Category Archives: bizarre

There are always reasons to hate computers.

Posted on August 26, 2007 | Leave a comment

So, why post another?

Well, this error I recently experienced in Eclipse was amusing:



“An internal error occurred while showing an internal error.” Eclipse’s way of saying, “Senator, I do not recollect those events.”

Real life analogy: Barb at BKA once told us about a former coworker of hers who accidentally cut off his finger on some industrial equipment at the WestVaco paper mill in Covington, Virginia. A manager wanted to know what happened, so the coworker went to the machine and demonstrated the chain of events. And lost another finger.

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Posted in bizarre, computing, funny, pain, tech

WHAT did you call me???

Posted on August 10, 2007 | 3 comments

My eighteen months of frustrating COBRA insurance coverage is coming to an end, and I recently received a letter explaining the expiration of my coverage. Their choice of salutation is interesting:

Did they just call me a penis?? Ah well. I’ve called them much worse things over these past eighteen months.

3 Comments

Posted in bizarre, funny, meaningless, medical

Baby Jesus has returned…

Posted on June 26, 2007 | 22 comments

…as a pork product?



See for yourself!

The money quote:

The Baby must dry several weeks before it is ready to be sold.

I’m off to buy some Baby Jesus and Lil Chub.

(thanks to Galen for the discovery.)

p.s., why is there a Buddha on the banner for babyjesus.com?

p.p.s., there is a band called Jesus Sausage. because you needed to know that.

22 Comments

Posted in bizarre, food, funny, religion

Creation Science Fair? No it’s not!

Posted on June 22, 2007 | Leave a comment
[16:17] Chris: heh, i am reading this call for a christian science fair entries
[16:17] Dave: omg
[16:17] Chris: they have a bunch of suggestions for entries
[16:17] Chris: “8. How much voltage or current can a human take before he is killed? Could do experiments on a plant.”
[16:18] Dave: lol
[16:18] Chris: i hope they mean plant like a green plant, not plant like a spy

[16:18] Dave: hahaha
[16:19] Chris: “12. Trilobites prove Noah’s flood because they are curled up or not?”
[16:19] Chris: here’s a non-controversial one
[16:19] Chris: “18. Is intelligence influenced by physical attributes. i.e. are blondes “dumb” or does skin color influence intelligence?”
[16:20] Chris: here’s the one ann coulter submitted: “23. Why do we have an Adams apple?”
[16:20] Dave: hahahahaha

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Posted in bizarre, funny, meaningless, queasy, religion

The Komai sure know how to treat a lady.

Posted on June 21, 2007 | 1 comment

Story from Galen yesterday in IRC:

i watched a show about two brits who lived with a tribe in new papua
they collect dog’s teeth to buy wives
and pigs are highly prized, like as much as people
anyway, one of the brits asks how many pigs it would cost to buy a wife and the dude goes:
“your question makes no sense at all”
“you can’t buy a woman with pigs, you buy women with dogs’ teeth”

1 Comment

Posted in animals, bizarre, funny, travel

Guerrilla marketing?

Posted on June 18, 2007 | 1 comment

Kathryn sat at the intersection, waiting to turn left. A truck with an attached trailer sat at the same intersection, in the lane next to her, waiting to go straight. The light turned green, and both vehicles tried to go their separate ways. But the truck’s trailer got snagged on Kathryn’s front right bumper, and dragged her car into the intersection. And she had a work client in the car! Luckily, there were no injuries – just body damage to the front right bumper. Both drivers pulled over and exchanged information and filed the police report. At this point, Kathryn found out that the other driver owns an auto body shop. He even gave her a business card!

Coincidence? Who knows!

I drove down to the site of the accident to drive Kathryn’s car to a different auto body shop to get the repair estimate. Her car is still sort of drivable – the only thing dodgy is the right front tire, which has some as yet non-fatal gashes in it. When we told the other auto body shop the name of the guy who was driving the truck, they recognized his name, and told us that he had filed for bankruptcy at some point in the past.

So, that got the conspiracy theory gears going in my head. Now I’m really starting to think that the guy was desperate for business!

1 Comment

Posted in bizarre, family, people

It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.

Posted on June 5, 2007 | 2 comments

I had too much fun with the Face Transformer web toy, a gizmo that transforms a photo of a face into different ethnicities, ages, and artistic styles:


From left to right: Original, baby, child, teenager, old, Afro-Caribean, Caucasian, west Asian, feminized, Modigliani, Boticelli, El Greco, Manga, Apeman, drunk


From left to right: Original, baby, teenager, young adult, old, Afro-Caribean, Caucasian, west Asian, masculinized, Modigliani, Boticelli, Manga, Apeman, drunk


From left to right: Original, baby, child, teenager, old, Afro-Caribean, east Asian, west Asian, masculinized, Modigliani, Boticelli, Manga, Apeman, drunk

Click any of the montages above to get to the larger versions on Flickr.

2 Comments

Posted in bizarre, crackbaby, family, funny, tech, toys

Dinner for astronauts?

Posted on May 17, 2007 | 1 comment

While doing research for the final paper for my Artificial Intelligence course, I came across this citation in a paper I am studying:

In several applications, Tang and Fishwich [22] … and many other researchers have shown that ANNs perform better than
ARIMA models, specifically, for more irregular series and for multiple-period-ahead forecasting.
…
[22] Z. Tang and P. A. Fishwich, “Backpropagation neural nets as models for time series forecasting,” ORSA Journal on
Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, pp 374-385, 1993.

Tang and Fishwich. What an awesome name that would be for a new Adult Swim cartoon.

1 Comment

Posted in bizarre, computing, funny, meaningless, tech

The universe is filled with lawyers.

Posted on April 10, 2007 | 3 comments

I had to sign a form tonight that has this legalese about permissions I’m granting to ACM by submitting my abstract to an evolutionary computing conference. Maybe I’m not around legal-speak enough to think that using the term ‘universe’ this seriously is not at all strange:

3 Comments

Posted in bizarre, computing, tech

Don’t sneak up on me like that.

Posted on March 28, 2007 | 1 comment

Interesting medical findings

(Thanks, Chris).

1 Comment

Posted in bizarre, funny, medical