Our royal family lineage

In one of those weird moments where random crap seems really appropriate, the Presley family titles:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Sir Pierce the Pompous of Hope End Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Wife's Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Noble Excellency Kelly the Hunted of Throcking in the Hole Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Daughter's Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Imperial Majesty Laura the Ineffable of Biggleswade by Biscuit Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Son's Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Most Serene Highness Lord Kane the Dulcet of Gallop Hophill Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My inner grammar Nazi makes an appearance

Commas, semicolons, colons, lists and “and”, and how they work together to handle nested lists.

Poor usage:

“Metro’s operating expenses are paid through three sources: passenger fares, revenue raised by the agency through advertising and other sources and taxpayers in the District, Maryland and Virginia.” — “Metro Considers Increasing Rail Fares” by Lena H. Sun, Washington Post Dec. 11, 2006, Page A11 (from A1).

What’s happening here? There’s a list, the colon tells us that, but then there is but one, wait, no, two commas and three “and”s to help us sort it out. No semicolons. Lots of words that go together in confusing ways.

The most likely answer is that there are nested lists and we need some way to sort them out, and this is where semicolons working with colons, commas and “and”s shine.

Try this:

“Metro’s operating expenses are paid through three sources: passenger fares; revenue raised by the agency through advertising and other sources; and taxpayers in the District, Maryland and Virginia.”

Not only is this now clear, but it opens the sentence up to paring unnecessary words.

Thus:

“Metro’s operating expenses are paid from: fares; advertising and other revenue; and taxes from the District, Maryland and Virginia.”

No need to say “three sources, because our semicolons make that perfectly visible, and this leads us away from other cruft like “passenger fares” and “revenue raised by the agency.”

My inner grammar Nazi usually stays in the background, but occasionally there's something that requires action.

Inhuman intellect

In its glorious entirety and brevity, a post from Razib at Gene Expressions (A Science Blogs Joint):

In the post below there is a lot of talk about genius that might rival Newton. I didn't throw down a list of criteria for why I esteem Newton, a lot of this is gestalt intuition anyway, and I'm probably not reflectively totally aware of why I feel the way I do. That being said, someone threw down Aristotle. Instead of Aristotle, or Plato, or any of the other numerous ancients I mentioned Archimedes. Why? Aristotle certainly had, and has, more influence than Archimedes. The reason is simple: Aristotle had superhuman intellect, but Archimedes had inhuman intellect. Aristotle had beefed up hard disk space, lots of RAM and top of the line CPU, but Archimedes had incredible applications that you just didn't see on any other box. Aristotle took the vector that was humanity and extended incredibly across the length and breadth of human space, but Archimedes shifted orthogonally outside of the plane of known space. I believe that Frederick Gauss, Isaac Newton, and their kind were aliens amongst us. While superhuman intellectuals can aid us in accelerating faster across the ocean of the unknown, the unhumans can cast a spell which magically parts the waters and exposes dry land.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing when discussing the intellects of Aristotle and Archimedes, and if not then it's not fair to compare the two.
There are probably as many ways to slice the question as there are reasonably binary pairs, but in this case I'll take theorist vs. engineer. Aristotle was a consummate theorist, someone who thought about how things should fit together. Archimedes, on the other hand, thought about what things could do, and while I think Razib is correct in projecting a perpendicular relationship between the two, I think that perhaps the great difference in direction might have misled him about the difference in the quantity and quality of their intelligences.