Another poem

This one is for all the people who, in the wake of the terrible disaster that has just struck Japan, babble the usual nonsense about how the ways of the lord are mysterious, or how nature is bountiful and kind, or how humanity needs to learn to scale down its hubris, or how this is god's punishment for Japanese war crimes, or how this is mother nature's punishment for our mistreatment of the environment, or how this is all because blah blah blah whatever. Here's an excerpt from Voltaire's Poem on the Lisbon Disaster:

UNHAPPY mortals! Dark and mourning earth!

Affrighted gathering of human kind!

Eternal lingering of useless pain!

Come, ye philosophers, who cry, "All’s well,"

And contemplate this ruin of a world.

Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,

This child and mother heaped in common wreck,

These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—

A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,

Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,

Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,

In racking torment end their stricken lives.

To those expiring murmurs of distress,

To that appalling spectacle of woe,

Will ye reply: "You do but illustrate

The Iron laws that chain the will of God"?

Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:

"God is avenged: the wage of sin is death"?

What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived

That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?

Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice

Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.

Tranquil spectators of your brothers’ wreck,

Unmoved by this repellent dance of death,

Who calmly seek the reason of such storms,

Let them but lash your own security;

Your tears will mingle freely with the flood.

Because it's Saturday

This is a propos absolutely nothing; I just love this poem, so what the hell, I'll post it.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks

Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams

Turns mine to wax.

And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins

How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool

Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind

Hauls my shroud sail.

And I am dumb to tell the hanging man

How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;

Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood

Shall calm her sores.

And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind

How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb

How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

It's Dylan Thomas, but of course you already know that.

Added: I've read this poem for the first time when I was 25, and loved it. I'm 35 now, love it still. I wonder at what age will I start feeling it hits a bit too close to home.

Someone please make the bugs go away

I suffer from a moderate case of entomophobia. I think insects are a horrible mistake of nature. They're so terrifyingly ugly that just thinking about them gives me serious creeps, and actually seeing them makes me want to tear my eyes out. And yes, this includes butterflies and ladybugs.

This condition also means that I get almost physically ill when for whatever reason I happen to catch a glimpse of one of those horror movies that feature gigantic, cattle-sized insects running around, usually doing very bad things to creatures much prettier than they are, like cows, dogs or human beings. I cannot control this feeling, even though on a rational level I know perfectly well that physics says six foot tall insects cannot exist (at least not on a planet with Earth-level gravity).

Here's why they can't. Weight of a body is proportional to its volume. Volume of a body is proportional to the cube of its length. Thus, holding things like tissue density constant, when you increase the length of a body by a factor of two, you increase its weight by a factor of eight. (Give or take.) So if insects were to be six feet tall, they'd have to look very different than what they look like when they're half an inch tall. For one thing, their legs would have to be much thicker in proportion to the rest of their bodies, or else they'd crumble under their own weight. Note that the bigger an animal is, the thicker its legs are in proportion to their whole body size. This is precisely because weight increases with the cube of length. Insect legs are tiny compared with the size of what they carry. Cats' legs are bigger than that. Human legs are bigger still. Elephant legs are even thicker than that. (It's one of the ways in which physics constrains the maximum size of critters. A land animal much bigger than an elephant would basically have to be nothing but legs.) Insects as big as horses would also need internal skeletons. External skeletons are much too heavy in proportion to the entire bodyweight to be sustainable beyond certain upper weight limits.

This is the mantra I keep repeating to myself whenever I get stuck having to watch CGIs (Computer- Generated Insects).

Binomial nitpicking

Kids Prefer Cheese gives a link to a really funny Sheen-Gadhaffi Quiz, and then says:

I got a 4 out of 10, worse than random.

This is a little bit, what's the best way to put it, wrong.

There's ten questions with two possible answers each, so probability of getting any one of them right by chance is one-half. Ergo, probability that choosing answers via coin flip will get you four or less correct picks is 0.38 (with n = 10 and p = 0.5, cumulative binomial(4) = 0.38). No way can you reject the null.