Phlogiston

Monday, September 24, 2007

Wikispices

Spice (disambiguation)

Spice usually means a pungent or aromatic vegetable substance, as pepper or cinnamon, used to season food. It can also refer to the following:

Science and Nature
  • A spicebush is an aromatic North American shrub, Lindera benzoin, with small yellow flowers.
Music
  • The Spice Girls were an English all-female pop group in the 1990s. Their members included Baby Spice, Ginger Spice, Posh Spice, Scary Spice, and Sporty Spice.
Television, Movies, and Literature
  • "Spice" is the colloquial term for the substance needed by the navigators of the Spacing Guild for interstellar travel in the novel Dune by Frank Herbert and the subsequent movie and made-for-TV movies.
  • If there isn't a pornography channel or production company called Spice, then I'll eat my hat.
Computers (probably)
  • SPICE is a powerful circuit simulator with many capabilities. Apparently.
Cuisine
  • There have to be like a thousand restaurants across the country called Spice, and they all offer an "exciting modern atmosphere for the discerning diner." Yeah, right.
College
  • Did you know that the Stanford Program on International and Cross-cultural Education (SPICE) was named the winner of the 2007 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize? Me either.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Lady Chatterley's Robot

"And a woman had to yield. A robot was simple with its programming. A woman had to yield it what it wanted, or as like it would probably turn nasty and go on a killing rampage. But a woman could yield to a robot without yielding her inner, free self. That the engineers and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could be taken by a robot without really giving herself away. Certainly she could be taken without giving herself into its electronic power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have her own kind of electronic power. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let it finish and expend itself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while it was merely her tool. Her robotic tool."