silliness
ksharpe | January 24, 2007Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid
By Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey
McSweeney's Books
64 pages
$18
"You have purchased this book and now you will learn. My name is Dr. Haggis-on-Whey and I am a scientist. I will not pretend to be your friend. We are here to study animals of the ocean and I will not mince words. If you pay attention I will be less dissatisfied."
So begins Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid, the third in McSweeney's HOW Series, 'Dedicated to the Exploration and Dissemination of Unbelievable Brilliance.' (Warning: Everything about the HOW…
drorzel | January 23, 2007Earlier today, I posted two "Dorky Poll" entries, one asking for people to nominate their favorite science textbook in comments, the other asking for their least favorite science textbook. As of 7:15, a bit less than nine hours after the posts went live, the comment totals are:
Dorky Poll: Least Favorite Textbook: 32 comments
Dorky Poll: Favorite Textbook: 12 comments
Negative preferences lead positive ones by almost a factor of three.
This isn't surprising, or shouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows actual human beings, but it's kind of striking.
drorzel | January 22, 2007Scott Aaronson lists his favorite foods, and says that he expects to weigh 3000 pounds by the time he gets tenure.
Jenn Fallis explains his mistake: he's a theorist. Experimental physics can provide a built-in exercise problem as you haul bits of apparatus from one place to another. Theory's sitting-at-a-desk-staring-into-space program just can't compete...
drorzel | January 16, 2007Via a mailing list, I got sent this link to a really mind-boggling Microsoft marketing video from the 80's. It really defies description, but the original poster made a good attempt:
Microsoft sent this tape to retailers to explain the benefits of Windows 386. Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys.
The link goes directly to the seven minute mark, or I'll embed the full video below the fold (mostly because I want to see how that works). It's nice to see that Microsoft have been PR aces for close to twenty years...
drorzel | January 15, 2007Quick! To Professor Science's house!
(I'd do that experiment for three lab coats, and I don't even wear lab coats...)
drorzel | January 9, 2007Well, that's what I hear...
(It's been a couple of days since anyone said anything mean about him on ScienceBlogs. I wouldn't want him to think we don't care any more...)
drorzel | January 5, 2007I'm A Boy
I'm A Ghost
I'm A Loner Dottie, A Rebel...
I'm A Man You Don't Meet Every Day
I'm A Midnight Mover
I'm a Rocker
I'm A Terrible Person
I'm A Wheel
I'm Actual
I'm Against It
I'm Allowed
I'm Always In Love
I'm Amazed
I'm Comin' On Back To You
I'm Easy
I'm Free
I'm Free
I'm Goin' Down
I'm Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart
I'm Gonna Crawl
I'm Gonna Love You Just A Little More, Baby
I'm Hanging Up My Heart For You
I'm Holding Out
I'm In Love
I'm In The Battlefield For My Lord
I'm In The Mood
I'm Just A Bill
I'm Lost Without You
I'm Not Feeling It Anymore
I'm Not Okay…
drorzel | January 3, 2007Today is the first day of classes, so I'm going to be kind of busy at work. Here's a bit of pop-culture silliness to lighten things up while I'm teaching and setting up labs.
The Neil Diamond chestnut "Sweet Caroline" got brought up in a back-channel discussion, prompting much revulsion from the older members of the ScienceBlogs collective. I'm in the age range where the song was just starting to acquire kitsch value, so I don't really mind it.
It occurs to me, though, that between Neil Diamond and OutKast (specifically, the song "Roses"), pop music has been pretty rough on people named "…
drorzel | December 20, 2006Slate's Explainer presents a list of questions that were submitted but not answered. They propose to answer one of these, chosen on the basis of a reader vote. (Details at the bottom of the article.)
Some of my favorites:
Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't our troops carry laser guns?
Because Home Depot doesn't carry an extension cord long enough to reach Iraq.
Is it possible to collect all the cookie dough in Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream and actually bake cookies from it?
"Coming up next on Mythbusters..."
Just suppose, one day someone wants…
drorzel | December 19, 2006Over at Inside Higher Ed, Edward Palm gets all Swiftian:
The Department of Defense finds itself desperately short of troops with which to sustain what promises to be a long and increasingly unpopular, inconclusive war in Iraq. The Department of Education finds itself suddenly alarmed by the relatively low percentage of Americans pursuing postsecondary education compared to the rate of participation in other countries. American colleges and universities find themselves bucking the current demographic trend such that some of them are lowering standards as they compete for fewer and fewer…
drorzel | December 4, 2006"I'm gonna owe God fifty bucks if I don't get enlightened soon."
I hate it when that happens.
drorzel | December 2, 2006One of the options that came with my new car (I bought one that they had on the lot) was an "Eight-Way Power Driver's Seat." As a physicist, I thought this sounded pretty exciting, because, you know, we appear to live in a three-dimensional world, and to get eight directions of adjustability would need to involve an extra spatial dimension or two, and that would be big news. Cancel the LHC, and everybody rush to the nearest Ford plant!
After a bit of experimentation with the car, I can report that we still have only three spatial dimensions. The eight adjustments are:
Move the entire seat up…
drorzel | December 1, 2006Stolen from a discussion on an email list, a small usage question:
What's the difference between a "fiasco" and a "debacle"? Is there a difference, or are they perfect synonyms?
My thoughts below the fold.
Personally, I'm with the person on the listserver who said that "there should be a touch of
comedy to a fiasco, and a touch of tragedy in a debacle," but I'm interested to hear what other people think.
drorzel | November 25, 2006Via Miriam Burstein, everybody's favorite Middle English poet posts about what he's reading these days:
Battlestar Ecclesiastica by Johannes Wycliffe
In this boke of science ficcion, a man ycleped Wycliffe is the bishop of the gret chirche of Seynt Paules, the which is lyk vnto a mighty shippe and kan moue thurgh the voyde of the planetes. Al othir chirches on the earth haue ben destroyed by the deuil and his feendes, who haue taken on the visages of men and look exactlie lyk friares. Ther is a mighti ladye of feyth called Margery Starbaxter, who ys a loyal warryour for the chirche and…
drorzel | November 22, 2006I've been way behind in my blogreading the last few weeks, owing to a huge amount of, you know, actual work for my day job, so this may have been all over the Internets already. On the off chance that it hasn't, via Ethan Zuckerman, a link to Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala:
Leroy Brown's head was like Wikipedia. It was full of facts he had learned there. He was like the entire Wikipedia site walking around on sneakers. Simon Baron-Cohen had written a paper about him.
It's done as a set of image files, which is kind of annoying, but it's worth reading all the way to the…
drorzel | November 22, 2006Steve Cook suggests a holiday for computer nerds:
Far better than World Hello Day would be Hello World Day, celebrating 32 years of every programming manual's stock first example. Global diversity could be honored by recognizing our rainbow of programming languages, from Pascal to Brainfuck, and when we were done we could all sing a song, examine some art, and return to our homes without bothering anyone.
Hey, it makes more sense than "Talk Like a Pirate Day"...
Of course, as always with a Snarkout post, there are more offbeat links in the post than you would want to shake a stick at, and…
drorzel | November 21, 2006PZ links to a video of a couple of guys dressing like missionaries and knocking on doors for atheism in Salt Lake City. Like most ambush comedy, the concept is better than the execution-- in particular, there's an opening rant about Mormons that goes on way too long. There's some moderately clever stuff, but it's pretty typical of the genre.
I've never quite understood the level of antipathy that the door-knockers draw. It's not that I've never been visited by them, but rather that I've never had a problem with them. When I was in grad school, the Jehovah's Witnesses used to come around at…
drorzel | November 16, 2006The fad of the moment among the physics majors is a shareware game called Pocket Tanks, in which players on opposite sides of the screen fire various weapons at one another, adjusting the launch angle and overall power in order to hit the target. Every time I walk into a room with two or more students in it, they seem to be playing Pocket Tanks. They jokingly justify it as studying for the projectile motion problems on the Physics GRE, and to the extent that being able to predict the range of a particle based on sketchy information about angles and relative launch speed can help, they should…
drorzel | November 10, 2006John Holbo comes a little unglued, but it's entertaining reading. Or, possibly, I need to get out more.
Also, what does Fictional Jimbo Wales think of this?
drorzel | November 3, 2006The Onion AV Club has a review of the Aardman Animation CGI flick Flushed Away that contains a sentence starting with:
Once the film introduces a pack of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno,...
Really, it doesn't much matter what comes after that. I don't really intend to see the movie, but it pleases me to know that there is a movie that introduces a pack of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno.
Really, more movies should feature packs of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno. Or, possibly, I should get more sleep.