silliness
drorzel | May 13, 2006It's a grey and rainy weekend morning, and I'm facing a day at work trying to put things in order before I leave for DAMOP on Tuesday, so I'm not in a big hurry to get moving. Of course, I'm not feeling all that inspired, blog-wise, either, so I'm going to fall back on one of the staples of lazy bloggers everywhere: funny search engine requests.
There's something a little odd about the way Google Analytics counts these, as "probability+of+fixation+of+neutral+mutations" comes in at #2, which is just sad-- searches for things relevant to this blog are completely dwarfed by PZ's sloppy seconds.…
drorzel | May 11, 2006Via a LiveJournal post on the dorkiest thing ever, a link that isn't new, but new to me: The Lord of the Rings in quotes from The Princess Bride:
PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don't get burned up by the lava.
AUDIENCE: What?
PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don't get burned up by the lava. I'm explaining to you because you looked nervous.
drorzel | April 27, 2006Have you ever wondered about the accuracy of the descriptions in chemical manuals of what different compounds smell like? "Sure," you say, "the book says that this smells like cheese, but does that really help me in my daily life?"
Well, worry no more. Dylan Stiles does the experiment so you don't have to.
(If you haven't responded to the poll question below, please consider it...)
Comments to this entry have been closed because of persistent spam. We apologize for the inconvenience.
drorzel | April 20, 2006Everybody should read today's Medium Large. In fact, you should read Medium Large every day. Why aren't you?
drorzel | April 18, 2006I just got a link-pimping piece of spam that suggests they're improving the targeting algorithm for Subject: lines:
Subject: hep-th index update
(For those not in the know, hep-th is the High Energy Physics- Theoretical category on the porn server.)
It's still a "close, but not quite," as I read hep-th about as well as I read Sanskrit, but at least they're in the right department...
drorzel | April 17, 2006Are you unhappy with the way you look? Feel like you're carrying around some large extra dimensions? Want to compactify your manifold before the summer conference season gets here?
If you answered "Yes!" to any of those questions, then you're ready for the String Theory Diet!
Each rich, satisfying meals of eleven-dimensional noodles, and watch the pounds melt away! You'll lose weight so fast, your friends will think that gravity is leaking off your brane and affecting them more than you! You'll be your own walking hierarchy problem!
You can lose as much as one Planck mass per Planck time (…
drorzel | April 14, 2006RPM is dropping his Double Entendre Fridays, which threatens to cut off the world supply of really dorky sex jokes. But never fear, I'm here to pick it up with a physics version!
Back when I was a lowly undergrad, I was the TA for an optics lab section, and was helping some students to adjust a Michelson interferometer. One of them made some comment about being amazed that I could make such minute adjustments to the alignment of one of the mirrors (done by turning an 80-pitch screw very, very slowly), and the professor running the class (who was one of my honors thesis advisors that year)…
drorzel | April 14, 2006The usual suspects are all upset about John Barrow's crack about Richard Dawkins:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
I don't quite understand the problem, here. I mean, he's right-- stamp collectors, the lot of 'em...
Consider this a sort of poor man's Casual Friday psych experiment-- I'm curious as to whether…
drorzel | April 13, 2006Of special interest to Nathan, evidence that the process of dissertation writing is the same across disciplines:
> work on dissertation
You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation.
> work on dissertation
You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball.
> tear out hair
Taken. You find the Elvish sword.
(Today's a Lab Day, so you're mostly getting silly posts...)
drorzel | April 13, 2006Via Inside Higher Ed, a story with the nearly unbeatable headline: Feds Pounce on Student Dresses As a Ninja. Why was a student running around the Georgia campus dressed as a ninja?
Ransom told The Red & Black student newspaper that he had left a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was snared by agents with guns drawn.
Damnit, now I want to know more! What is the Wesley Foundation, and why are they running ninja vs. pirate smackdowns on college campuses? Or, more precisely, why aren't they running them on my campus?
"Arr!" "Yaaah!!!" Brilliant!
