The metaphor of the "chain of being", along with its buddies "missing link" and "higher organisms", have been responsible for a whole load of terrible, misleading, and ethically repugnant shit. Look up the history of scientific racism if you want to, for an example. It's about time to ditch this stupid chain metaphor; all the people who actually think about this stuff have done so. (And by the way, while you're already doing your phrase-dictionary purge, go ahead and lose "more evolved", too. Same shit, different bag.)

So these two people put together a neural net that could tell Shakespeare and Marlowe apart, and concluded based on this that "Edward III" was indeed mostly written by Shakespeare, among other things. You should read the paper; it's free.

"Neural Computation in Stylometry II: An Application to the Works of Shakespeare and Marlowe",  THOMAS V. N. MERRIAM and ROBERT A. J. MATTHEWS, Literary and Linguistic Computing 1994 9(1):1-6

"Using principles set out in an earlier paper, a neural network was constructed to discriminate between the works of Shakespeare and his contemporary Christopher Marlowe. Once trained using works from the core canon of the two dramatists, the network successfully classified works to which it had not been previously exposed. In the light of these favourable results, we used the network to classify a number of anonymous works. Strong support emerged for Tucker Brooke's view that The True Tragedy is the Marlovian original of Henry VI, Part 3, the latter being the product of subsequent revisions by Shakespeare."

http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/9/1/1
 

• $290 on grad school application fees
• $80 on fucking GRE score reprints
• $28 on transcripts

• New transhumanist online magazine: H+
• Responsible poll-watching: FiveThirtyEight (they've got Obama at 93.4% to win)
• An online poet who, if you aren't reading him, you don't know what you're missing: The Digital Cuttlefish (seriously, this guy's like the new W. S. Gilbert; he's an absolute wizard with meter)
• Lovecraft was right: Unexplained Antarctic mountains. (if you don't know what I'm talking about, get edumacated!)
• Pictures from our trip to China coming soon, along with reports on whether piracetam+choline actually does that thing it's supposed to do, as I just bought some.
• Go vote! I just did. And don't let anyone give you any bullshit about it.

The Kircher Society appears to be indefinitely on hiatus, which causes some sadness for me. I expect some others feel similarly about its absence..

Here, however, are two other things to read that run in the same channel:
http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera
and
http://cabinetmagazine.org/

The former is actually quite similar to the Kircher Society, but appears to update a bit more frequently. It has slightly more of a science focus, and as such it publishes some posts on non-wunderkammer topics as well, but the time-density of Pretty Shiny Things is about the same, and the quality of write-ups arguably better. The entry on Bosch's "Stone of Madness" on the first page is particularly worth a look, as is the skull-camera on the second.

The latter is a magazine that, if you don't already read it, you probably should. Be prepared for a bit of postmodernism (and if you're going to reply to this with some lame crack about Sokal, don't bother; you'll be using the time better if you go educate yourself a bit instead) and a certain amount of MJT-esque tongue-in-cheek analysis.