silliness
drorzel | June 6, 2008How will you know, unless you take this Internet quiz?
(I get a 78 on the Husband scale ("Very Superior"), so yay, me. Of course, if I answer the Wife questions, I get a 16 ("Very Poor (Failure)")... Which, given the preposterous sexism of the standards, probably also counts as a "yay, me!")
drorzel | June 5, 2008A simple question:
Bunnies or squirrels?
Emmy eagerly awaits your answer.
She leans toward bunnies, herself, because squirrels can climb trees or, as she puts it, "escape into an extra dimension" (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). Bunnies are earthbound, and thus better for chasing.
Of course, there's also the Cat Question, but we'll save that for another day...
drorzel | May 20, 2008Welcome to today's exciting episode of "How Big a Dork Am I?" Today, we'll be discussing the making of unnecessary models:
In this graph, the blue points represent the average mass in grams of a fetus at a given week of gestation, while the red line is the mass predicted by a simple model treating the fetus as a sphere of uniform density with a linearly increasing radius.
The "model" was set up by taking the 40-week length reported at BabyCenter, and dividing by two to get an approximate radius for the spherical baby. Then I assumed that the actual radius increased linearly from zero to the…
vhughes | April 28, 2008About a week ago, ScienceBlogger Randy Olson (documentary filmmaker of "Flock of Dodos" fame) left a comment on Shifting Baselines suggesting that the best way to combat anti-science propaganda like "Expelled" is with a pro-science film festival. "Right now, if a high school kid makes a really great video about evolution, where is he or she supposed to send it?" he asked. "And more importantly, the presence of such a festival becomes an incentive to draw new talent into the subject."
Chad agrees, but makes the bold suggestion that bloggers could organize such a festival online.
The issue got…
grrlscientist | April 10, 2008tags: itchy tentacle relief, octopus, Japanese commercial, streaming video
Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a commercial for itchy tentacle relief tentacle lube. Despite what you're thinking, this streaming video is SFW [0:30].
drorzel | April 7, 2008When I was talking to my parents on the phone last night, my father told me about a guest op-ed in the Press and Sun-Bulletin that might be of interest to some ScienceBlogs readers and bloggers:
As if there aren't enough problems in the world, we are now on the verge of a phenomenon that will dwarf the projected scenarios of global warming. The cause is the alarming and accelerating loss of Earth's weight and mass by the burning of fossil fuels.
Every year that goes by, millions of tons of coal and millions of barrels of oil are burned. Nothing is left but ashes, soot, and gases, and there is…
grrlscientist | April 4, 2008tags: beer orchestra, humor, silliness, streaming video
Those crazy beer-swilling Canadians! At least they aren't advertizing icky beers like Budweiser or Coors lite or other crappy American beers [1:15]
drorzel | March 28, 2008Today's question come to us courtesy of Ivy League white-reggae band Vampire Weekend:
So, who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma, anyway? Well, John Scalzi, obviously, but the real question is: why? Why does this simple piece of punctuation engender such strong negative feelings in people who are otherwise mostly sensible?
Personally, I lean toward using it, to avoid the "my parents, Ayn Rand and God" problem, but I can't say I feel strongly enough about that to go through an entire book manuscript "STET"-ing removed serial commas. So what gives?
drorzel | March 20, 2008Over at Making Light, Abi has proposed a parlour game using books as Tarot cards. As always for Making Light, the resulting comment thread is full of dizzyingly erudite responses, and clever literary in-jokes.
But it strikes me that there's a fundamental flaw in the game-- Abi's examples all involve selected works, chosen to be appropriate for the subject of the reading. For true divination, though, you need an element of randomness, whether it be yarrow stalks tossed in the air, or the iTunes randomizer. Fortunately, we have LibraryThing: if you look at our library, you'll see a "Random…
vhughes | March 17, 2008On Friday, 3/14, math enthusiasts worldwide celebrated π Day, in honor of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (approximately 3.14).
Back in August, Chad asked his readers which irrational number they preferred, π or e—the base for the exponential function (approximately 2.72). He went with e, because "you just have to love a function that is its own derivative."
