Amusing: January 2008 Archive Page

Great satire from The Onion.

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

Of course it's not scientific, but it's fun. Virgil Griffith:

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, "Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that."? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?

Well, here's one idea.

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.
3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)! Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores
4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.
5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

When steampunk was speculative fiction, not charmingly retro... Edgar Allan Poe pulbished this mock news story in the New York Sun.

The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon; and this too without difficulty -- without any great apparent danger -- with thorough control of the machine -- and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore! By the energy of an agent at Charleston, S.C., we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage...

Robots gloating, and occasionally philosophizing, over their decision to destroy the humans. Love the binary solo. The guy on the left does an excellent imitation of a standard PC speech synthesizer voice. Overall, this is a great send-up of the "arrogant humans create robots who turn on them" meme (which was first widely spread by the Czech play Rossum's Universal Robots, from which languages around the world acquired the word "robot.")

Nick Tate had a rather thankless role in the cult British science-fiction show Space:1999. Note how the cheerful Disney guy, Mark Elliott, is skipping down the sidewalk at the end.

The Double-Tongued Dictionary cited one of my blog entries as a source for the word "quizzam," which is a word I use to let students know that a scheduled quiz might be harder than they expect.

That blog entry was actually written in iambic pentameter, since I wrote it on my annual "Blog in Blank Verse Day."

One hundred different people hitting a drum, from age 1 to 100. A short film by Lenka Clayton and James Price.