...on his return to his room, [he] found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast...
Contemplating
DHoism the other day, I caught myself musing, Sure, there's a bunch of dangerous professors out to destroy all that we hold dear. Obviously, most of these guys (and gals) are happy to stay undercover like the silverfish that they are, but one particularly flagrant example has decided to embrace his inner Dangerous self, even touting his status as
Professor of Dangeral Studies! Well, why not bring these low-lifes out into the daylight -- we'll see how dangerous they
really are. This is, I guess, the essential thesis and raisin dater of DHoism.
So, one thing led to another, and it wound up with me deciding that I oughta do my little bit to help give the whole field a kick-inthekiester-start. Yeah, I know. I'm the exact opposite of the tweedy academic type. Anything I could propose would be looked upon suspiciously, not to say with a certain detached bemusement. After all, a wink's as good as a nod, to a blind bat! Since Dr. Horowitz has
kinda kindly offered a philosophical foundation for the enterprise, what's most lacking is a theoretical framework for discussion. All the other cool disciplines have one, and some have several.
So, further musing ensued. Without benefit of mescaline, cannabis, or
Klonopin, it was slow going. I realized I needed a noun. All the cool theoreticians hit upon a neologism that served to crystallize
that thing regarding which they theorize (or, in German,
Gesundheit). Some, less creative theory guys hijack a
perfectly innocent noun and, zombie-like, force it to do their bidding. "So," I'm thinking to myself, "should it be
dangerosity or
dangerality." Sorta like
Ginger vs.
Mary Ann. Which led to a blinding flash of the obvious:
WAIT JUST A COTTON-PICKIN MINUTE! I'll take BOTH, thankyouverymuch.
Then, just like benzene rings organizing themselves in front of my eyes, the whole thing fell into place. Consider, if you will, the following figure:
As any fool can tell, ... uh, well, let's try it again:
where Dangerality is defined as "the propensity [of a professor] to spout such obvious liberal shibboleths as 'The evidence for human causation of global warming is overwhelming.'"
Dangerosity, on the other hand, represents straightforward Islamofascistic Bush-hating.
Note that this deceptively simple schema gives us a straightforward classification system for the Dangerous Ones (Dangies?), and, Wallah! a
metric by which they may be compared, to be called Dangerousestness, wiz, the distance from the origin, given by the formula SQRT(AL^2+OS^2). Thus, in the example above, we see that Prof. B*, although not the most extreme on either Danger Dimension, is definately the most Dangerousest of all.
You can thank me later, David.
*Whom Prof. B might bé is left to the reader as an exercise.
...on his return to his room, [he] found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast...
