male readers may find biting down hard on a wooden spoon will help them read further:

...Crucifixion methods probably evolved over time and depended on the social status of the victim and on the crime he allegedly committed...

The cross could be erected "in any one of a range of orientations", with the victim sometimes head-up, sometimes head-down or in different postures.

Sometimes he was nailed to the cross by his genitals, sometimes the hands and feet were attached to the side of the cross and not the front, or affixed with cords rather than nails.

"If crucified head-up, the victim's weight may also have been supported on a small seat. This was believed to prolong the time it took a man to die," says the study, co-authored by Matthew Masien, also of Imperial College London's medicine faculty.

- link to full article

Needless to say, the fact that early Christians did not get wind of this development in the crucifixion of genitals can only be a good thing. I wince at the range of gold plated idol jewelry now occupying my imagination. A distraction is in order...

Today's Mu Haiku (if you choose to accept it)...

The impact of Jesus' testicles on the future of Crucifixion idolatry:

How should Christian society put positive spin on the news that Jesus' nuts were nobbled to the cross? A better man than myself might write a Mu Haiku thus:

The Lord said unto
Heaven and Earth: Hallowed be
his holy gonads.

What 5 - 7 - 5 ways can you find around this problem?

Everyone knows that the mutilated testicles of Jesus will help raise humanity to their ultimate destiny beyond the clouds - but don't get too excited! When God invented masturbation, he didn't expect such a positive response:

God's birthright to us is joy, happiness, and health, and there are few moments more joyous than the moment of orgasm. Therefore, every time we masturbate, we should say a prayer of gratitude, thanking the Lord for our bodies, for sexual pleasure, and for masturbation as a means of experiencing the bliss of orgasm.

- link

Mu to that!

Categories: Religion, Weird, Humour, News, Links, History, Human, Sex, Jesus, Culture, Nonsense?, Meme, Fun, Mu Haiku, Mu

Labels: Mu Haiku

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Energy is motion. Decrease the amount of motion down to low enough levels and you virtually suspend reality. Thus time, at these low temperatures, begins to lose its meaning. We all perceive ourselves as composite selves projected along a future moving axis of time. Couldn't we all do with jumping a few steps forward? The cryonics movement thinks so:

1. Take your still quivering human corpse (recently pronounced legally deceased)
2. Cut off the head
3. Drain all fluids and replace them with your favourite brand of Cryoprotectant
4. Using liquid nitrogen quickly freeze the soggy remains to the lowest temperature possible
5. Stick in cold storage (no pun intended) and hide somewhere safe from economic collapse, earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis, floods, riots, theft, violence, religious fundamentalism, biological contaminations, asteroid impacts and black holes
6. Hope that civilisation and/or the company assuming responsibility for your remains survives long enough for scientists to figure out how to turn an anti-freeze sodden, ice-crystal damaged lump of inert, organic matter back into 'you'
7. Have a new body grown from your genetic material
8. Plop the old brain in the new body, tying up any loose ends nice and neatly
9. Go shopping (you're clothes are 1000+ years out of date)

But don't just take my simple instructions as a matter of fact. There are a whole host of legally bound cryogenics organisations who can't wait to have your entire life savings signed over to them just before they chop off your head. The world is full of such kindness.

"Believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow." - Dr. Arthur Rowe, Cryobiologist

So here is the first Mu Haiku mission of 2006 (if you choose to accept it):

A Cryogenically-Frozen Tank Full of Mu?

Is it possible to extend your consciousness forever? Would you want to? What are the chances of civilisation staying stable long enough for cryonics to be a viable alternative to just rotting like everyone else? And most importantly, what would Jesus think about it?

Here's the message I'll be leaving future Transhuman generations to laugh at in recently thawed-out retrospection:

If life is a dream,
the soul a mere illusion:
Refridgerate me.

What the Mu do you think? And remember - it'll be the very richest and most craziest amongst us waiting for you when you wake up:

'No one knows just what future technology may bring, or what form a new existence could take. Mr. Laughlin confronted that issue in a meeting last August with his lawyers while drafting a trust. Mr. Laughlin opted against allowing a mere biological clone to get his money. He insisted whoever gets the funds should have "my memories." - link'

Mu to that!

Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, Sci-Fi, Singularity, Future, Human, Consciousness, Religion, Life, Death, Time, Fun, Society, Technology, Transhuman, Nonsense, Meme, Mu

Labels: Mu Haiku

As this year draws to a close and my first trip home in 18 months looms large ahead of me, the concept of time has been made prominent in my imagination. 2005? What does it mean?

That 2005 years ago some bloke in some nonsense-scripture was allegedly born to a woman who couldn't tell her husband the truth of her misdeeds and weaved in her defense the most famous hussy-alibi of all time... Talk about arbitrary!

