{1}  Melissa started it all:

Proposal: That Sarah Piatt be voted the *highest* standard of sentience.  

According to the latest SWIL News, she managed to be filking with Joel,
Larry, and me until 3am at PhilCon on Friday night and STILL be dismembered
at a SWIL meeting at Swarthmore the next morning.  This, my fellow SWIL
members, is incredible.  For an encore, she returned to PhilCon and filked
with us AGAIN on Saturday night.

As we all know that the SWIL news is the Final Word [pause for a moment of
silence and a recitation of the appropriate passages from the Holy SWIL
Bible], these things must be true.

All hail Sarah.


Melissa
.sig on its hands and knees worshiping Sarah

{2} (Stephanie B. Dyrkacz) wrote, in response to {1}:

> Oh, almighty Sarah, give us your blessing!  Show us how to raise ourselves
> out of the pit of lowly sentience.  Take pity on poor Charles and shine
> your divine light on him in his hour of need.
> 
> Stephanie
> .sig ditto to Melissa's

{3}  As an addendum, Melissa wrote:

In this hour of need, we beseech you, oh Sarah, bestow upon us your good
will and turn not your wrath against us, for we are but lowly gibbons in
your eyes.  

And it came to pass, that at the third hour of nineteenth day of November,
Sarah was taken from us and ascended to Swarthmore.  And lo, there, in
humble Sharples, did she minister to SWIL and she spake unto them saying,
  "Fear not!  For I bring you bottles of Tide that will be great joy for
all who care to show up. Lo, this day, on the settee of David, a pile of
lint has been found.  And it shall be called Phil which means chancellor,
almighty dog, everlasting SWIL news, prints of piece."

Then, in a glory that was fairly bright, although not quite as bright as
some glories are, a choir of angels appeared and began singing exactly a
flattened fifth off key.  

And a squad of security guards came and arrested the angels.  And they were
rather put out.

Thus endeth the lesson.


{4} As another addendum, Stephanie wrote:

        Oh, heavenly Sarah.  Show us how to worship you and your chancellor Phil
so that we may be saved.  Lead us not into the dirty hands of the security
guards and let us once again bend an ear to the glorious music of "Share
and Enjoy".  Do not forsake us, oh, Tidely one!

{5} Charles replied to {2}: 

Hey, now look here.  Who said anything about hours of need?  While it's
true that I AM the minimum standard of sentience, there are certainly
things out there less sentient than I which are doing just fine all on
their own.  I am happy and content in my low-level of sentience.  
       Oh, and by the way, I KNOW the highest standard of sentience.  He
lives in my room on top of my stereo, is made of rubber, and is wiser than
thou!

Charles

{6} Ross Dickson wrote, in reply to {5}:

Ack, it seems the unknowing are trying to upset the cosmic of balance of the
minimum and maximum, the alpha and omega as it were, of sentience. If either
of these two powerful forces strayed too far from the other the fate would
be unthinkable, well at least pretty bad. You may respond, "Well what about
the angles that arrived at such an opportune moment?" To that I say, check
your receipt, I had already booked the real angles for a gig over in the
engin lab and they were there, so yours must have been impostors.

ross
.sig eaten by gibbons
where the .sig here it would comment that at 3am coherence is not mandatory.

>{7} StephÕs reply to Charles ({5}):

> Now, don't tell me you don't have hours of need!  You need food,
water, and sleep on a daily basis, right?  So every day every sentient
human has hours of need, and I was simply praying to Sarah to relieve them.
 
> Re:     Oh, and by the way, I KNOW the highest standard of sentience.  He
> lives in my room on top of my stereo, is made of rubber, and is wiser than
> thou!
                                                                        Than me, perhaps, but not more than the great Sarah!
{8} Charles shot back with:

Thanks, but I think I'd rather relieve myself than have Sarah's help. 
Nothing against Sarah and all, but some things are just too personal (not
to mention unsanitary and deviant) for other people to help with.

{9}  Jeremy piped in with a sort of non sequitur:

Of course, you realize that now we have a minimum standard of sentience
(Charles Danforth) and a (pending) maximum standard (Sarah Piatt) we will
now need a full set of standards of sentience, including but not at all
limited to:

1. A mediocre standard of sentience (a.k.a. a 'sittard')
        Someone who's sentience is so normal and ordinary that no-one will
comment on it.  This may be the most difficult standard to find.  After all,
if someone is "normal" or "ordinary" they probably aren't non-members of
SWIL; therefore, they either have failed to attend three consecutive
non-meetings, or else they aren't sentient.  In the latter case, they
of course are not a standard of sentience at all; in the former, we probably
don't know them well enough to nominate them to ANY standard of sentience.

2. The most contradictory standard of sentience.
        This is a person who has the most reasonable claims to being BOTH
minimum and maximum standards of sentience.  I don't know who this would be
in our reality, but in some reality in which Sarah and Charles are the same
person, well I'd pick him/her then any day.

3. An arbitrary standard of sentience
        Pick somebody.  Anybody.  That person is the arbitrary standard of
sentience for SWIL for ever and ever.  Even if they aren't in SWIL.  Even if 
they aren't in Swat.  Even if they're dead.  They're it.  Nobody else.  No
reason.  No argument.

