jack

"Yves Rossy nicknamed the 'Jet Man', is a Swiss pilot, inventor and aviation enthusiast. He is both the first person to build and the first person successfully to fly a jet engine-powered wing strapped to the back.... On 26 September 2008, Yves successfully flew across the English Channel from Calais, France to Dover, England in under 10 minutes."

"I am the Grammarian about whom your mother warned you" T-shirt.

Metal cut-outs to take in your luggage past X-ray machines. The top two are the writing "Nothing to see here", and a cut-out of a Stars-and-Stripes.

Gene Weingarten excellently parodies a typical comment thread in response to a newspaper article.

When Birmingham Council tried to instil pride in recycling efforts, it had the clever idea of sending out 360,000 flyers showing the city skyline. Unfortunately the leaflets actually had a picture of Birmingham, Alabama, on them. 'I can't believe nobody noticed,' said resident Jon Cooper, who spotted the blunder.

( Read more... )

A webcomic I just found, from two people linking to individual strips, but that is well drawn, and in a fairly small run has a number of classic strips:

The home of Adolf Hitler, 1933. Doubt creeps in.
Painstakingly created the exact opposite of Mahatma Gandhi
Newspaper stand[1]
Speed dating a pro wrestler
"The Jackbooted Thugs"
Friday evening at the Spinx's house
"Hello, I want to buy a bookcase, please."
16th century Russian Howitzer
The ATHEIST apocalypse!
The emperors' [sic] new clothes, each as metaphor for current cultural trends.
Opposite world

[1] I kept wondering why this URL wasn't loading correctly, until I realised "page404" did not refer to an http error :)

And for the set-up in the first panels more than the punchline:

Entrance to hell
An alternate reality, in which people's physical size is directly proportional to their level of intelligence

With thanks to Matt R and PJC respectively for most recently linking me to them,

Scorching Earth, a flash puzzle game where you play as a forest fire.

Fantastic Contraption, a very pretty mechanics game: build things out of wheels and rods and water, bouncily and convincingly

Related to several places, most recently stolen from God Plays Dice here, from a book. The point being not what people know, but how good they are at knowing what they know.

"For each of the following ten questions, give a range that you are 90 percent confident contains the correct answer. Your goal is to get exactly nine of these right[1]. Yes, I know that sounds weird! But the point is that if you get all ten right, you're proabably underestimating your own abilities to predict things. If you get eight or less, you're probably overestimating them."

Assign a range to each question in a comment. Look up the answers and see how many you got right. Post it if you like. GodPlaysDice said to repost it if you liked, and to email him the answers (izzycat AT gmail DOT com) if you like; I assume he wishes to informally gauge something.

Here are the questions:
1. How old was Martin Luther King, Jr. at death?
2. What is the length of the Nile River?
3. How many countries belong to OPEC?
4. How many books are there in the Old Testament?
5. What is the diameter of the moon?
6. What is the weight of an empty Boeing 747-400?
7. In what year was Mozart born?
8. What is the gestation period of an Asian elephant?
9. What is the air distance from London to Tokyo?
10. What is the depth of the deepest known point in the ocean?

Although what interested me was that it simply meant you could have a quiz where people who don't know much about it (or who know too much about it) can play too. I'm curious to see how big the ranges are -- mine are embarrassingly wide, generally between a factor of two to a factor of ten, though of course, I know several much more precisely now.

[1] It would be more precise to say "and not know which one you got wrong". The idea being you should be pretty certain about all of them, not guess "0-1000,000" on nine and "-315.17" on the last one :)

"A proof of the Riemann hypothesis"

Linked from God plays dice blog, a putative paper on the Riemann hypothesis. I can't read it, I never was plugged into the mathematical grapevine. But it would feel remiss in the extreme not to pass on the comment.

( Read more... )

ETA: The result is from a stable that does work on the Riemann Hypothesis, but has had several flawed proofs published before. This was flawed, and maybe patched already.

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

Evolution , with the magic of stop-motion fridges. (Also: Dumbasses put hands over their ears and say "la la la, can't hear you". Original scientist sends long, thoughtful reply saying "Pull your fucking heads out of your asses, already. Duh.") Disclaimer: people who believe in the absence of any sort of evolution are not automatically dumbasses. Really.

