Deconstruction, Deconstructed

Hee hee hee...a computer engineer takes a look at literary criticism and breaks it down into terms the rest of us can understand. It was posted in Slashdot's "Education" section, but it really should have been posted under "It's funny. Laugh."

The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gðdel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure

Creepy geological news from Yellowstone...

Geologists speculate that Yellowstone Park may soon (and not just in geological terms) be the site of a gigantic volcanic eruption. Possible effects including the deaths of "everything living within a 600 mile radius". Apparently the volcano's ~40,000 years overdue, and there's a lot of suspicious geological activity going on.

Color me creeped out.