For this week's Sb Reader Poll, we want to know if you agree with Chad:
Click Here for PollOnline Surveys | Web Poll | Email MarketingView MicroPoll
Want to know the results? We'll publish them exclusively in…
drorzel | March 15, 2008Paul Krugman is now a famour economist, but many years ago, he was "an oppressed assistant professor, caught up in the academic rat race." So, he did what any good academic would do in that situation: he wrote a silly paper to cheer himself up. In this case, a paper discussing the issues that arise in interstellar trade because of realtivistic effects.
It's a brilliant bit of silliness. It's hard to pick a favorite bit, but this is pretty good:
To conclude this section, we should say something about the assumption that the trading planets lie in the same inertial frame. This will turn out to…
drorzel | March 14, 2008Today has been dubbed "Talk Like a Physicist Day". Why? Because we're at least as cool as pirates, that's why.
Over at Swans on Tea, Tom offers some vocabulary tips:
Use "canonical" when you mean "usual" or "standard." As in, "the canonical example of talking like a physicist is to use the word 'canonical.'"
Use "orthogonal" to refer to things that are mutually-exclusive or can't coincide. "We keep playing phone tag -- I think our schedules must be orthogonal"
"About" becomes "to a first-order approximation"
Things are not difficult, they are "non-trivial"
Large discrepancies are "orders of…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2008tags: Meet Hugo: Cat of One Thousand Faces, humor, silliness, streaming video
Watch Hugo transform himself with his amazing disguises! [1:28].
Okay, it's true that he tries to eat some of them, too.
drorzel | February 23, 2008Because I'm a Bad Person:
(Context here, here, and here, Flickr group here.)
vhughes | January 18, 2008
Hello from Day 1 of the 2008 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference! I just had a late lunch at the hotel restaurant with Dave, Bora, and some other conference participants. As we were walking into the restaurant, and past a large and colorful buffet table, NC-native Dave says to me, "Yeah, people from North Carolina are really into buffets." Really?
Well, I've been looking around the web for any kind of evidence to support this hypothesis, and I can't find any. Vegas, of course, is known for buffets. But where else? Data, anyone? Where's the state-by-state buffet breakdown?
A site…
drorzel | January 9, 2008Via a back channel, the Gardner Project of EniTech Research. They have an argon laser, so you know it's science!
(This is way too slick to be the work of real crazy people, and, of course, there's this ad... This is almost certainly either performance art or viral marketing for an upcoming tv show, but it's pretty amusing. Make sure to at least skim through the comments.)
drorzel | December 20, 2007As previously mentioned, I plan to end the book with a chapter on quantum flim-flam. As research for this, I've been looking at kook sites on the web, and Googled "quantum healing," which turns up all manner of gibberish from Deepak Chopra. It also includes a helpful little item at the bottom of the page:
Searches related to: quantum healing
maurice chevalier hugh grant deepak chopra ectomorphic
The Chopra search makes sense, and "ectomorphic" is a gibberish word that shows up in that sort of stuff. But Maurice Chevalier? And Hugh Grant?
If I could just figure out the connection between…
drorzel | December 14, 2007I took a much-needed Luddite Day yesterday, shutting down the computer and spending the afternoon loafing on the couch reading. I had meant to have a new stereo installed in my car and do some Christmas shopping while I waited, but we got a moderately significant snowstorm yesterday afternoon, so I pushed the installation and shopping back to today, rather than waiting for the roads to get really bad and then trying to come home from the mall.
This means I'll be spending today doing some Christmas shopping while my car stereo is upgraded. So it'll be a day of open threads, a serious one to…
drorzel | December 12, 2007One of the alternately entertaining and depressing things about the culture wars in the US is the existence of a sort of parallel academic universe, in the form of vanity universities like Oral Roberts University, Bob Jones University, and Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University. These provide both a thin veneer of credibility for pseudo-academic nonsense and a launching point for hilarious academic misconduct.
There's really nothing comparable on the militant atheist side. But here's your chance, Pharynguloids: Myers University is for sale:
Don't write the obituary for Myers University yet. The…
drorzel | December 11, 2007Dave Ng over at the World's Fair is at it again, asking what sort of science background Santa Claus has:
So the premise is that Santa is at least several hundred years old, and you've got to assume that somewhere along the line, he spent some time in academia and probably got a degree or two. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he is a man of science, but I guess the question to ask is in what way specifically?
Now, you might think that there are lots of ways to go with this. You could note the flying reindeer, and say that they're clearly the product of either genetic…