God hates FAQs

A friend recently linked to a service which, when you're raptured, can send a last message to a loved one. There are two basic approaches. You've been left behind .com is run by Christians, and employs an ingenious dead-man's-handle.

Post Rapture Post .com is run by atheists. Post Rapture Post is a lot funnier.

( Read more... )

This came up in the pub last night, a physical theory for why vampires don't show up in mirrors, and the military applications of it. If you don't know simont, you should be made aware of his write-up: http://simont.livejournal.com/205240.html

* You think arguing about what Narnia book is best to read first? Meet the Discworld reading order flowchart!

* How to toilet train your cat. Claims to do exactly what it says on the tin. (And you know, that's how to train your cat to use a water closet, not a litter box. The flushing is still being worked on, but has progress.)

* GLadOS ringtones! (The character-laiden computer from PORTAL.) They are amazing, produced from text-to-speech and audio editing software, they sound just like her announcing an incoming call "For the comfort and convenience of those around you, please acknowledge it. You're not going to answer it, are you?", in tone and phrasing, and so sweet and/or psychotic. For the first time ever in my life I am tempted to choose a ring tone because I want to, rather than to remove ring tones from life as completely as I am able.

* Kongregare.com/games/scarybug/chronotron

"You had me at time travelling robots!" This is amazing. It's like lemmings, but instead of lots of lemmings, you have a robot with a time machine, and have to keep looping in order to stand in the right places and operate the right buttons to get all copies of yourself back to the time machine!

Wikihistory (Desmond Warzel)
(link)

"Wikihistory is a delightful science fiction short story by Desmond Warzel in the form of a series of messages posted to a time-travellers' forum." Via someone.

A Plan for Scams (Daniel Franke)
(Link)

In which Achilles and the Tortoise discuss plans for an Eliza system to automatically generate plausible gullible responses to 419 scams (and so make it impossible for scammers to pick out real victims).

Achilles: I'm drafting a letter from Hooke, Lynn, Fischer & Pierre, partners at law.
T: I wasn't aware you had any legal training.
A: You know all that email in your junk folder purporting to come from rich Nigerian widows with jammed caps lock keys? ( Read more... )

ONN: FCC Okays Nudity on TV if it's Alyson Hannigan
(Link, plays video)

From the Onion. I love that just about the whole headline is the URL. I haven't watched the video, I just thought the title was so perfect.

That's the second biggest rickroll I've ever seen![1]
(link)

[1] I debated with a "Biggest. Rickroll. Evar." Simpsons reference, but decided the Monkey Island reference was better as (a) Monkey Island is the coolest thing ever and (b) it probably does come second best, after xkcd's take.

I get great fun explaining this at work, as people had heard of Astly, but never of the practice of rick-rolling. In short, what happened was the American sports team the New York Mets had a poll on their website to decide their new theme tune.

( Read more... )

Terror law in tatters as extremists go free
(link)

What a marvellously accurate headline. I'm fairly sure there's a subtext that "terror law in tatters" is a bad thing, or a good thing, but I can't tell which. The content is very serious, but I just love how well-chosen words can convey precisely an opinion, even a deliberately ambiguous one (even though I don't suppose the headline was actually intended objectively).

"Can I post binary files here?"
-- comp.basilisk faq

"My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail. I replied: 'What's really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to.' Security requires a particular mindset."
-- Bruce Schneier

S: "It seems everyone's being hit by the baby stick."
Me: "The baby stick? Oh, is that what they call them nowadays?"

Me: "Thank you very much, I'm very glad I've found someone nice to share with, that's very convenient".
Sebastian: "Thank you for sharing."

" the article is quite good, and includes at least sketches of the various proofs that 0.999... = 1 ... the arguments ... are interesting, .. one gets to watch people who don't really understand why this should be true, but want to understand it ... It might give you a headache, though. It's like sausage being made."
--Isabel, God Plays Dice

"Headline: Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene!"
-- via robh

"Col Mustard is so heartbroken that he kills himself, in the billiard room, with the lead piping, which causes a certain amount of confusion further down the line."
--Andrew Rilstone

"If the planet’s seas really do rise, I’m going to the Netherlands. [The] attitude is 'what’s a few more feet on the dikes?' Not only have these people been keeping the North Sea out since the Middle Ages, but they also work at it 24/7. If you want to get something done, ask a busy person." -- Patrick Neilson Heydon

"I can understand why you were confused. If you're trying to combine Suction and Inverted Psycho Suction, that would be enough to confuse anyone. Actually, I think you got off lucky; I'd expect that mixing Suction and Inverted Psycho Suction in your brain would lead the two to react and create a fantastic explosion which would reduce your brain and your head to gamma radiation leaving nothing but the top end of your spinal cord sticking out of your shirt, attached to nothing.

Of course, if this happens, the opponents should immediately summon the Director."
-- rec.bridge

"I can easily check just by looking down that I am not a poached egg (I have arms and legs, but not a white or a yolk). But who my father is, and whether or not he created the universe, is much less obvious."
-- Jacob

"But I really can't complain, since my title's cotaken from Einstein anyway. Yes, cotaken, as in I took the complement of what Einstein said; there are no arrows getting reversed involved here."
--Isabel, God Plays Dice

For the propagation of news, apparently Arthur C. Clarke has died.

Of the vast number of "Gary Gygax has died. I will now demonstrate my witicitude by humorously conflating Gygax's existence with that of his creations" comments on the internet, my favourite few were:

xkcd Death: "You know how when someone dies, they challenge me to a game for their soul? I'm afraid I might be a while on this guy." (Which I think is a great comic, but not quite up to xkcd's usual staggeringly good presentation, I infer it was a little hurried and hence had more verbiage, which just goes to show how good it normally is.)
Penny Arcade A tribute banner "Gary Gygax. Rolling in his grave."
Futurama Gary: "It's a. *rolls dice* Pleasure to meet you! "

(OK, that last wasn't a tribute, it was just good. And a honourable mention to Order of the Stick, because although it's not as funny as the others it (a) fits seamlessly into the ongoing storyline of the comic and (b) says who Gygax was and what he did. I know the name, but no more about the history, but definitely do appreciate the existence of roleplaying games.)

Saraphale asks here: http://saraphale.livejournal.com/184863.html Imagine you MacGuyver-like find a sealed evil science lab, and want to throw in stuff made from office supplies to measure what's on the inside and if it's liveable. The full conditions are there: go, help!

These quotes not be quite up to the normal hoped for quality, however, I wanted to get something posted and they are all nice. Several of the gemmiest witticisms have been in interpersonal email recently, and I've stopped trying to catch them all and work out which are sufficiently context-free and non-private to reproduce, so aren't here.

"He has apparently never made any secret of the fact that he has a male friend with whom he maintains a platonic relationship, in all possible senses of the word."
--Rilstone?

( Quotes )

Q: Are you scottish?
A: Yes.
Q: Where are you from?
A: Scotland.
-- From an ceilidh. (Actually, that didn't happen, but it's how I heard it in my head, ok?)

Lesbian Speed Dating Pastiche Video via Vyvyan via Feanalwa A: I'm sorry, I'm just not ready for a relationship right now.
Lesbian Speed Dating Pastiche Video via Vyvyan via Feanalwa Q: ... How about now?

GINI: Mmm, sex. It makes anything better.
FERRET: Not prison.

Q: You might not claim it was the best of all possible sonnets, but it was a spectacular local maximum.
A: Aww! That's not only a lovely compliment, it's a maths related lovely compliment.

"I probably should give the cow the benefit of the doubt."
-- bugshaw.

"My Census Bureau contact tells me that the authors of the data file have seen the wisdom of my point of view, in spite of my unconstructive and unhelpful feedback (I said 'Wow, that is an incredibly terrible idea')
-- Mark Dominus

"[Readers[1]] may not have heard about it, because it concerns (a) India, (b) Australia, and (c) cricket. For Americans who are not international news junkies, the quantity of news encountered about any of these three topics in a week will typically amount to zero."
-- Geoffrey K. Pullum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
Mornington Crescent (game)
[box: All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear.]

DM: 'you are an evil dice...I like that'

GM: 'It's semi-evil! Evil-esque.'

Q: So we have four and a half elves?
A; Whats the exchange rate?
Q: How many of us would we need to swap to get a dragon?
DM: What would the rest of you do once you'd swapped yourselves?
Q: We could take turns playing it.
A: Or play bits of it. I'll be the left wing.
A: Flap! Flap!

[1] Interestingly, the original referred to American readers, but taken out of context, I thought it a lot funnier when the country in question wasn't emphasised.

"In general, a mathematical term that does not have several conflicting definitions is not important enough to be worth learning."
-- Jeffry/Rich via godplaysdice

"The phrase...which has become a cliché, came from Rinehart's novel The Door, in which the butler actually did do it."
--Sometimes, wikipedia excessly cross-linking can be done witily and informatively

"You're the rogue! You can't call 'not it' for sneaking around and getting rid of a corpse!"
--Roleplaying

"I'm not sure what that says about the quality of the episode. If the quality they were going for was marmite, then I think they've achieved it."
--Rochvelleth

"Children are unlike cigarettes though, in that they tend to turn into grown-ups given enough time."
--blue_mai

"Cold Calling Is Dead! Picture a life without cold calling ... Order my book ... Enter your primary email address in the box below, and we will send you our newsletter, including excerpts from... "
Seen in google ads. Is it irony? Or successful marketing?

"The filmmakers added new scenes to the film, including one...similar to one a sound-alike had uttered in a fan trailer. In it, Mr. Jackson repeatedly uses an Oedipal expletive to describe both the snakes and the plane."
-- Wall street journal review of Snakes of a Plane, via language log

"XML has an extremely low signal to noise ration."
--Best typo ever.

"One lesson to learn from all this is that those early Royal Society guys were very smart, and when they say something has a mysterious 0.4x in it, you should assume they know what they are doing."
-- Mark Dominus

O.J. Simpson is in jail for trying to reclaim some items in Las Vegas that an alleged thief stole from him. If O.J. is found guilty of asking a thief to return his belongings, he could go to jail for 30 years.

I assume O.J. is kicking himself for not killing everyone in the room, covering himself in their DNA, and going golfing. You have to stick with what works. What the Hell was he thinking?
-- Scott Adams

"Ecclesiastical heraldry differs notably from other heraldry in the use of special symbols around the shield to indicate rank in a church or denomination. The most prominent of these symbols is the ecclesiastical hat."
-- wikipedia

Vocabulary quiz: Free Rice

This vocabulary test is really great? Freerice, unlike a traditional vocab test, has a large dictionary and measures hardness of words by how many people get them right this means it's amazingly good at finding words right on the boundary of what you know, ones you've heard used somewhere, but can't quite place, rather than either being words anyone knows, or common long words, or words so obscure only people in specialist fields know them, or words simply famous for being obscure.

This gives an unfair advantage in the quiz to people who know words from having heard them used in books and conversations with articulate people, rather than people who read dictionaries for fun :) So it suits me.

The questions are tailored to your responses, after a few minutes finding their own level at a category of words you know 3/4 of. I could play all day.

Also, it (apparently) raises advertising revue, from which it donates to charity.

This morning, I got up to level 45/50 before starting getting them wrong. What do you get?

Geography quiz: Statetris

There've been many geography quizes going round that ask if you can place countries in europe, but this is so cool because it's Tetris!

Each country falls from the north, and you have to manoeuvre it into position. There's some clues, for instance, it has to be one of the ones on the bottom.

In the easy level the country is labelled. In intermediate, it isn't. In hard, it needs to be rotated to the correct orientation.

It's really satisfying because when you've completed all-but-one, the last country is Russia, which is really big, and really obvious, so it's such a release to be able to plonk it down with a thunderous crash to finish the level.

1. "We used to quip that "password" is the most common password. Now it's "password1." Who said users haven't learned anything about security?" -- Bruce Schneier.

In fact, there were many less funny but more optimistic trends to be drawn.

And indeed, often I want to use the simplest password the submission will let me. I have a weak password I use for throwaway accounts on websites where possible. Of course, this only works if the only thing risked is *my* access, if hacking the account wouldn't escalate someone else's privelege nor let them spam email to arbitrary addresses. Eg. if the site has no more functionality, or lets anyone sign up, or lets you do some things only after you've authenticaed in a slightly more rigorous fasion.

2. "If the PuTTY web site is down (Connection Timed Out), please don't bother mailing us to tell us about it. Most of us read our e-mail on the same machines that host the web site, so if those machines are down then we will notice before we read our e-mail." -- The PuTTY team

Which is completely true, of course. I just thought it was well-phrased.

3. // Version 0.1 "What happens when you try to develop a bug tracking system with a bug tracking system"
int main() {
printf("Bug 0\n");
printf("\n");
printf("printf("Reproduce: Run the program\n");
printf("What happened: Terminated immediately with errcode 0\n");
printf("What I expected: A bug tracking system\n");
printf("Assigned to: me\n");
printf("Suggested fix: Write a bug tracking system\n");
printf("Status: under development\n");
printf("\n");
return 0;
}

4. Two hale young men coming out of formal hall:
First: Do you remember Woof? The series of children's books about a guy who turns into a dog?
Second: No.
First: You're INSANE.
Second: But it sounds good!

5. "The male is generally silent but gives a low whistle during court. The female makes a gruff growling call."

6. Verne famously got ticked at Wells for making bleep up, pointing out that Wells had no Cavorite to hand, while he had used an entirely plausible cannon to launch three buckets of soup to the Moon. -- Making Light

7. TBQ: So Lestat and Nicolas run away to Paris together.
Other Person: Uh-huh.
TBQ: And get an apartment together.
OP: Uh-huh.
TBQ: And sleep together.
OP: Uh-huh.
TBQ: And talk about how they love each other.
OP: Uh-huh.
TBQ: And kiss each other before they go to bed at night - in the same bed, mind you.
OP: Uh-huh.
TBQ: And then in later books Lestat talks about how much he loved Louis. And then he tries to sleep with David. And in Tale of the Body Thief he repeatedly talks about how he loves men as much as he loves women.
OP: Uh-huh.
TBQ: So you see what I'm saying?
OP: Sure. But, he's not gay. He's French.
TBQ: [bangs forehead into desk] --BratQueen

8. We saw a pigeon with what looked like an olive branch, though it may have been privet, and the water is out of the house now, so we let the pairs of taller animals go. -- About recent flooding

9. int error() {
return 0/0;
}

10 "I know some pretty unscrupulous art dealers, but I doubt even they deserve this." -- Five days a stranger

The spiritual sequel to DM of the Rings has started here. ie. "What if Starwars Ep II was the result of a roleplaying campaign, not the plot as planned, but that resulted when the players argued with the DM and got unexpected dice rolls." I didn't like the first few cartoons so much, but this one and the next one are well worth it.

You need to know that the players were griped off because the DM wouldn't give them blasters, and the equipment list was the Dungeons and Dragons equipment list with "laser" before every item, so they ended up with "laser swords". This starts just as they're captured by a large number of droids and suicidally attack them.

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/darthsanddroids/episodes/0009.html

The link going around is here, from an Australian newspaper. The image shows a silhouette of a dancer rotating in the air. Is it rotating clockwise or anticlockwise?

People seem to see it one way or the other, though most people can swap the way they see it. The paper says it depends on being right-brained or left-brained. There are some analyses floating about from before the paper made the link, but I can't find anything definitive.

Logically, the silhouette *ought* to be perceivable either way -- if there are insufficient depth cues, and you cover up the shadow, it ought to be front-back symmetric. But to me it definitely *looks* clockwise[1].

Can anyone tell if there's anything special about the image? Does anyone know if right/left-brain-ness really has any bearing?

[1] Bonus points for saying "from the top or the bottom". From the top, please.

ETA: No-one finds any support that this has anything to do with left/right brains, that seems to have appeared with the news article. So not necessarily false, but doubtful, given that it has no source.

http://lol.ianloic.com/lj/cartesiandaemon

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