2005 means nothing to me, and as such I feel that in these secular days the Gregorian Calendar should be scrapped and updated with something snazzier, something more universal. A calendar of practicality; a calendar for everyone:

• The Maya Calendar had five cycles, the last one ushering in the end of time itself on October 13, 4772.
• According to the Japanese Calendar its now Heisei 17. The Islamic Calendar deems the start of 2006 as 1426...
• Star Trek uses Star Dates. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World had Henry Ford's 1st Model-T Motorcar as its Messiah
• There has even been a calendar devised for future inhabitants of the planet Mars, the Darian system!

A wealth of different dating systems exist, each one weaving time into different tapestries of significance. But I think we can do better. So here is the last Mu Haiku mission of 2005 (if you choose to accept it):

What the Mu kind of calendar do you call this?

If you could devise your own calendar what would you base it around? Maybe the Stevie Wonder Calendar would suit you. He broke out from his Motown contract in 1971, making next year 35 AM (After Motown)... Or perhaps you fancy using the age of Earth itself as a definition. That makes it about year 4.2 billion right now... Whatever you choose, make it Mu and shove it in a beautiful 5-7-5 Haiku! Here's mine:

A moment flies in
nine thousand billion ticks;
Cesium seconds.

The comments section awaits your ideas... Maybe time is simply too difficult for some people to grasp at all:

"Don't allow yourself to be fooled by school professors, television programs, books, the Internet or what other people say about the duration of mankind's history. God created the heavens and the earth in a total of six literal days and the seventh day of rest, then He patterned mankinds span of civilization for seven thousand years in the same way." ~ Rapture Ready

Mu to that!

Categories: Science, Weird, Humour, Weblog, Time, History, Religion, Bible, Future, Sci-Fi, Myth, Ancient, Reality, Technology, Nonsense, Meme, Fun, Poetry, Mu, Haiku

P.S. I am going home to the UK for the next 3 weeks, so Huge Entity updates will be irregular and infrequent until the start of January. Have yourselves a great time this arbitrary holiday season... And don't forget to keep Mu-Haikuing until there's no Mu left!

Labels: Mu Haiku

Food is fashion these days. A symbol of your 'lifestyle'; a token gesture of the kind of culture and upbringing you were formed from. We adaptable humans eat everything, even substances not considered compatible with our digestive processes are shoveled into stomachs across the world in ever more sophisticated and recombined forms.

But one widespread consumable remains taboo: the primeval salvations induced by eating human flesh. Maybe humanity's longest surviving, self inflicted terror. The ultimate delicacy?

As with most deeply significant human taboos, time buried our cannibalistic urges only to have them resurface, reborn through the democratically-shared, social-consciousness that is the internet:

"...come to me, I'll eat your delicious flesh" - link

And the world reeled in disgust as though a new horror had been discovered. But before you pass judgement on the cannibal and their inappropriate desire for man-flesh, consider that maybe their actions can be justified under certain circumstances:

... Eating someone who has died in order to survive is incorporating their substance, and it is quite possible to compare this with a graft. Flesh survives when assimilated by someone in extreme need, just as it does when an eye or heart of a dead man is grafted onto a living man. - link

...and once a justification has been found, surely then mankind should assimilate that justification, morph it into new forms. Modern society is ultimately a machine towards homogeny, to simulation. In other words - we shall continue to abhor eating human flesh, but surely to taste it is something altogether different:

Old ones are tough. Young men and women taste better. And babies taste like fish. The flesh is very soft... - link

And so, today's Mu Haiku mission, if you choose to accept it...

The taste of flesh made modern:

How would media spinners and advertising executives turn the unique flavour of human into a brand-able, mainstream product? What place does mankind's most primal taboo have in today's globalised world? Once human taste is free from taboo its simulacrisation is inevitable:

His famous diet
Old Atkin's forgot - Human:
The other white meat

That's my first attempt. Where is yours? It's all a bit too much for some people:

"There is no rational basis for asserting that a human being has special rights: A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy" - link

Mu to that!

Categories: Mu, Haiku, History, Human, Food, Weird, Humour, Culture, Fun, Meme, Simulacrum, Cannibalism

Labels: Mu Haiku

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Yes, it's Mu Haiku time again at The Huge Entity! Get your brains at the ready and your contemplative consciousnesses engaged. A real nonsense splitter today:

"The US state of Kansas has ruled that science classes in public schools should include the teaching of intelligent design and the doubts it casts on Darwinian evolution. The move has dismayed the nation's scientific community." - link

But wait a minute, as we bow our heads in respect for the loss of rationality shouldn't we also be celebrating the new opportunities an evolution free universe holds for the scientific process? [Bear with me here, I'm not condoning ID nonsense just yet...]

If The Designer is now legally a testable hypothesis (at least in Kansas), it must also presumably contain some observable premises we can use to come up with new and better theories - for this IS how the scientific method is meant to be applied. Now that ID is legally science we'll have to start treating it that way.

