Category Archive

While at Oak Island, we visited the North Carolina Aquarium. It was decent, nothing on the Baltimore Aquarium, but it had some cool stuff. In the southeastern swampland exhibit, there was a very specific sign (below) about what not to do on the plants. When I trundled on the venus flytrap three feet away, I had the perfect excuse, but they didn’t buy it…

There was also an outdoor pond with a bale of baby turtles and some carp.

It is very important to know your audience when marketing your product. This was posted at the bus stop just outside the CS department at CMU.

By now, the April Fools’ Day blog post shtick is so done that it has been reduced to one bad joke after another. It’s too much! I will be joining the Kloonigames Alliance Against Awfully Horrible Need-a-word-for- jokes-starting-with-N (KAAAHN).

I saw a great bumper sticker today.  Unfortunately, the pic I snapped was blurry as all crap and I felt too nervous to take another one.  Which I shouldn’t have, but I can’t help myself.

We child-proofed the house,
But they STILL get in!

It doesn’t inspire confidence in a jobs posting site when you get results for job salaries like this:

I must admit, I am surprised. I thought for sure being a Republican paid better than raping people, or at least paid the same. Time travelers have an unfortunately low salary. Obviously, they are too stupid to realize they could be hocking artifacts from the past for millions. Oh well.

I’m not at all a sports fan, but even I can appreciate this humor. Sorry if you’ve already seen it (I actually saw it last week and was just reminded of it). My favorite line: “It’s ok, he can afford one, don’t worry.”

PhD Comics does it again. Seriously, that is so spookily accurate, I need to get a credit check to see if someone has stolen my identity. Minus the sports/celebrity gossip. Substitute tech/gadget/astronomy news for sports statistics/celebrity gossip and you have me pretty much to a T.

I wonder if a campaign like this, executed a few years ago, would have helped endear him more to the public?  He actually comes across as somewhat human.

This T-shirt just cracked me up:

Of course, it actually could have been this way. I think the US even had a defacto assumption that the moon was ours. This is very much not the case. With the recent Japanese and Chinese probes to the moon, the upcoming German probe, and rumors of more probes and missions to the moon, there are many claimants. There was a Moon Treaty that was supposed to hand control of all heavenly bodies over to the international community (that is, the UN). However, this useless piece of paper was only ratified by the likes of Mexico, France, India, Chile, Australia, and the Phillipines (and several other small countries), none of which have a manned space program.

The moon is potentially a gold mine (or rather, a helium-3 mine). What it is not, is a waste of time. If we ever do manned exploration of other worlds, a lunar base would be a great base of operations. For one, it’s good practice. For another, the lower lunar gravity could allow people to reside there longer with slightly reduced health effects while still providing an easy base to launch from. Of course, the moon has its dangers. NASA is planning a new lunar base on the lunar pole, where danger from solar radiation is diminished while still allowing for energy gathering from solar arrays.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out on the moon. Will there be borders and bases manned by robots and people from many different countries? Or will we see international cooperation as we have seen with the space station? At this point, it’s anyone’s guess.

I found this in a bathroom of a Taco Bell near Sutton, West Virginia. Not only is it misspelt, but there is something wonky with the logic here. Why should I be courteous and lock the door? Isn’t the social norm that people knock before entering a bathroom? Granted, they would assume it’s a multiperson bathroom in this case, but a sign could be put on the door: “NOK FRSIT.” Also, doesn’t it seem to assume that you won’t mind much if someone barges in on you wiping yourself, but that the barging party will? A better sign would remind you that you need to lock that door.

When you subscribe to a crapload of feeds that have overlapping subject matter, you see interesting themes emerge. In the astronomy subblogosphere, the recent news about the double galaxy 3c321 has sparked yet another competition over who can come up with the coolest headline. In case you haven’t heard about it, 3c321 consists of two galaxies, one of which is shooting a jet of particles at the other (via its black hole) which could strip the atmosphere off any planets in that galaxy. Here are the headlines I have collected in the wild:

1. Bad Astronomy: Taste my death ray, 3c321!
2. Space.com: Galaxy blasts neighbor with deadly jet
3. NASA: ‘Death Star’ galaxy black hole fires at neighboring galaxy
4. NASA Image of the Day: Black Hole Bully
5. Discovery News: Galaxy zapping neighbor with deadly beam
6. National Geographic: ‘Death Star’ galaxy found blasting smaller neighbor
7. Celebritycraps: Black Hole ‘Owns’ Galaxy!!!
8. Cumbrian Sky: ‘Death Star’ galaxy lets rip…
9. BBC: Black Hole ‘bully’ blasts galaxy
10. ArsGeek: I swear, some peoples galaxies…

And the list goes on with variations on the theme. Almost as shocking as the campy puns are the multitude of posts that just regurgitate titles from the major news outlets.

This phenomenon is not limited to the domestic abuse in double galaxy 3c321. I have observed it occur again and again. I suppose it comes from probably three different causes: catchy headlines attract readers, blogs are supposed to be creative outlets and so bloggers try to be creative (and I guess newspaper editors as well), and a natural desire by people to show off their wit. I decided to combine all three by going over the top and using a fake word just to make it rhyme. The result attracts readers, is creative, shows off my prodigious wit, and thumbs a cynical nose at the blagoblag for its absurdity while ironically increasing said absurdity. Insert arrogant, fake, British-gentleman laugh here.

As a side note, wouldn’t be interesting if we’re actually witnessing a galactic war between two ridiculously advanced civilizations who don’t mind taking millions of years to kill each other?

Whenever I’m in the lab and mistype my password logging into my laptop, there is an insanely loud beep from the PC speaker. Why not use the actual speakers on the machine rather than resorting to the PC speaker, a relic from the times when computers and dinosaurs walked side-by-side and computers had to be loud in order to be heard over the rumbling of the earth? Tonight I was messing around on the command line in MySQL and entered a bad command only to have my ears blown away by this 270 decibel dinosaur-alerting screech.

So I went searching for a solution to my problem and I was willing to do anything — even if it meant opening my system and ripping out the little speaker’s still-beeping heart. I gotta hand it to Microsoft, though, they make things easy. Psyche!

Under Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager, you get a screen like so:

You would think that the PC Speaker would be under “Sound, video and game controllers”, but you’d be wrong. PC Speaker is hidden under System Devices. Disabling that does absolutely nothing. This is because Microsoft practices something called function obfuscation. Basically, if you expect something to do something because doing so would be intuitive, the actual function is performed by something else.

The Microsoft developers had this conversation:

Bob: Ok, we need to add the PC Speaker to the Device Manager.
Jim: I think we should add it to “Display Adapters” since it is displaying sound in the air.
Bob: Good point.
Jill: Wait, that is really messed up. People might guess that.
Bob: I just had an idea. People might guess that.
Jill: That’s what I said.
Bob: Be quiet, Jill, men are talking.
Jill: <storms out of the room>
Jim: I know, let’s make it a hidden option called Beep.
Bob: Brilliant. It’ll be years before anyone finds it.

To make a long story about a really boring topic that just totally pissed me off so I had to vent short:

Under View, choose the option “Show hidden devices.” This will reveal the “Non-plug and play devices” node in the tree under which is the “Beep” device. Click on the Driver tab and click “Stop” and under Startup choose the type as “Disabled”. Now wasn’t that easy?

Why is the US focused on Iran so much right now? I say we focus on the real threat: Greenland. That’s right — Greenland.

Why nuke the poor peace-loving people of Greenland, you might ask. They are not doing anything per se. But they are sitting on a mountain of fresh water locked in their glaciers. And in those glaciers lies the key to temporarily halting global warming.

So we drop a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb over Greenland and detonate it in the air. The heat wave will vaporize some of the ice, but the temperatures will be so hot for miles that much of it will melt (a hydrogen bomb reaches temperatures in excess of 10 million degrees Celsius at the burst point). The melting ice will flow into the ocean as runoff and then proceed to cool down the North Atlantic Deep Water current. The same current was cooled down about 8200 years ago when Lake Agassiz (a giant North American glacial lake 7 times bigger than all the Great Lakes combined) melted and drained into the North Atlantic. That melting event spurred a mini-ice age according to new research.

What about the people of Greenland? Do they deserve to die to cool down the northern hemisphere? Well, there are only 56,000 inhabitants, so we can easily relocate them to more sensible locations like the coastlines of the US. Once this plan is announced, miles of beach-front property will go on the market and will be easily purchased for next to nothing.

As an added benefit, monsoon seasons will be much lighter throughout Asia. All that pesky rain previously used for growing crops and the mosquitoes that pass on malaria will be significantly lessened. This will lead to thousands of lives saved who might have otherwise succumbed to malaria.

Look, Greenland is melting anyway. Do our children deserve to wait decades for it to slowly melt before they get relief from the awful effects of global warming? NO! Nuke Greenland now for our children. Those glaciers and the bears that live on them are the real terrorists.

From the most excellent xkcd:

I felt the exact same way when I first picked up python.  It was like finding the holy grail of programming languages.  To be able to just throw things into a list and access them without having to worry about casting.  To throw around functions like they were variables.  To weave functions out of thin air and watch them vanish when their usefulness had expired.  It was magic.

Of course, the honeymoon faded.  I still use python as a first resort.  As a programming language for exploring new ideas, it can’t be beaten.  Development time is ridiculously fast.  There has been effort to get the runtime up to snuff as well, but with much reluctance I’m forced to admit it doesn’t compare to C or even Java, may God have mercy on my soul.  Granted, it all depends on the application, blah blah blah.

Despite all that, I still love it.  It’s definitely first in my heart as far as programming languages go.

I’ve seen Santa dogs and elf dogs. Frosty the Snowman dogs and Rudolf dogs. But this is a new one to me.

I’m not sure if anyone realized it, but Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, is running for president. How do I know this? His first campaign ad. He has finally proposed doing what I’ve been saying do for years: unleash Chuck Norris on the world. Illegal aliens at the border? Walker Texas Ranger baby.

So this election, would you rather have Chuck Norris protecting America or space aliens? That’s what I thought. Vote Dennis Kucinich.

Daedalus got his new winter coat. He just loves it. (He wouldn’t move from the spot where we placed him.)

I just attended a wedding yesterday and have been without Internet for way too long. Interestingly, my last post became wildly popular on both digg and stumbleupon. That post has more than doubled the total traffic of all time to my blog, bringing it to over 10k hits. As of the writing of this post, the post has gotten 4,060 hits today alone, about 550 yesterday and 990 Friday. Crazy. Thank you, whoever put up that sign. On a side note to anyone who might be wondering, CMU uses blue cannisters for recycling. There isn’t normally a cannister in that location and people were standing around it the past couple days before it, so anyone who passes through there on a regular basis would know not to use it. Some funny comments on the post and on digg.

Anyhow, at the wedding, the best man gave the traditional toast. The couple being married had dated for about 10 years, so it was a pretty special wedding to a lot of people. The best man made the point that, in marriage, it’s easy to fall in love with somebody, but a happy marriage comes from growing that love. As your love grows, you’ll look back and see your wedding day as the day you loved each other the least. He concluded with the following line (my paraphrase since I can’t remember exactly):

“May the best day of your past be the worst day of the rest of your life.”

It got a round of laughs, but it’s also a great way to put it.

There’s a food drive going on in the School of Computer Science at CMU right now. I came in yesterday and found this sign:

I think if I were running the food drive and found the container full of trash, I would have vomited the hot blood of righteous anger in a similar fashion.

I heard a great metaphor in my software engineering class today. We were talking about agile processes and somehow the issue of not relying too heavily on any one member came up. I think the term “heroic programming” was on the slide. It made me think of that one person who tries to take on too much and ends up coding the entire program himself. In my undergrad, that was usually me.

Back to the new metaphor. Bus Number is the number of people vital to a project. That is, if n people were to get hit by a bus, could the project continue? Great term that sums up the point succinctly.

Later, we were talking about the Scrum development method and the point came up that only people on the team should participate in meetings, though others might be in attendance. The TA was presenting the lecture today since the professor was out of town and there was a term on the slides that he attributed to a generation gap referring to people in the meeting as chickens and pigs. Another professor who sits in on classes put it this way (my paraphrase):

It has something to do with how close you are to the project. It’s like a breakfast of ham and eggs. Sure the chicken gives the eggs, but it’s not the same sacrifice as the pig.

So a lot of websites are posting their kids in their Spiderman outfits or an array of really cool pumpkins or just changing their logos.  Me?  I stick to dogs.  This lady brings a mastiff around school all the time and today she had him dressed up as a flying monkey from the Wizard of Oz.  She was dressed up herself as the Wicked Witch of the West.  Not a bad outfit on a monster of a dog (who is actually quite sweet).

Oh and vote for the frickin coolest pumpkin of all time:

Probably would not be noticeably bad. Colbert certainly is attracting a massive amount of attention after declaring his desire to run as a candidate in South Carolina. Whereas Barrack Obama’s facebook group was haled as a success after gathering 384k+ members, Colbert’s group skyrocketed to over a million in just one week. So does he actually have a shot at the presidency if he decided to kick it up a notch and run in all 50? That certainly seems to be the case with younger voters at this point, but would it hold out at the actual election? On Wonkosphere, he’s got a buzz percentage of about 4%, roughly one-third of the buzz for the candidates the media is telling you to vote for (Hillary and Giuliani).

Better yet, he should run in 48 states, singling out 2 as “handicap” states to give the other candidates a fighting chance. I’m sure he could find a pair funnier than Alaska and Rhode Island, but that’s a start.

Also, for a good read about why the democratic leadership isn’t worth two farts in the wind, you should check out today’s article on Dissident Voice.

Saw this on the blog of Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape.  Maybe NSFW, certainly the language is very intense, so if you’re offended by the granddaddy f-word, it makes an appearance about 47 times (rough guess, I’m not gonna bother to count).  In any case, it’s a great example of what good editing can do.  The best example of this I’ve seen is a classic that everyone has probably seen:  Shining.

Well, this ain’t no Federation baby. Unlike the world of Star Trek, where money isn’t much of an issue for your average Star Fleet officer, money is an issue in our world. And soon to be off our world, as well. In one of those bizarre, possibly pointless moves, some scientists have created a currency fit for space. Paper bills and metal coins just won’t work. If a metal coin develops a jagged edge, that could be deadly in space. Plus, ever try counting dimes in a spacesuit while the Galactic Burger King drive-thru guy looks at you impatiently? Never again, says I!

The Solution

Rather than using paper, which isn’t durable, or metal, which isn’t safe, or credit cards, which have magnetic strips that may interfere with certain electronics (or be destroyed by the solar wind), scientists have settled on using polytetrafluoroethylene, aka teflon. This currency was developed by a group funded by Travelex, a currency exchange firm. The name is a bit grandiose and nauseating at the same time: QUIDs. Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination. A single QUID will be worth about $12.50 US (£6.25, €8.68). So despite being a bit of a pun, it’s also just plain overstretching. Intergalactic? Not unless we develop FTL (faster than light) drives sometime this eon.

Besides being a load of hype, there could be an actual application for this currency. If Virgin Galactic gets off the ground (or one of the other contenders), and space tourism becomes a real thing, these chips will come in handy. And I propose we nickname them chips. How sci-fi that would be.

While on the topic of presentations, I came across this video in the archives of Presentation Zen and then again on Bad Astronomy the same day. Coincidence or some hidden memetic process?

I think it’s an awesome example of how the worst PowerPoint presentations actually come across: as messages with zero entropy (that is, no information).

Well, it’s been a long wait, but David Firth has released the eighth installment of the delightfully twisted and demented Salad Fingers series.  We meet a new friend, Roger, and welcome back Hubert Cumberdale.

Warning:  If you are easily offended or freaked out, then maybe you shouldn’t click that link.

(Credit: Tungsten Chew/The Tech)

Some MIT students have tricked out the statue of John Harvard (aka the Statue of Three Lies) to look like Master Chief from Halo 3. Apparently, this statue is the target of many pranks. Go geeks! Read more about it here. Here’s the before shot:

My wife Donna found another great bumper sticker the other day and snapped the pic below:

“When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies’, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”

That seems pretty clear to me.

I came across an interesting difference in usage between British and American versions of the word assurance. The word typically means a promise or a guarantee in American English. So when I came across this ad on the Scotsman it caught my eye. Hell yes I want my life assured! Turns out, to the Brits, it just means insurance. Pity.

English Headwear Blog

They have compiled a great list of nutty captchas caught in the wild. The best is certainly the Russian one, as many others have agreed. Captchas are particularly interesting to me since it looks like I’m going to be working with Dr. Luis von Ahn next semester on the GWAP project (games with a purpose).

Read the rest of this entry »

Extreme Weather Making History — Discovery News

Of course this comes as no surprise and years like this one are probably going to become the norm. I’m actually kind of hoping for the weather system to do some crazy flipflop and plunge us into an ice age. That’ll show those big corporations and the evil politicians who support them!

(courtesy of the ever-awesome xkcd.com)