humour
neurophilosophy | July 26, 2007
"What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? Never matter." So says Homer, in one episode of The Simpsons. And although I'm not an adherent of Homerian dualism, the show is still my favourite thing on television. I think it's sheer genius.
The Simpsons often contains science-based jokes and references to evolution, cosmology and particle physics. In one episode, for example, Homer enters a parallel universe through a wormhole; another features Stephen Hawking, who Homer refers to as "the wheelchair guy".
One of my favourite episodes is Lisa the Sceptic (Season 9, Episode 8) in which Lisa…
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2007Last Saturday morning an armed robbery was attempted at the Nacka Forum mall not far from where I live. Two masked robbers went in just as staff were arriving to work, dragged a woman into her workplace, gaffer-taped her to a chair and demanded that she turn off the alarm and tell them when her co-workers would arrive. After receiving confusing replies, the two men left, running, and minutes later the woman worked herself loose of the tape and called the police. She is physically unhurt.
The robbers had gone into a cashless realtor's office, Svensk Fastighetsförmedling, instead of the post-…
neurophilosophy | July 8, 2007
The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, began in 1881 as a weekly column in a San Francisco paper, and was published as a book in 1911.
BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. That which distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the…
aardvarchaeology | June 14, 2007Here's a charming interview with Apples in Stereo front man Robert Schneider, followed by him performing "Energy" from the new album. All courtesy of the Instant Talk Show. (Total clip length 9 minutes.)
aardvarchaeology | June 5, 2007David Nessle is a Swedish comic artist, author, editor, translator, sf fan and blogger. His blog is without any serious competition the wittiest one I've encountered in the Swedish language, and I read it religiously. Recent themes of his blogging have been a Saami version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", an ongoing tiff among Swedish poets, amateurish 60s comics, small-town Swedish food packaging, what to do with all one's books, his collection of plastic action figures and classic dinosaur artist Zdenek Burian. Go read!
aardvarchaeology | May 28, 2007I love the ability to see what people type into search engines before they end up here (an ability provided, for instance, by Extreme Tracking). Much of the time, people are obviously looking for porn. Somebody just typed the following into Google:
Where I can put my penis in the women pic?
Yes, where, oh where indeed?
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2007[More blog entries about history, humour, engineering, catholicism; historia, humor, teknologi, katolicism.]
The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm is advertising a position as lecturer on the subject of bridge-building, in other words, a Pope.
One of the most ancient honorary titles of the Supreme Pontiff is Pontifex Maximus, literally "Greatest Bridge-maker". Explains Wikipedia:"The Pontifex Maximus was the high priest of the Ancient Roman College of Pontiffs. This was the most important position in the Ancient Roman religion, open only to patricians, until 254 BC, when a plebeian…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2007
Dear Reader, you have certainly received Nigerian scam e-mail more than once."It is obvious that this proposal will come to you as a surprise. This is because we have not met before but I am inspired to sending you this email by the huge fund transfer opportunity that will be of mutual benefit to the two of us.
However, I am Barrister Martins jide, the personal attorney to the late Engr. Suk Hun Wufei flody, a Citizen of Japan, who used to work with Nigerian National Petrolum Co-operatrion (NNPC)."
But have you heard of scambaiting? It's a popular pastime where internet users, protected by…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2007Another one of my favourite podcasts hits 100 instalments: the R.U. Sirius show. It's cyber-counterculture talk radio with ample references to sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, but done in a geeky, distinctly literate manner. R.U. Sirius himself used to be the editor of seminal cyber-mag Mondo 2000 back in the day, and is now an elder statesman on the trippy fringe of technology. By his own admission, he likes to spend a Sunday afternoon reading a thick book while stoned, and him and his posse of witty co-chatterers are a delight to hear.
Among recent guests on the show we find security expert…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2007Here's a pretty far-out news item from Dagens Nyheter.
"A 58-year-old Dutchman had one ear and his nose bitten off by another man and a school had a power outage due to a brawl in Växjö on the morning of Thursday.
Shortly before three in the morning police were called to break up a fight in Växjö. They found two seriously wounded men and a long-haul truck full of flowers that had been driven straight into an electrical transformer station. Also, they found a severed ear and nose on the scene that were taken to the hospital and reattached to their owner.
Both men came to Växjö in the Dutch…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2007
My 8-year old son is, like myself at that age, a big Star Wars fan. But his road to the stories has been more complicated than mine. Much of what he knows about them comes from a computer game version where everything is for some reason visualised as built out of legos. So he asks me a lot of confused questions that I can't always answer.
Just now we had such a conversation where I learned that he had gotten all three main female characters mixed up: Luke Skywalker's grandma, mother and sister were the same person to him. When I teased him about this he just replied, philosophically, "It's…
aardvarchaeology | January 30, 2007
Dining with polyglot friends (he's a Sinologist who also works with Georgian and Basque and speaks a bewildering variety of Asian languages, she interprets Mongolian and speaks the most exquisite Swedish), my wife and I learned something about Mongolian cuisine and cursing.
Mongolia has kind of a heavy-metal reputation. I mean, leave them to their own devices and they'll conquer Eurasia. But as it turns out, these people cook really bland food and use extremely low-key expletives.
Salt is the only spice in regular use. A typical meal may consist of a pound of boiled goat and a bowl of…
aardvarchaeology | January 18, 2007One of the journals I edit periodically receives letters from an old man in the country. They are written in an old-style hand with many quaint expressions of respect, and concern the price of subscription and back issues. The letters are clearly products of an old brain stuck in an infinite loop.
All are almost identically phrased and keep coming regardless of how we reply. It looks as though this gentleman uses a master copy of the letter to rattle off a new one every time he starts to feel the need for subscription information, but that he is unable to remember that he has already had that…
aardvarchaeology | January 10, 2007For the last couple of years, a new kind of beggar has operated in the Stockholm subway. These people walk through the carriage handing out little photocopied notes, and then they move back, collecting the notes and whatever spare change people are willing to give. The notes say things like "I am an unemployed Bulgarian violinist rendered incapable of playing by carpal tunnel syndrome. I have three children to feed. Please help." Harmless enough, I guess, but a bit of a nuisance in a culture unused to beggary.
A friend of mine got really tired of the note beggars on his daily commute. He made…