"Boffin on quest to make 'chickenosaurus."

Yes. It's true. "Boffin on quest to make 'chickenosaurus."

"Joe Meek ... the most important British musician of the Sixties."

"[H]e was a backroom boffin who revolutionized sound, devising new recording techniques and crafting an endless flow of gloriously deranged experimental pop that gave him the right to regard himself as the true creator of the records he worked on. Telstar, by The Tornadoes, is still Meek's best-known single. It was the first record by a British act to reach the top of the American pop charts and, rather unexpectedly, was chosen by Margaret Thatcher as one of her Desert Island Discs. An ode to the dawn of the space age and to what Harold Wilson later called the 'white heat of technology', it's a dizzyingly exciting instrumental full of strange, unclassifiable effects: the rocket-launch sound at the beginning is said to be a toilet flushing in reverse; the sounds evoking radio signals were apparently produced by running a pencil around the rim of an ashtray."

"What counts as a swot varies from school to school..."

"... but the threshold for what is constituted 'boffin behaviour' tended to be lower at poorer-performing schools."

Underachievement in Britain.

A "French boffin" proves Nintendo's claims are "complete and utter cobblers."

I'm mainly blogging this because the English slang tickles me, but the dispute is over whether games like "Big Brain Academy" and "Brain Training" are going to sharpen your intelligence.

"I just hate it when stereotypes are right."

News for boffins.

"A BOFFIN too busy to find real love has INVENTED his idea of the perfect woman – a female ROBOT."

No, I haven't set up a Google alert on "boffin" -- yet! -- a word I discovered yesterday. I just clicked on the "LOVE MACHINE: Man lives with female robot..." link at Drudge, because I've long been interested in robots -- click the robot tag, below for proof -- and also less-than-great sex. And suddenly, again, it's a boffin. They're everywhere.

Inventor Le Trung, 33, created Aiko, said to be “in her 20s” with a stunning 32, 23, 33 figure, shiny hair and delicate features....

"Fem-bot" Aiko, who has cost £14,000 to build so far, is a whizz at maths and even does Le’s accounts.

Le, a scientific genius from Brampton in Ontario, Canada, said he never had time to find a real partner so he designed one using the latest technology.

He said he did not build Aiko as a sexual partner, but said she could be tweaked to become one.

Just like real life: she could be tweaked to become one.

“Her software could be redesigned to simulate her having an orgasm and reacting to touch as if she is playing hard to get or being straight to the point,” he said.

Just like real life: fake orgasms!

“She doesn’t need holidays, food or rest and she will work almost 24-hours a day. She is the perfect woman,” he said.

Feminists, don't get too mad at Le. He had a heart attack at age 33 and thinks he may need Aiko to take care of him some day. Really, maybe a lot of us will benefit from caregiving robots some day. (Robots are unlikely to ever to organize a "call in inhuman" day.)

“People have mixed reactions when they meet Aiko,” he said.

“They either love or hate her. Some people get angry and accuse me of playing God. Once someone threw a rock at Aiko. That really upset me.

“But many people are fascinated by her.

"Women are generally impressed and try to talk to her. But the men always want to touch her, and if they do it in the wrong way they get a slap.”

Playing God? Is that the main criticism he hears? I would think more people would tell him he's avoiding relationships with real people.

By the way, after writing this post, I've been reading "Look Me in the Eye," about a man with Asperger's Syndrome. The author, John Elder Robison, feels a great affinity for machines -- as opposed to human beings, with their trickery and multiple levels of meaning and strange emotions.

UPDATE: "She's not really my girlfriend.... I have friends – I don't need to create friends."

"A boffin provides a video demonstration of how the gadget mixes real-life ambient sounds with music."

A boffin? I learn a new word from Clive Davis, who noticed this post of mine promoting the iPhone app RjDj. Clive is not ready to abandon the natural ambient sound of the real world.

Yesterday, I made a video clip -- intending to overlay the video with the soundtrack I was hearing as I spoke. But I forgot to record the sound, and anyway, I think it's interesting to see how utterly foolish I look trying to speak while hearing my voice processed through this program. The old post highlights the boffin's line "That is something very similar to the effect of drugs." He's describing the subjective effect on the person listening to the sound produced by the app. But this video clip shows that it makes the listener look mentally disabled in a manner very similar to the effect of drugs. [The loss of synch at the first edit is unintentional and not meant to demonstrate anything. Sorry for the additional disorientation!]



Notice the addition I put on the old post earlier this morning:

I realized that running this app into your own ears is like imposing a "Harrison Bergeron" program on yourself. Are some children smarter than others? Let them listen to the teacher through "Echolon."

You know what I mean by "Harrison Bergeron"? It's a Kurt Vonnegut story, and that Wikipedia link above, has this link to the full text of the story. It's pretty short, and I think it's pretty important to upload it into your brain for future reference. Yesterday, we were talking about "book groups" and Ron -- "Please, mum, can I be frontpaged for no reason at all? Or would that be ef-frontery?" -- said:

Maybe we could do this here on Althouse. Ann picks a book, we read it, and live-blog our agreed-upon discussion...

... and, hell, we could still get drunk and live blog our bitching about our spouses!

Well, far be it from me to impose a big old book on everyone when this blog is all about disorienting shuttling from one thing to another, but I will call an instant story club on "Henry Bergeron." It begins like this:

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.

“Huh?” said George.

“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.

“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.

“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”

Don't worry, Hazel. You can download RjDj into your iPhone. It's really interesting, hearing all the different sounds....

ADDED: Clive Davis emails:

Very funny video, Ann.

Maybe the nearest equivalent to the B-word is "rocket scientist", a term which is causing some dissension at the Daily Dish today. The only time you see "boffin" in print nowadays is in newspaper headlines - much like "fillip".

In England, periods and commas refuse to be caged in by quotation marks.

100 geniuses.

"The top 100 features not just brainiacs and boffins, but 19 musicians, two artists (Damien Hirst and the illustrator Robert Crumb) and one sportsman (Muhammad Ali). He is joined at number 43 by a surprise entry: Osama bin Laden."

Boffins? I don't know what the hell is going on here, but it's irking me, and why are so many of the geniuses British? Was the list compiled in Britain by any chance? In this country, when we make a thing of calling people geniuses, we give them half a million dollars.