The Argument:

1. The intelligent designer formed life, and in doing so left traces of something we misperceived as 'evolution'.
2. The 'evidence' of 'evolution' we misperceived does not fit properly with our 'theory', as this court case concludes, therefore every scrap of evidence that was collected is actually better applied to questioning the existence of The Intelligent Designer him/it-self.
3. Thus we must conclude that all the imperfections inherent in just about every species of flora and fauna on this planet were mistakes made by our supposedly 'intelligent' designer and not by the errors collected over countless generations by random and non-planned mutation within the now defunct 'evolutionary process'.

What then caused the intelligent designer to make these mistakes? It can't have been stupidity, for surely THE Intelligent Designer is everything but stupid. I do have a few other ideas though.

The Motivation Behind The Mistakes:

• He was the ultimate procrastinator: The Designer kept putting off his work until he hardly had time to re-design that defective human sinus system or reroute that male urethra so that it didn't pass right through the prostate gland. Happens to the most driven of us, why not the very very most driven?
• He was a lazy git: He just couldn't be arsed finishing his jobs. Flying Squirrels, for all their half-falling / half-flying are just not worth the effort.
• He ran out of time: Truly 6 days, even in designer-heaven, ain't a long time. So ok, he decided on a gas for his creatures to breath, but by the time he realised that the very same oxygen supply that kept them alive was also slowly killing the creatures that absorbed it the 7th day was upon him. No work on the designer-Sabbath for Mr. Designer, oh no.
• He ran out of ideas: When you've seen over 900 species of bats you've seen them all.
• He was just joking: Yeah, I suppose inverting the human retina to give us a blind-spot, but not doing the same to the octopus might have been kind of funny at the time.
• He had better things to do: We forget that life came later on in the designer's universal project. What about the rocks? Putting down all those layers of sediment must have taken a bloody long time.

...and so on

So this week's Mu Haiku mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ponder the evidence some more. Why did The Intelligent One make so many 'mistakes'? Let's see what the ID advocates themselves have to say on evidence:

"The critical thinking and precision of science began to really affect my ability to just believe something without any tangible evidence..." - Salvador Cordova - quoted in Nature

Mu to that!



UPDATE: Someone has answered my question... It's all about Incompetent Design.

Many thanks to Sceptico, Pharyngula, Panda's Thumb and everyone linked above!
Categories: Intelligent Design, Religion, Science, Darwinism, Evolution, Creationism, News, Politics, Humour, Kansas, Education, Nonsense, Meme, Mu, Haiku

Labels: Mu Haiku

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Time for another session of Mu poetry...

Mu is a Japanese and Chinese word regarding an absence of/in the negative. When one desires an answer, but your question makes false assumptions, the answer can only be Mu. A radical change of perspective is required before the Mu can be overcome... - link

...this week inspiration comes from my very own Japanese students! There are some things in life so bewildering and yet so imbued with meaning that sometimes only art, and in this case poetry, can uncover anything resembling insight.

Here are some examples of authentic poems I received this week from my Junior High School students. May they tell you little, but teach you much:

Universe
Beautiful Stars
pretty, smiling, friendship
Friends are important
Love

Life
Very complicated
cry, laugh, self
Time passes so quickly
Sad

Sun
Very hot
Shining is big
It is very important
Beautiful

Moon
White silver Light
Wrap the sky
Shine all things
Beautiful beyond expression

The Earth
Very beautiful
Earth is blue
Many people live on Earth
Love

Dream
Very mystery
Enjoy, interesting, beautiful
Dream is coming night
Mystery

and my personal favourite...

Lion
Cool face
Running, eating, barking
Lion is very strong
Terrible

In expressing their very dearest ponderings an entire alternate Universe of their creation comes into being! Write your own Mu poem in the comments section below. Try keep your subject matter deep and your mind completely empty, and remember:

Chance
It's lucky
We're waiting it
But it doesn't come
Because it's things catching oneself

Mu to that!

Categories: Japan, Culture, Poetry, Mu, Humour, Fun, Nonsense, Philosophy, Weird, Meme

Labels: Mu Haiku

Mu is a Japanese and Chinese word regarding an absence of/in the negative. When one desires an answer, but your question makes false assumptions, the answer can only be Mu. A radical change of perspective is required before the Mu can be overcome.

With this in mind, and a love for a multiplicity of nonsense, I have spawned the new:

Huge Entity - Mu-Haiku; all the Haiku, Mu-sense.
Today's topic is inspired by the heathenoid Carnival of The Godless campaign... Blasphemy

Mary was easy.
Had Father and Holy Ghost,
The Queen of threesomes

Submit your own blasphemy themed Mu-Haiku in the comments section, and don't worry, we're already guilty in the eyes of the Christian God:

"...whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin..." Mark 3:29

Mu to that!

Categories: Haiku, Poetry, Mu, Nonsense, Philosophy, Humour, Religion, Christianity, Blasphemy, Meme, Weird

Labels: Mu Haiku

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