My Bent Brain
jfiore | May 13, 2008Have you been paying attention to science news? See if you can answer the little quiz below (my mind was wondering while proctoring my Science of Sound final exam yesterday).
Which of the following is not both a planet and an element in the Periodic Table:
A. Mercury
B. Uranus/Uranium
C. Neptune/Neptunium
D. Pluto/Plutonium
No fair looking up a Periodic Table either.
jfiore | December 27, 2007As readers of this blog may have noted, I have a thing for patterns and sequences. Maybe it's my musical training (e.g., inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion of a motif) or my love of palindromes, but I have a habit of reading signs and whatnot backwards (right to left). Sometimes funny things pop up. The other day I was riding my bike (on the mag trainer, not in the snow) and sometimes I will count revolutions to pass the time. That gets boring so I might count "alphabets" (hey, it's easier than counting to 26 over and over). I thought about reciting the alphabet backwards. This…
jfiore | November 25, 2007I am a fan of the BBC show Top Gear. Mind you, I'm no gear-head, but these guys do some funny things and I like to hear their take on various new car models. Last night I caught an episode that I had not seen before where the three hosts come to the USA, rent cars, and drive to New Orleans. On the way, they pass through Alabama, and well, some not-so-friendly southern hospitality ensues. Video here.
Co-host James May has a few words about it in his blog.
Let's just say that the take-home message is that in certain areas of the USA one should not attempt humor that "colors outside the lines".…
jfiore | November 15, 2007There is a fun programming assignment I give to my freshman Python class. I call it curses. An example of it (written in Java, with source) can be found here. Basically, the program generates a series of denunciations, each followed by a somewhat odd curse. For example: "You noisy pile of squashed dog snot- May your TV set gyrate madly!" or "You mindless sponge of rotting spam- May your buttocks emit a loud buzzing noise!" (try it, you might find it entertaining). The purpose of the assignment is to show the students how to use random numbers to access tuples (random array indexing for you…
jfiore | September 9, 2007Sequences, whether it's the colors of the rainbow, the names of the planets, or ages of Earth's geologic past just scream for mnemonic devices such as acronym-sentences. Some of these can be quite entertaining in their own right, and even more entertaining if you make them up yourself. For example, beginning electrical engineering and technology students are faced with the task of memorizing the resistor color code. The code is used to denote the nominal value of resistors with a total of ten colors corresponding to the numerals 0 through 9:
0 Black
1 Brown
2 Red
3 Orange
4 Yellow
5 Green
6…
jfiore | May 23, 2007"Visualize! Visualize! Visualize!" is a cry often heard by athletes. The idea is to picture a performance in the mind, and by repeatedly doing so, help insure a successful result when the times comes for the real thing. For example, as a runner I might try to visualize striding smoothly and powerfully mid-race so that hopefully, that image will become reality on race day. I have had some luck with this and recommend Running Within by Lynch and Scott if you're interested. But these sorts of things are rather vague and rely on reinforcement of a positive self-image, of a confidence-booster. I'…
jfiore | April 7, 2007A few stark lines on a white background could represent any number of things. What do you see?
(My cheesy drawing was inspired by the cover artwork from an early 80's Frank Zappa album.)
jfiore | March 20, 2007An ancient National Lampoon once intoned "Fun is where you find it." I have found this to be a useful rule to live by. The intersection of humor, Dada, and a vacationer armed with a digital camera can bring entertaining results.
Clearly, these folks are fans of the Austin Powers movies, but it's nice to see a little environmental responsibility and civic pride mixed in with your basic amorous dalliances.
OK, the video tapes I can understand, but do you really need special shoes?
"Do you get wafers with it?"
And those associates would be Billy Joe, Earl, and Lerleen?
"Right this way, we…
jfiore | February 10, 2007One thing I want to dispel immediately is that this is about normal "handedness". Sure, you can pick up a ball and throw it with your non-dominant hand/arm and experience the sensation of a "chicken-arm", but that's not the point under investigation. No, this has more to do with skills that are shared unevenly across the body (or even directionally on a side). Consequently, the attempt at a mirror image action produces sub-par performance in both the dominant and non-dominant sides. Secondly, we expect that repetition of an action will lead to better performance of that action, so repeated…
jfiore | February 9, 2007Owing to an overuse injury that has curtailed my running, I find myself gravitating toward my other main avocation, the drums, in order to maintain my sanity. These two things are at opposite ends of the spectrum: one is all about fitness, the other, skill. In the past couple of weeks I've been performing a little experiment on myself. I'd like to invite other Sciblings and readers to consider joining in with their own self-experimenting and report back their initial findings and then again weeks or months down the road. This could be interesting.
It all has to do with the body asymmetry of…
bushwells | December 13, 2006Ever the provocateur, Christopher Hitchens tells us Why Women Aren't Funny in the January 2007 Vanity Fair.
Mr. Hitchens believes that humor in men serves as an attractant to women, sort of a laff riot version of the male peacock's tail:
Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An…
jfiore | November 16, 2006I don't know if it was part astral projection and part sleep paralysis, or just a too-large slice of autumn bread too close to bedtime, but I recently spent some time at planet Nurmth. Don't be alarmed. It's much like Earth and populated by sentient hominids with technology similar to ours. There was one striking difference though. The inhabitants of Nurmth are obsessed with numbers.
When I first arrived, I noticed that many cars had bumper stickers with numbers on them. Some people wore jewelry in the form of numbers and still others sported number tattoos. At first I though this was some…
jfiore | October 29, 2006They say that a man who owns a clock knows the precise time of day, but a man who owns two is never quite as sure. In my case, that implies complete temporal confusion.
I wish my house had a master clock, sort of like the clock in my computer, which would serve as the time base for everything held within. I love the concept of daylight savings time, but the manual change of the clocks has become large and bothersome. When I was a child, we had four clocks in the house: one in each of the three bedrooms plus one in the kitchen. All analog, all easy to change. Last night I did an inventory as I…
bushwells | October 10, 2006We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell - Oscar Wilde
A recent Sunday found my kids and me careening through the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey as participants in the local "Run with the Devil" MiniCooper rally. Yes, I own one of those goofy little automobiles, and my little devil car has struck me wild-eyed and drooling with car lust, causing me to seek congregation with likeminded enthusiasts. The rally was organized by a charming Empire-type couple, complete with accents from somewhere in the UK or its territories, who are very much into things Gothic. Last year's…
jfiore | August 26, 2006Is it just me, or has there been an almost annoying increase in the number of "Let's see how smart you are" ads on the Web these days? From self-propelled pseudo-IQ tests to numeric sequences to who-knows-what-else, I see these little buggers pop up on all manner of pages. I find them to be a waste of time, not because I think any form of testing is bad, but because the very premise of a correct answer is sometimes flawed. In some cases, all they tell you is whether or not you think like the person who wrote the test.
A case in point: The other day while checking the weather forecast, I saw…
jfiore | June 20, 2006The question has been raised as to whether or not organized religious fervor will eventually win out over the Enlightenment ideals of humanistic atheism, and if it does, the consequence of America devolving into a theocratic hegemony. On their side, the humanist-atheist camp operates from a position of empiricism and rationality which appears to be a huge plus. On the other hand, as I see it, the main practical-structural difference between the devoutly religious and atheists like me is that atheists do not have weekly meetings or door-to-door membership drives.
Researchers at IBM and the…