Weekend America -- Monty's Lifesuit: Science Fiction to Fact

This weekend, San Francisco hosts the 2008 RoboGames. Last year's event attracted more than 3,000 spectators to see robots and their human inventors compete in races, weightlifting and all-out robo-smackdowns. But one returning champion from Seattle has a bigger mission in mind. Reporter Jeremy Richards has the story.

It's not a hard defense to make. While the misconception of the "wussy" poet is common in America, I know from internationals I've talked to that it's a decidedly American misconception, a manifestation of the tired idea that men should only express their feelings while drunk or during football games lest they appear, you know, weak. Sure. Were Wilfred Owen and history's long litany of soldier poets weak? Is Iraq war vet Bryan Turner, who just published Here, Bullet, a book of poems about the war, not tough enough? Tell him he's not a fighter.

Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say.

"When a jet flies low overhead, every glass in the cupboard sings. Feelings are like that: choral, not single; mixed, never pure. The sentimentalist may want to deny the sadness of boredom in his happiness, or the freedom that lightens even the worst loss. The moralist will resist his faint complicity. The sophisticate, dreading to be found naïve, will exlaim upon the traces of vanity or lust in any motive, as if they were the whole. Each is selling himself simplicity; each is weakened with his fear of weakness."

-- James Richardson, Vectors