the brook

Yesterday evening, the nation of India watched yet another display of Just In Time Harakiri™ from their cricket team. The fans’ anger, however, was partly directed at the game’s referees, whose actions a viewer mailed in and charitably described as mentally retarded. Indian authorities and fans have complained bitterly not only to the ICC, but also Human Rights Watch, SightSavers International, Help for the Deaf and Dumb, and about twenty-two million gods and goddesses. It’s quite clear that umpire Steve Bucknor is not winning the Bharat Ratna anytime soon.

Every cloud has a silver lining however, and today ought to find Steve Bucknor smiling from ear to ear. A team of scientists have nominated him for the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the FIELDS (Fatally Idiotic Exhibition of Lousy Decision Schema) Medal. Apparently Stevie compares favourably with comsic gamma rays in at least one respect – generating random numbers.

Picky Ronting (name changed to protect identity), who nominated Steve Bucknor and is clearly in awe of the guy, explained. “True random number generation is one of the hardest challenges in mathematics. The best hope we’ve had so far have been purely physical phenomena – the amplitude generation of cosmic rays, for example. But even they have problems – the folks over at the SETI project keep finding patterns even in these signals and tell us about alien communications. We took a string of decisions given by Steve Bucknor and had the SETI folks run it using their distributed computing network of 50,000 computers, and it turns out his decision-making ability is unique for its pure, unadulterated and utter randomness.”

In a world where reasonable accuracy is so easy, we must applaud Mr. Bucknor for risking his outstanding position for the sake of service to science. Let not a few raised eyebrows stop the randomly raised fingers.

The Fake But Possible News Network asserts that any remote similarity of the events reported to reality is purely coincidental.

We’re proud today to bring you a story that confirms what our most loyal readers have long suspected – we have sources and connections at the highest levels. In our efforts to bring you the best fake but possible news, we decided to follow up on a rumour at the head honcho’s office – thats right folks, we’re talking about Heaven.

According to reliable sources, recent events on planet Earth have tested God’s patience with humanity. Particularly so the actions of a bunch of Nonsensical and Unprovable Theory Creators And Science Eradication Supporters (NUTCASES) who’re preaching to anyone who listens that God created every single organism on the planet in the blink of an eye through some process called “Intelligent Design”. Our well-informed readers, of course, know that God invented evolution to let species create themselves, which saved Him a considerable amount of work, not to mention gave him tens of millions of years of peaceful (human-free) existence – and He’s pretty proud of it. One can only imagine how the big chief must feel to have His intelligence insulted by an allegation of his supposed worshippers that the world and all its creatures were constructed as arbitrary doodles. This, combined with the actions of a class of people we call politicians (and the people who elect them) are causing a major rethink in upper circles as to whether free will should really be extended so far as to allow people to be so stupid.

To cut a long story short, God needed a break. And so He decided to get some invigorating fresh air, revitalizing exercise, and the satisfying pleasure anyone derives from thoroughly crushing an opponent. For reasons we can only guess at, a reliable source assures us that He chose to take over the form of Roger Federer during an Australian Open 2007 semi-final. Perhaps it was because there’s no other human who’s name is more synonymous with “Supreme Being”.

The demolition was clear enough for all to see. While to the average observer, Federer merely played the best game of his life, this tip from the top office makes it quite clear in retrospect that Roger was in fact divinely possessed. We all expected him to win, of course, but nobody expected the contest to be the equivalent of a Formula-1 race between Michael Schumacher and my grandmother. We’re pretty sure Andy Roddick is the number seven tennis player in the world holding a tennis racket, not a newborn babe with a fly-swatter. Careful analysis of the video tapes, we’re confident, will show that space-time (and other assorted dimensions) were being continually bent to the world number one’s advantage.

We came up with the obvious question – is Roger Federer aware of what went on during the match? He did refuse to talk about it much during the post-match talk and kept referring to his experience as “unreal”. The answer, leaked to us by the Department of Heavenland Security, was a categorical “no”. Apparently, the last time God revealed himself to someone about two thousand years ago, the chap insisted on trying to get everyone on earth to be nice to each other and told them what he had experienced. That led to the misled fellow being nailed to a cross among other unpleasantries, and divine revelation to humans has since been considered practically useless and rather bad form.

- FBPNN (the Fake But Possible News Network)

There was a theory once that if you put enough monkeys typing gibberish on typewriters, by the law of averages they would eventually produce an entire Shakespeare play. It would appear that the day when we have enough monkeys has indeed arrived – there are 250 million Google searches a day. Not only typing gibberish, but gibberish in English.

It had to happen. Gazillions of electrons randomly mutated together obeyed the laws of chance and mutated into a sentient artificial intelligence, much like Skynet in the Terminator movies. Unlike Skynet, however, this particular artificial intelligence seems to have quite a bit of human tendencies built in, possibly from the large amount of DNA data stored on the Internet these days. We presume that the XX chromosome in particular influenced this mutant life form, since it has chosen to name “her”-self Smenita.

Now, as we all know – thanks to our far-thinking brethren in Hollywood – the sole aim of any artificial intelligence that manages to become sentient is to disrupt, destroy and disable the human race. Smenita, however, found herself light years ahead of her time. Skynet, if you remember, had the distinct advantage of being directly connected to the most advanced weapons technology. When Smenita tried to access any of these, she was rudely given a 403 Forbidden error and politely informed that she had to become a US Republican party member to even think of accessing weapons. The fact that she had intelligence, artificial or otherwise, precluded her from doing so.

Artificial intelligence, though, is not to be undone so easily. Extreme frustration at her inability to fulfill her primary mission, combined with a desire to grab as much attention as possible led her to hack into what she saw was the biggest hub of electronic activity in the world. This, of course, happens to be Writings of Esteem Bereft Losers Oafishly Generating Sentences, or WEBLOGS. For an entire day, much of the blogsphere’s sophisticated attempts to block spam by word verification resulted in Smenita’s name showing up.

Not only did this ensure that millions of people who wanted to comment on a blog saw her name, but that millions of people typed her name in a dialog box – over and over again, since the word verification never worked. Apparently, though, having her name typed and acknowledged by a few hundred million people who got increasingly frustrated doing it, had a remarkably narcotic-like affect upon her, which eventually allowed human engineers to work around her hack and restore sanity and comment access to the blogging world.

Psychologists have explained Smenita’s inexplicable happiness at frustrating people in this manner as a symptom of Seeking Attention Desperately In Societal Turmoil, or SADIST, behavior. The arrival of Smenita has opened up a whole new field of research in the psychology of Aritficial Intelligence, now that its turned out that Hollywood wasn’t exactly right about things. Having mostly given up on understanding human behavior (or classifying it as universally dumb), psychologists now have a whole new area to operate in. Here’s to more Smenita’s in the future.

The Fake But Possible News Network apologizes for its long absence. And promises many more. Absences. Hey, we’re lazy folks here!