Dear Ken,

The cock you loaned me turned out to be a hermaphrodite. It fertilized itself, laid eggs, nurtured a clutch of chicks (12 in all). You can expect a box of week-old chicks via DHL in the next few days.

As for the bottle of hemlock - it sits on a high shelf in the staff room. The sticky label says something like: " Only give this to Keith if there is no other way of shutting him up!"

The issue about cults is a deeply serious one as we both know. I appreciate your humor because none of this is going to get fixed before this Christmas or the next or the next.

Socrates (or was it Plato) understood that endless disputation lead to mostly negative outcomes. In some translations of the Meno dialogue, Socrates is described, by Meno, as a "sting ray" - more properly he is called a "torpedo fish" - that is, he put his non-students into a torpid state through his endless negations. Hence, Plato comes up with the propositional or hypothetical approach. That is, let's assume that 1 + 1 = 2.

Too much cognitive dissonance can lead to students going to sleep. Too much inspection of one's navel leads to a stiff neck.

Luckily design allows us to just make stuff and worry about what we have made later.

Merry Christmas

keith





 Keith Russell notes the relation of the word cult to such words as
culture and cultivate. That is where the discussion of Triz, Kaizen, and
Six Sigma belong.

Speaking of cults, I am worried about Keith. Keith admits that he is an
adherent of Socrates, a well-known corrupter of youth convicted of
capital crimes in Athens and put to death. Socrates was most likely a
member of the cult of Pythagoras, a shadowy mathematical philosopher
whose name bears striking resemblance to such recent cultists as
Rastafari and Rasputin. Plato records that Socrates skipped out on
debts, and he died owing a cock to Asclepius. 

While I am no Asclepius, I often lay awake at night troubled by the
thought that Keith may be corrupting the youth of Newcastle when he
should instead be cultivating the good, the beautiful, and the true.
Should the good citizens of Newcastle force Keith to drink hemlock for
his cultic activities, he may depart the planet owing me the cock I
loaned him for a cultic sacrifice, not to mention the dozen eggs I
should receive as interest on the loan.
<\SNIP>