Until yesterday, I had been without a computer for ages — about a week and a half, I think. I decided to sell the iMac in favour of a PC that could run Flight Simulator, and the sleek white machine decided to retaliate by blowing up. So it’s in the shop getting a new motherboard and power supply, while the replacement PC only arrived yesterday. But it’s very nice — Athlon 64 3600+, 2G, GeForce 7600, 250G Raid 1.
That said, I just ran across this excellent analysis of the current linguistics wars (you’ll need to be a bit familiar with both the Intelligent Design movement and historical linguistics to follow it):
The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism was clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9); it held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke, for the immediate purpose of disrupting humanity’s hubristic attempt to build a tower that would reach to heaven: “Let us go down,” God says to Himself, “and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues.