silliness
drorzel | November 3, 2006Like most pieces in McSweeney's, the lette denying Indiana Jones tenure goes on a bit too long, but it has its moments:
The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body during and after the transition to a coeducational system at the college. However, his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.
(Via The Little Professor)
drorzel | October 31, 2006At least, that's the obvious conclusion to draw from today's Medium Large...
drorzel | October 12, 2006I'm inordinately amused by this Overheard in New York entry. Quite possibly because it reminds me of the Jesus Bread-Golem Project, or maybe just for the suggested headline "If Jesus Wanted Us to Eat Him with Salsa, He'd Be Appearing on Tortillas.... Oh... Wait."
I'm a Bad Person. Also, I miss Fafblog.
Update: See also this LiveJournal post. It's a meme!
drorzel | September 27, 2006While checking out the official Nobel Prize web site to see when the prizes will be announced, I was surprised to discover that the Nobel Foundation offers little Flash games on their web site. In particular, I had to check out the Laser Challenge site.
Oh. My. God. Maybe it's just the cold talking, but that has a surreal brilliance to it. It's basically a sub-Mario walk-and-jump game where your job is to gather supplies for an "Amazing Laser Party" in honor of "Dr. Photon" inventing the "super-laser." You pick up little CD's (representing music for the party) and bananas (representing snacks…
drorzel | September 24, 2006Following on the heels of my post on getting into graduate school, Jorge Chan offers some advice on how to stay in graduate school.
drorzel | September 17, 2006Does including his middle name make USC quarterback John David Booty sound more or less like a porn star?
(Yesterday was the inauguration for our new college president, so it was a long day, and I'm a little punchy watching SportsCenter...)
drorzel | September 15, 2006Via a mailing list, Peugeot offers a parallel-parking simulator. So, if you're a person who thinks that Grand Theft Auto doesn't contain enough three-point turns, there's a Flash game just for you...
drorzel | September 14, 2006The truly remarkable thing about the BaconCat incident is not that John Scalzi taped bacon to his cat (as you can tell from his wife's reaction), or that he got a bazillion hits from Fark for it (which is what the Internet is for, after all), or that he made a motivational poster about it (because, really, it takes firearms to keep Scalzi away from PhotoShop).
No, the remarkable thing is that the fake blog someone set up for John's cat currently has a Technorati rank in the top 1.6% of all blogs (848,635 out of 54 million, at this writing).
Really, there's just no way you could make this shit…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Janet thinks she's scoring nerd points by posting a picture of her nerdy watch, but I can match her timepiece:
OK, there's nothing particularly nerdy about the watch itself-- the nerd part is the band, which in this case, is held together with a cable tie. The little loops that are supposed to keep the strap down broke off, so one day when I was in the lab, I grabbed a plastic cable tie, and made my own loop.
That was in December. I replaced the band about a week ago. I only replaced it because Kate was getting her watch fixed, and pointedly asked whether I needed anything done with mine. (…
drorzel | September 6, 2006Fed up with the hotness contest results, Janet has decreed a nerd-off, asking for:
your geekiest jokes, your nerdiest life-lessons, your testimonial to your favorite programing language (or tissue culture medium), what have you.
We've already had a local thread of funny physics jokes, but for sheer nerd value, it's hard to top the classics:
Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An abelian grape.
or
Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant with a mountain climber?
A: You can't. A mountain climber is a scalar.
It just doesn't get nerdier than those...
drorzel | September 5, 2006On Inside Higher Ed this morning:
The University of Florida has distributed several thousand T-shirts in which Roman numerals intended to indicate 2006 (MMVI) in fact indicate 26 (XXVI). After discovering the mistake, the university will have many thousands of other T-shirts redone, The Gainesville Sun reported.
But, hey, the football team is supposed to be pretty good.
drorzel | September 1, 2006Lots of my fellow ScienceBloggers have been playing with the Official Seal Generator (Tara, Steinn, Bora, and Josh, and probably others by the time this posts). I'm just punchy enough to play along, but I can't decide which way to go with this. So, below the fold, I present the competing options for the Official Seal of Uncertain Principles. Vote for your favorite in the comments, if you're so moved:
Serious option:
Silly option:
drorzel | August 29, 2006Medium Large has critical advice for all you websurfers.
Of course, you didn't need me to tell you that, because you already read Medium Large. Right? Right?
drorzel | August 23, 2006Via Arcane Gazebo (who adds a category), an entertainingly snarky taxonomy of lab scientists:
Weird and Whacky
Consider the "mad scientist" of popular fiction, someone so obsessed with their subject that they forget to dress and show up to the lab in their pyjamas. Without wishing to indulge in stereotypes there are scientists who are highly creative and imaginative, it's just that you do wonder when the Mother Ship is going to come and collect them. On a good day they are self sufficient, enjoy thinking laterally and are great at finding ingenious ways of tackling a difficult piece of…
drorzel | August 22, 2006The classroom across the hall from my office is currently being remodeled into interview rooms for the Psychology department (we traded it for some laboratory space in the basement). As a result, my usual office soundtrack of KEXP streaming over the web has been supplemented by, well, whatever the guys doing the remodeling happen to be listening to.
Thus, I can report that carpernters and electricians listen to classic rock radio, while painters appear to favor Rush Limbaugh. I'm sure this information is the key to some deep insight into American mass culture, but I have no idea what it means…
drorzel | August 18, 2006As the "binary liquid explosive" plot sounds a little implausible, and the usual lack of, you know, hard evidence regarding the plot begins to become clear, the question has to be asked: what was really up with the terror plot that has banned an entire phase of matter?
Wondermark has the answer.
(Register link via Calpundit Monthly, Wondermark link via a mailing list.)
drorzel | August 10, 2006As noted by several people, most recently JoAnne Hewett, one of the players at the final table of the World Series of Poker Main Event is a Ph.D. physicist: Michael Binger, recently of SLAC. So, I guess we need to expand the list of non-academic physics careers to include "professional poker player." I'm not sure how Prof. Katz left it off his list.
JoAnne quotes from his bio:
Michael Binger hopes to continue doing research in physics without having to run the rat-race of getting a job and impressing all the right people as he puts it. A win here at the World Series of Poker Main Event would…
drorzel | August 8, 2006If you're in the habit of reading science blogs, you've probably already seen Mark Trodden's article on the science of coffee, including a chemical analysis of the contents of espresso. You might be asking "Is there nothing these science types won't analyze?"
Apparently not, as Dylan Stiles demonstrates. Now there is somebody who needs to get out of the lab for a while. Take a walk, read a book, just don't take NMR spectra of anything for a few days.
drorzel | August 7, 2006I'm very pleased to report that in the month of July, no less than 35 people found this site by searching for some variant of the phrase "Queen of Niskayuna." The dog's going to be insufferable when she hears this. I'm also pleased to report that Aaron Bergman no longer shows up in the top ten results-- Chris Mooney does show up before I do, but at least I'm the second proper name in the search terms list.
Of course, a disturbing number of people also got here by searching for some variant of "butt propellor" and, in one case, "balloon ass." I really, really, didn't need to know that.
Anyway…
drorzel | August 6, 2006Over at Making Light, the Nielsen Haydens stumbled upon a video of the Hurra Torpedo version of the Bonnie Tyler/ Jim Steinman kitsch masterpiece "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which absolutely boggles the mind. Of course, the weird thing is that their re-invention isn't actually any weirder than the original video, which Teresa also attempts to explain. All this together inspired Matt McIrvin to one of the best post titles ever.
But the really fascinating thing about this is the "explore more videos" feature on YouTube. From the original video, you can find links to several live versions of…