Category Archives: funny

CNN’s triumphant return to accurate journalism

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
…ok, ok, fine — I admit it. I changed it; I couldn’t help it. Sorry. 🙂

OMG SOCIALISM!

“This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issued by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to ny house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.”

Add these to your reading list

These are some of the odd books unearthed for the Diagram Prize which is awarded each year to the book with the strangest title.

Yes, these books are real.



All Dogs Have ADHD


Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind


Beyond Leaf Raking: Learning to Serve/Serving to Learn (Essentials for Christian Youth)


Bombproof Your Horse


Curbside Consultation of the Colon


Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics


Fancy Coffins to Make Yourself


The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais


How Green Were the Nazis?


How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art


Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings


The Big Book Of Lesbian Horse Stories


Living With Crazy Buttocks


Malformed Frogs


Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality


People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It


The Art and Craft of Pounding Flowers: No Ink, No Paint, Just a Hammer


I Was Tortured By The Pygmy Love Queen


Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes


Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium


Squid Recruitment Dynamics


The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan: Magic Medicine Symbols in Silk, Stone, Wood and Flesh

(via)

Optimism that only a programmer can appreciate

“A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place.”

— IEEE Grid news magazine

Corn muffin coefficient

From a recent Quotation of the Day Mailing List email comes this gem from a collection of letters written in response to the US Department of Agriculture‘s redesign of the Food Pyramid:

“The cleansing properties of urine are not even addressed in the food pyramid. This must be corrected. We cannot allow small minds and prejudice to bury this useful health information from our brothers and sisters in light.

“Write back IMMEDIATELY and tell me where to report with my diagrams. I am including corn muffins prominently in my calculations. That alone should tell you that I know what I am doing!”

– Mark Martin, Foodician, from his submission to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the redesign of the “food pyramid”.

Here’s a snapshot of the original letter from the collection of letters the USDA received:

I think it’s an artist’s prank. He claims he received a response from the USDA but it was just a generic form letter. Nevertheless, the prominence of corn muffins in his calculations is hard to ignore.

links for 2009-03-06: Pile o’ toys

This impressive augmented reality demo from GE inserts computer-generated 3D objects into live video. First, watch the short video. Then, try it yourself.
Israeli musician “Kutiman” took a big pile of seemingly random YouTube video clips and used them as instruments in his own musical compositions. I could not stop listening to these. My favorites are tracks 2 and 3. His site is overloaded at the time of this post; for now you can see samples here, here, and here.
Can you be an awesome DJ using nothing but a web browser and your computer’s keyboard? Yes you can.
A curious programmer, inspired by Roger Asling’s evolution of the Mona Lisa, asks if the technique could be a good way to compress images. Also take a look at the nice online version of the image evolver he wrote, in which you can set your own target image.
Hilarious Livejournal diary done in the style of Rorschach from the Watchmen comic book series.
The Crisis of Credit, Visualized – An extremely well-produced video describing the credit crisis in simple terms.
instantwatcher.com – “Netflix for impatient people”. A remix of the Netflix site that is “about a quadrillion times easier to browse than Netflix’s own site”.
$timator: How much is your web site worth?
Cursebird. A real time feed of people swearing on Twitter. THANK YOU, INTERNET!
Leapfish. An interesting new meta-search engine with a clean interface. “It’s OK, you’re not cheating on Google.”
Twittersheep. “Enter your twitter username to see a tag cloud from the ‘bios’ of your twitter flock.”
PWN! YouTube. This is a great idea. You just type “pwn” in front of “youtube” in the URL, and voila; instant links for downloading and saving the videos.

I wish my 401(k) was this much fun.

Every letter is powerful

A fun nugget from my new favorite blog, Futility Closet:

Show this bold Prussian that praises slaughter, slaughter brings rout. Teach this slaughter-lover his fall nears.

Grim, no? But remove the first letter of each word and the mood changes:

How his old Russian hat raises laughter — laughter rings out! Each, his laughter over, is all ears.

Check out Futility Closet for more fascinating curiosities tinted with language, math, science, antiquity, puzzles, and amusement. I especially enjoy The Random Item Button.

links for 2008-11-14


Take Stanford’s iPhone Programming Class For Free
– I would love to take this class. The internet-connected iPhone’s multi-touch interface and powerful multimedia features provide an amazing playground for programmers, if you can stomach Apple’s strong-armed policies on application distribution in the App Store. (BTW here is a site that tracks activity of iPhone apps in the App Store, and posts information about apps that aren’t yet available in the App Store: apptism.com).

bitalizer – bending bits into structure – Upload a file, and this site will turn its binary contents into a simple set of rules governing an interesting image rendering process.



Bitalizer v1.1 – shell32.dll from Brian Reavis on Vimeo.

A visualization of the bits that make up the common “shell32.dll” library file found on Windows machines.

The Pomegranate Phone – A really well-done marketing campaign for a new touch-screen GPS-enabled smartphone that also makes coffee, projects video, instantly translates your voice into other languages, has a built-in shaver, and works as a harmonica. And doesn’t really exist. Instead, it is an elaborate ad campaign created by the Nova Scotia government to generate interest for the Canadian province. The little videos included in the ad are a good touch.

Child’s Play Charity – Donate games to sick children – For my birthday, Chris and Angel donated video games in my name to a Roanoke hospital using this site. Terrific idea!

As real as it gets – This is what Photoshop would look like if it were made out of the physical world.

Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering – A coworker sent me this great list. It was originally published in 2001 and its tenets remain true today.

In closing, a silicon haiku from our IRC robot:


like stars winking out
the woman has lost her screen
opening your toad

SUBJECT: Request for URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

I’ve seen this many other places, but I cannot help reposting it here. It is a great statement on the current economic crisis:

DEAR AMERICAN:

I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.

I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.

I AM WORKING WITH MR. PHIL GRAM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR, YOU MAY KNOW HIM AS THE LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT IN THE 1990S. THIS TRANSACTIN IS 100% SAFE.

THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED THE FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE FUNDS IN THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE. MY FAMILY LAWYER ADVISED ME THAT I SHOULD LOOK FOR A RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS A NEXT OF KIN SO THE FUNDS CAN BE TRANSFERRED.

PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, IRA AND COLLEGE FUND ACCOUNT NUMBERS AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN TO WALLSTREETBAILOUT@TREASURY.GOV SO THAT WE MAY TRANSFER YOUR COMMISSION FOR THIS TRANSACTION. AFTER I RECEIVE THAT INFORMATION, I WILL RESPOND WITH DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT SAFEGUARDS THAT WILL BE USED TO PROTECT THE FUNDS.

YOURS FAITHFULLY MINISTER OF TREASURY PAULSON

(samples of scams parodied by the above letter)