4. A non-standard of sentience
        A non-standard of sentience is anybody who is NOT one of these
standards of sentience.  This is probably a lot of people, since there are
a lot more people in SWIL than there are rules in this here list.  But wait
a second -- you know what?  All these other standards are an individual
begin.  In the name of consistency, this must be too.  So either we must 
kick a hell of a lot of people out of SWIL (ie remember them), or we must
come up with a lot more standards...

PLEASE HELP ME COME UP WITH MORE STANDARDS (SENTIENCE-RELATED) OR ELSE
SWIL AS WE KNOW IT MAY CEASE TO EXIST!
   
{10} Fred Bush replied to {9} with:

     Oh dear, wouldn't want SWIL to cease to exist, so I guess I must throw a
couple three four more "standards of sentience" into the fray.

STANDARD OF SENTIENCE--a big banner someone carries which says "sentience".
The bearer of the standard travels before SWILfolk wherever they go
announcing that sentients approach.

SUB-STANDARD OF SENTIENCE--this would be a minion of someone who's
sentient. for instance, perhaps joel/steph/melissa would be sub-standards
of Sarah (they are obviously her thralls, though, since there are only
three of them, they cannot be her minion).

STANDARD OF SENTIENCE--we need someone to go to Greenwich and attune
him/herself to the sentience of people there. Then, we can tell if someone
is sentient, avant-garde, behind the times, or just slow.
{11} To which Charles replied to {10} with:

I actually have been there and studied at great length both the exact
location of the prime meridian (from which all time zones and longitudes
are based) and the standard meter from which meters were at one point
defined.  I feel that, being the Minimum Standard, I sit in a unique
position straddling the line of sentience and thus am best able to tell who
is on which side of what.

so there.

Charles
{12} Jeremy responded with:

Of course, if you know who's on which side of what, you probably know
a lot, and may therefore be more than minimally sentient.  You
therefore aren't straddling the line, and while more comfortable that
way you won't be able to tell who is on which side of what, which is a
contradictory!

HOORAY!  Charles has just revealed himself to be not only the Minimum
Standard of Sentience, but also the Most Contradictory Standard of
Sentience.

This is where the madness stands right now.  I wish to propose that, whilst Sarah being the highest standard of sentience would help me immensely, I fear that that is out of the question right now. Neither do IÊfeel that Runcible should be the highest standard of sentience.  (I say this because I am not sure who I fear more right now:  Sarah or Charles.  Getting either one on my bad side would be bad--so what do I do?  I get them both on my bad side.)  Actually, every body knows who the highest standard of sentience is in SWIL.  [no, no.  Not ME.  IÕm generally accepted as being just a half-step above Charles].  No.  The highest standard of sentience in SWIL is a person who is so smart that, even though he has proven his sentience, refuses to attend three consecutive meetings and therefore will not join SWIL.  I am talking about none other than Black II.  [True.  Runcible could devour Black II, and Sarah, well, LetÕs not think about What Sarah will do to Joel when she finds out that I am not defending her maximum sentience proposal]  However, I can shed some light on the mysterious Black II, of whom so little is known.

	1).  He is a Lego person.  As such, he can actually be dismembered and be in many places at once.
	2).  He has come back from the dead once.  In 1990, he was killed by radiation poisoning.  A dimensional gate was found into the Lego Underworld--(another dimension; Legoes have no known religion), and he was brought back through a process that closely resembled SpockÕs being brought back to life.  (i.e., the body was healed and the spirit was reunited with the body.)
	3)  He is the driving force behind the Laboratory--the science instillation in Legoland.  He uses computers--I do not.  (He is doing this typing for me.)  He prefers LCÕs--Lego Computers.  MicÕs (Mega-Icky Computers) he feels are not worth anything.  Translating this to the human world and to SWIL language--He Wants His PC!!!
	4)  He does not require sacrifices or prayers.
	5)  He has saved at least one species of bird from extinction.
	6)  He has saved several computer beings--beings that now exist in computer matrixii--from a power shortage in their nodules.  These beings were then incorporated into the Laboratory computer system, where they now live happily.
	7)  He has discovered a non-polluting energy source.  Energon cubes harness the energy of a sister dimension and channel it back into ours, so as long as there is enough energy in the cube to keep the dimensional hole open, the cube will automatically recharge itself.  This is not depleting the sister dimension, because the energy is returned to the sister dimension through black holes.  The total energy of the system therefore remains constant, but now usable.
	8)  He was once a ghost buster.
	9)  He is a member of the Legoland Congress.
	10)  He is the reigning Lego champion in Staff-Battleing. 

	That is my proposal.  However, I do not think that it will go over to well with the majority of the factions in SWIL, so IÊsuppose that IÊwill side with Sarah.  (Did you really think that I would side with Runcible?  If I did I would have to find a new table to sit at.  And new people to hang out with--maybe Gil.  And give up on Sarah.  It is not worth siding with Runcible, even though it is Charlas, not Sarah, that owns the katana.)  
	And, oh, Fred.  Sarah does have minions.  It is not just the three people that you named.  It is Joel, Steph, Melissa, and ALLÊ256 Lego People.  Nyahh.