If I wrote Comedy II

Last night, I was getting into bed when I heard a high-pitched whine. This has to be one of the most annoying sounds, simply because of how difficult it is to pin down. A good FFFFMMMM is instantly recognisible as a fan and only the fridge makes a certain multi-tone hum. But the whine, any electric motor can pull that off. And then comes the question, "Is it annoying enough to start kicking appliances until it stops?"

I've suggested using pendulums to automatically kick appliances at ten-minute intervals, yet no one seems interested. I can't understand why. People are going to kick malfunctioning equipment anyway, why not have the designing engineers make sure that kick lands in a harmless location? It's all about repeat sales I guess.

But back on topic. The real problem with the whine noise is how close it resembles a buzzing fly. Flies are like unsuccessful cats. Cats can pester you because they have disarming cuteness; flies don't have this advantage. Cats emit a low pitched buzz that's soothing; being smaller, flies have a much higher pitch that incites anger.

The problems with flies are a perfect example of how evolution doesn't work. Consider, how many flies have you noticed and squashed only after the buzzing set you on edge? By the natural selection we learned in highschool biology, non-buzzing flies should have replaced buzzing flies. Of course this doesn't help promote intellegent design either. As we have an animal that exists only to annoy people into squashing it, I'd say we should go with the moronic design or sadistic design theories.

Speaking of intellegent design, it seems that there's some major work that needs to be done. Consider e-mail. It is intellegently designed: a bunch of engineers and other intellegent people got together and wrote down a method of sending notes between people using a computer (I'm guessing the computer games of the time didn't come with expansion packs and map editors yet). So it was intellegently designed, but it wasn't intellegently implemented--that's why I have to delete a dozen hot stock tips sent under the name 'Re: greenish verbatims' from my inbox.

Thus I wish to present my own theory "Intellegent Design-Cr*p Implementation." Essentially, we take Intellegent Design and add "but the implementer screwed it up" after each major point. Also, due to the number of dangerous openings in the design of the world, I'll be introducing "No Legal Council" forming the ID-CI-NLC theory. Which will be followed by a number of other clarifications including the "No Marketing Research," "Poor Documentation" and "Insufficient Testing" to the theory (remarkable as these concepts are added, the theory starts resembling the Evolutionary Theory only with some higher being tripping over the 'create universe' switch).

The term 'higher being' is a strange one. The Jewish/Christian/Muslim idea of god is a trancendant being; higher works in our concept of space. The central problem is we don't have a word in English to mean farther along the beingness axis. And this problem isn't limited to pointless metaphysical discussions. Whenever we discover or invent something new, we need to create a word for it, and the current system is terrible. For most computer-related items, we just describe what it does and start yanking letters out until it's down to a few syllables (e.g. Compact Disk Reader/Writer became CD-RW).

Luckily, while computer engineers are terrible at naming, they have given us a solution to the problem. Many computer protocols are fowards compatible: they have extra data fields which don't do anything now, but they're clearly defined in case someone implements them later (yes English provdes for new words to be added, but it doesn't have a mechanism to lock down the syntax in advance, for example is 'blog' a noun or a verb?). Just look at the waste under the current system: anyone with enough advertising dollars can ruin a perfectly good word. Take 'vioxx' for example, that could have meant anything, but now it's yet another pain medication. As a commented before (Plug) the Greeks managed to create lots of useful words for things that didn't exist.