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e-mail author (edward@ordman.net)
Here is a poem I wrote for the closing show of IRAS in 2001.
It is based very loosely on an old Gilbert and Sullivan song, Darwinian
Man
The object, of course, is to use as many big words and phrases from
the
lectures as I can.
She spoke of music of the spheres,
He carefully measured her telomeres.
What could she do, the robot to woo?
He called her an ignorant Harvard Grad,
She called him a short technological fad.
And he claimed be never would take a wife,
Till the Pope conceded that he had a life.
(2)
She offered communion and wished him well,
He gobbled extended HTML
She checked his reaction when she went unveiled,
But he rebooted and his checkpoint failed.
What could she do, to carry it through?
Though the data forms that the maiden tried,
Were both scientific and sanctified,
His emotions were restricted by a budget line,
And he played at soccer in his rare spare time.
(3)
She taught Liberation of machine souls
In pursuit of research and of carnal goals.
She requested a highly skilled conference team
To finance his Happy Hour subroutine.
What else could she do, to see the thing through?
Now his ground of being was orthopraxis,
His evolution driven by breaks on taxes,
So the lady applied her intellect keen
To capture the soul of a new machine.
(4)
With a view to make his being more free,
She sought a new psychic reality.
He found her attractive and well arrayed
But her biotechnology retrograde
What now could she do, to see the thing through?
She plied him with Java and offered him tea,
She got a gene transplant for longevity.
And constructed on a teleogical plan,
A distributed system Lamarckian.
(5)
They planned to meet in a shady glade
Till he crashed after Microsoft's next upgrade.
She gave him an Op Sys reinstall,
A CPU transplant and he stood up tall
My story's near done, the gal's nearly won
He now called her homo technologens,
She called him her techno homologens,
Their love for each other now all could see,
They lived happ'ly ever after, virtually.
(c) Edward Ordman August 2001