8 Ways to Sunday

Today’s word has a split personality: it’s capable of being both horny and pious.

concupiscent

– adjective

1. lustful or sensual.
2. eagerly desirous.

Yow. I think it’s the “eagerly desirous” part that puts this one over the top.

Interestingly, the Catholic Church has its own definition of concupiscence that is both more general and more nuanced. More about that on Wikipedia, too.

Updates

• 1/7/2007 @ 5:50 PM — Seems I’m not the only one who thinks this word is awesome. Somebody is selling t-shirts on CafePress that read, “DANGER: CONCUPISCENT IDEATION.”

I just noticed that the word count on this blog recently passed one hundred-thousand. That’s more than some novels.

Wow.

from Queen of Wands, ©2003 Aeire

Over the weekend, I stumbled across a web comic called Queen of Wands that I’d definitely recommend to fans of the genre. Written and drawn by a woman who calls herself Aeire, the comic has a story arc and characters that make it worthwhile to follow from the very beginning. One of the best things about QoW, however, is the occasional one-off strips that stand on their own.

My favorite of these is this strip, which spoofs Captain Planet and the Power Rangers to vent the author’s occasional desire to speed up natural selection a bit. It seems that stupid people are breeding and taking over the world, and all that stands in the way is a team of spunky teenagers with the power to invoke Charles Darwin and his Chainsaw of Natural Selection. There’s a great follow-up a week or so later, in which the comic’s leading lady — who has little patience for the aggressively stupid — feels compelled to do some gene pool disinfection of her own and is barely kept from killing a customer by her boss.

If you liked those, you’d probably also get a kick out of the occasional appearances of the Grammar Nazi — an old lady who fights (violently) against poor spelling, bad grammar, and the scourge of netspeak. The best of these is probably “The Grammar Spork.” The strip has it all: foaming at the mouth, furniture chewing, eyeball removal by plastic kitchen utensil, and a low price of just four payments of $29.95. Get your own Grammar Spork™ today, for quick and easy relief from the pain of poor grammar.

Asimov believed “The Last Question” to be the best short story he ever wrote. Now you can read it online, without even having to make a trip to the library.

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five-dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way…

This story is the epitome of high-concept “hard” science fiction. The narrative spans a few trillion years of human history in about 4,500 words and pursues big answers to the big questions. That it can do this without alienating or boring less scientifically-minded readers is a testament to Asimov’s skill. Along the way it touches on the concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism, but its ultimate target is much larger and more impressive.

The central premise of the story — humanity invents an artificially intelligent machine capable of solving its thorniest problems, but the biggest problem of all proves insoluble time and again — is a set up for an ending with more punch than almost anything else in the genre.

“Ask Multivac.”

“You ask Multivac. I dare you. Five dollars says it can’t be done.”

Adell was just drunk enough to try…

You owe it to yourself to read this story.

(Props: Backwards City)

Updates

• 2/9/2006 @ 6:00 AM — If the link to the story isn’t working for you, try this copy from Google’s cache.

I don’t remember what link I followed to this little buried treasure, but I’m thrilled to have found it. The OneLook Reverse Dictionary is at least a dozen times more useful than a book of synonyms thesaurus, and faster to boot.

Most of the times I find myself reaching for a thesaurus, it’s not to find a word that means the same thing as another word. Instead, I tend to use them to find the word for a certain thing or concept by looking up related words and hoping for a match. Thesauri aren’t very well suited to such a task, which is where OneLook’s tool comes in very handy. It also offers some useful features for crossword puzzle junkies.

Updates

• 12/20/2005 @ 12:15 PM — There’s a OneLook Reverse Dictionary search plugin for Firefox.