(Note: I don't want to know…
drorzel | April 10, 2006Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, and an excellente planne for a worke of grete literarye merit, including:
The dog-maysteres Tale: the dog-mayster (talle, curtel of greene), his dogge, and his companiounes do fynde an olde wool-quaye that semeth to be havnted by a foule spectre - one of them has those fancie new eye-lenses, the which she doth frequentli misplace - eventuallie they fynde that yt is John Gowere who maketh the appearaunce and similitude of a hauntynge in ordre to kepe the quaye closid, for he disliketh the noyse of woole shipmentes when he writeth hys lame poemes. They do…
drorzel | April 6, 20061) This week's Inforgraphic: Job and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
2) Music reviews containing sentences like: "[The new Flaming Lips record] frequently sounds like Steely Dan as heard from the other end of a machine shop."
Which reminds me, I need to go down to the machine shop...
(Yes, this is a fluff post, but I felt like I needed to post something a little less dyspeptic than the previous entry...)
drorzel | April 4, 2006The post title is a famous William Gibson quote, referring to the tendency of high-tech gadgets to be put to uses the manufacturers never expected. By "the Street," he meant people in general, with maybe a slant toward the sort of underclass element he focusses on in his books, but he might well have been referring to bored grad students. Witness Dylan Stiles and the Man-o-Meter, which assigns a numerical value to machismo, based on your skill at, in the words of one commenter, fellating a digital manometer.
We didn't get up to that much of this sort of foolishness in my lab, in part because…
drorzel | April 1, 2006With silliness running riot at ScienceBlogs, it's more important than ever to keep your fraud-detection skills sharp. Thankfully, the BBC is here to help, with a list of real news stories that sound like they might be hoaxes (via Making Light).
Unfortunately, they're mostly not very funny. A couple are just lame celebrity trivia. But it's the thought that counts.
(As far as actual hoax posts go, I sort of like jefitoblog's Idiot's Guide to Kenny G ("Is it his mellifluous playing or the beautiful songs that make the record so great? Heck, that's easy: Both!"). April Fool posts in general tend…
drorzel | March 24, 2006Reading Dylan Stiles's blog yesterday reminded me of a post I wrote last summer about how to approach student talks about synthetic chemistry. Since evil spammers have forced us to turn off comments to the old site, I'll reproduce the original below the fold:
Summer days are here again, which means the return of the
annual summer student research seminar. There's a local tradition
of having all the students doing on-campus research give 15-minute
talks to all the other summer students. In principle, I think this
is a very good idea, as it gives the students some practice at
public speaking,…
drorzel | March 23, 2006One of the nice things about the move to ScienceBlogs is that I gained access to a much better stats package than we had for Steelypips. In particular, I can now look at the keywords that bring people to my site (for steelypips, I could only get keywords for the domain as a whole, which meant that my blog traffic was swamped by Kate's NetHack site.
On ScienceBlogs, though, I can easily find the odd search queries that have brought people to the site. Which is both depressing (the #4 result is "pharyngula," which really puts things in perspective...), and sort of interesting ("deep attachment…
drorzel | March 16, 2006I've seen the idea of an "Opposite Day" popping up lots of places in the political blogosphere (most recently from Big Media Matt and Will Wilkinson), and it sounds sort of cool. The idea is that you commit to writing blog posts on topics chosen by readers, taking the opposite position from what you would normally argue.
The problem is, this really only works for people blogging about the humanities and social sciences, where you can sensibly argue both sides of any position, or invent entirely new sides at a whim. Us science types are a little more constrained by reality. We've got all these…
drorzel | March 14, 2006I'm with Kevin on this one: this whole "Pi Day" thing is just too dorky for words (I'm looking at you, Clifford...)
However, as noted by Arcane Gazebo, it's also Einstein's birthday, which is an occasion much more worth commemorating. So celebrate as the man himself would have: invent a new theory of the universe while working at a boring and unchallenging job because you can't get an academic position. Or, possibly, divorce your wife and marry your cousin. It's all good.
drorzel | March 9, 2006It's apparently PZ Myers's birthday, which has triggered an orgy of "happy birthday" posts on ScienceBlogs. It's so, so... LiveJournal. Still, everybody else is doing it, so, hey, man, happy birthday. Celebrate with some spicy baked cuttledfish:
("Mr. Squid" image from this page of weird Asian snacks.)