Anti-Woo Cleverosity

Via the Barefoot Doctoral, this:

Prank

Just a story I enjoyed...

When my real analysis professor was a graduate student, he had a Number Theory professor who made the homework sets available by leaving copies at local copy shops, where you would go and pay for them to make a copy of the problem set for you. One time, the week before an exam, the professor hadn't left any problem sets, so my now-professor and his pals typed up a page of unsolved problems in the field and left them for the other students.

But the Worst Is...

Monday's xkcd tickled me:

But for me, the worst random sound in a song, and this occurs in a few KSAL songs, is the sound of a bicycle bell. Do you know the kind of bell I mean? It's the kind you put on a bike and it has a little lever on the side and when you pull it, the bell goes "zhing, zhing." Hearing that when you're backing out of a parking spot or tooling along in a neighborhood is definitely enough to trigger a heart attack.

Ikea Cartoons

Ed and I recently bought some furniture from Ikea. When you buy from Ikea, you typically have to assemble the furniture yourself, and you get a large booklet full of instructions. Aside from a safety warning that is printed in 30 (!) different languages, all of the instructions are in pictures. The first page of our booklet contained the following general pieces of advice:


I find these drawings immensely charming and I love the details like the different styles of frowns on the left-hand people.

But the drawing that gets to me the most is in the second row, where it is recommended that you assemble your furniture on carpet rather than a bare floor. The guy who has broken his furniture breaks my heart:

In contrast to his carpet-kneeling alter-ego, who strokes his new furniture with pride and delight, this fellow is greatly saddened and disappointed by his error. I realize that this is somewhat humorous, but I've always noticed that I find other people's disappointment very painful to empathize with (more painful than grief, for instance), and I actually find this drawing kind of upsetting. I found myself thinking about it in bed at night and feeling sad.

Catalog Blog

I've been enjoying a new catalog blog. This post in particular reminded me of Debbie for reasons I can't identify. (Debbie, is this your sense of humor?)

The Perils of Lesbianity

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Sally's Christmas Present

The Styroclock.

Animal Cracker Whim

I'm eating some animal crackers here at my desk, and I mentally made a joke about animal crackers and vegetarians. Then I suddenly wanted to google "Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?" - not to find out the answer, obviously, but to see if this is a common joke/question and where/how it might be answered.

It turns out that, typing "can vegetarians eat" into my little Google search box, the fourth suggestion is "can vegetarians eat animal crackers." So apparently the fourth most common ending for that question is, in fact, animal crackers. (It's right after fish, eggs, and chicken.)

I found that far more amusing than the actual search results. Apparently I am not the only one who types smart-ass questions into Google.

A Bit Ambiguous

I did a double-take at the first sentence of this Denver Post article:

A Thornton restaurateur who served Peking duck to President George W. Bush — along with several Democratic and Republican politicos — could serve 20 years in federal prison on a charge of laundering money connected to a marijuana distribution ring.

Wait - several Democratic and Republican politicos were involved in a marijuana distribution ring?

Oh, no, they just ate Peking duck. Well that's better.

Someone Wrote This?

From Google News, I was reading this PC World article about a rejected iPhone application. I kept finding myself confused by the structure of various sentences in the article, until I finally I realized, "Hey, this isn't me; this article is terrible."

Seriously, someone wrote this for publication (even on the web)?

Excerpts, with comments:

A novelty, essentially harmless, iPhone and iPod app has been rejected from the Apple store...

This kind of stringing together of modifiers works in spoken but not (IMO) written English.

Bailout Bucks is a simple novelty app that lets you put your picture as the face of fake dollars bills, in large denominations, so not appear that you might be attempting a forgery.

Not only is the last bit missing a word or two, but the whole ending part of the sentence is...just not how you write English.

The work of The Codist, a computer programmer and iPhone app developer, Apple has rejected Bailout Bucks based on the view it "ridicules public figures" or could do if it every [sic] saw the light of day.

Apple is the work of The Codist? Wait, what? (Yes, this is a slightly pedantic point, but I still found the sentence more than averagely difficult to read.)

The Codist goes on to question how the approval process works, is rejection down to one individuals understanding of Apple's terms and conditions, does personal taste ultimately decide what is in or out, and what supervisory level, if any, checks the process is fair and consistent.

Did someone dictate this over the phone, intending it to be the outline of a story someone else would write, only to see it published as dictated? How does this type of sentence come to exist in an article?

You would think that, given the overabundance of people with degrees in journalism, English, etc., even a lowly job like this one would be staffed by someone who could write grammatically.

Less Mysterious

I love this bit of the paper I'm reading:

Laguerre sowed the seeds for much of the material of this chapter in Sur La Géométrie de Direction [11]. The specific approach we shall be taking is, however, quite different from the approach in the original, or even subsequent, publications of Laguerre. In Chapter 3, much of this material is redeveloped in the Minkowski model. The results of the present chapter are much less mysterious in that context.

I don't recall having ever seen, in a paper, this close an equivalent of a professor's usual reassurance that "this will all make sense later."

Source: Robert Knight's 2000 doctoral dissertation "Using Laguerre Geometry to Discover Euclidean Theorems."

Christmas Specials

By John Scalzi, The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time, including

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible...

Not Just "Difficult"

I am in love with this cartoon. I think it's the books:
From lolgod.

(I want her book.)