humour
jdupuis | April 23, 2010This one's on Cracked.com and, unusually for them, is Safe for Work.
Now, I'm down with making education more interactive, social, customizable, multitasking, multimedia and web-enabled and all that, but for every good thing there are potential downsides. And Cracked's article nicely sums up some of the more, shall we say, absurd and ridiculous implications of Web-enabled education.
Let's just say the words pwned, First!, mentos, TL;DR and Nigerian princes all make cameo appearances.
Take a look, the Top 20 Ways the Internet is Taking Over Schools.
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2010In many of the world's most affluent countries, the population is shrinking because people aren't having enough children to replace the folks who die. This offers some hope to solve global overpopulation, though unfortunately the solution involves eradicating poverty and establishing global ecological sustainability, which ain't exactly easy.
These shrinking populations become demographically top-heavy, with few young people to support the elderly. Luckily, health care is so good in e.g. Japan and Scandinavia that old folks are in much better shape than they were two generations ago.…
jdupuis | April 3, 2010OK, so Friday Fun a day late.
Anyways, April Fools day was a couple of days ago and I thought that the ScienceBlogs home page was the funniest science-related prank of the day.
So, for those of you that missed the headline and the little story that went with it, here goes:
CERN Scientists Awaken Balrog
When the Large Hadron Collider brought protons up to full speed on Tuesday,
smashing them together at 99 percent the speed of light, the world did not end
as some feared. But disturbing news emerged Thursday morning that CERN
scientists have desperately been trying to cover up a catastrophe of…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2010When I was in school I read a great story about a man who took opium, felt that he had a great philosophical insight, wrote it down, and then found, after sobering up, that what he had written was "I perceive a distinct smell of kerosene", Jag känner en distinkt doft av fotogen.
Mucking around on the blessed web, I now find that the man was Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American 19th century physician and author. But it was ether, not opium, and turpentine, not kerosene. Here's what OWH writes in his essay "Mechanism in thought and morals : an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society…
jdupuis | March 19, 2010John Scalzi's latest AMC column Why Hollywood Always, Always Gets the Future Wrong is, as usual, very smart and right on target.
And pretty funny too.
Everybody gets the future wrong. It's not just Hollywood or science fiction writers. When it comes to the future, no one knows anything. At the close of the 19th century, British physicist Lord Kelvin declared heavier-than-air flight an impossibility (despite the existence of, you know, birds) and that radio was just a fad. In the '70s, the president of Digital Equipment Corp. voiced doubts that anyone would ever need a personal computer. In…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2010
Sunday "... five men were indicted, some of them members of the Black Cobra criminal gang. They are suspected of involvement in cake theft from the Godbiten bakery in Ãstorp [pop. 8500] earlier this week. The cake was stolen from a truck on an industrial estate.
120 boxes containing among other things mazarines, brownies and apple pie were taken from the site."
Via Swedish Radio.
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2010
Scandinavians generally speak pretty good English. But every now and then you come across reminders that they are still very far from being native speakers. Witness this pail of wall-paper glue that I bought earlier today.
Dear Swedish glue-maker, "hernia" means brock and is defined as "the protrusion of an organ or the fascia of an organ through the wall of the cavity that normally contains it". Wikipedia continues, "By far the most common herniae develop in the abdomen, when a weakness in the abdominal wall evolves into a localized hole, or 'defect', through which adipose tissue, or…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2010
Christian fundamentalists like to believe that homosexuality is an illness that can -- and should -- be cured. The factual belief is contradicted by a solid scientific consensus, and the value judgement is widely considered to be a repressive holdover from the Bronze Age.
The makers of the French orange-based soft drink Orangina seem to agree with the fundies' unscientific belief that homosexuality can be induced post-natally in a fully formed individual. They, however, are certainly not homophobes. On the contrary, in a recent major ad campaign they invite consumers to use Orangina to "Wake…
illconsidered | February 24, 2010Being from Vancouver, I can't let the winter olympics go by without at least one brief note. They are going on for a week and a half now, but by design, I am back in Australia for work.
I love Vancouver, it's a beautiful city:
But, I am no fan of the olympics, so I am delighted to share an amusing sign put up somewhere in the interior of British Columbia:
To avoid persecution by the Olympic Special Forces, the exact location and the friend who sent it to me will remain unnamed (hi, Steve!).
illconsidered | February 12, 2010I never said much about Copenhagen finding it all rather predictably depressing. But in case you did not follow it closely the youtube audio below sums it all up admirably in the style of Dr Suess!
(h/t to Climate Extremist)
illconsidered | February 3, 2010ONCE TWO SCIENTISTS--it hardly matters what sort--were walking before dinner beside a pleasant pond with their friend, a reporter for the Dispatch, when they happened to notice a bird standing beside the water.
"I am a skeptic," said the first scientist. "I demand convincing evidence before I make an assertion. But I believe I can identify that bird, beyond all reasonable doubt, as a duck." The journalist nodded silently at this assertion.
"I also am a skeptic," said the second, "but evidently of a more refined sort, for I demand a much higher standard of evidence than you do. I see no…
aardvarchaeology | January 27, 2010The Web helps you check if your ideas are original. Recently I've come up with two puns that proved to be unoriginal but still surprisingly uncommon.
Ronald McDonald is the Lord of the Fries.
The famous fantasy role-playing game should always be referred to as Dung & Drag. It amazes me that I haven't thought of this before. Now I have this vision of greying drag queens in printed dresses and rubber boots, cleaning out the manure, shearing sheep and driving tractors.
aardvarchaeology | January 19, 2010Writes Dear Reader Bruce Paulson of Gillett, Wisconsin:
Your article the other day about rutabagas whet my appetite so on Friday I went to the local grocery store with a friend who was staying for supper. I unloaded three of them at the checkout counter where a teenage clerk started to examine them for an identity sticker. There was none. So she turned to her 65 year old supervisor and said, "What is THIS?" The supervisor said, "That is what they call a Swede turnip. Swedish people eat them, but normal people don't." The clerk then started to check the produce price list for Swede turnip…
illconsidered | December 25, 2009Happy Holidays to all regular and part time readers out there!
Frosty the Coalman, is a jolly happy soul,
He's abundant here in America and he helps our economy roll.
Frosty the Coalman's getting cleaner every day
He's affordable and adorable and helps workers keep their pay.
There must have been some magic in clean coal technology,
For when they looked for pollutants there were nearly none to see.
Oh, Frosty the Coalman, is a jolly happy soul,
He's abundant here in America and he helps our economy roll.
Thumpity thump thump, thumpity thump thump look at Frosty go,
Thumpity thump thump,…
aardvarchaeology | December 17, 2009I've listened to Escape Pod, the science fiction short-story podcast, for four years now. And lately I have become increasingly awed by one of the newer hosts, Norm Sherman. His writing is acerbic, his delivery is deadpan, the guy is just so cool and funny. On the most recent EP episode he played an absolutely sublime H.P. Lovecraft love ballad that he's written and recorded, and it turns out the guy is a veritable Jonathan Coulton! Only one who speaks as well.
Cuz you're my quasi-icthyan angel
You're my half amphibian queen
You're the Overlord of my Universe
You're the Tormentor of my Dreams…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2009My 6-y-o daughter usually sleeps really solidly over in her room and is not easily woken by sounds she's accustomed to. But this morning she told me over breakfast, "Dad, you and Mom made the weirdest noises last night and woke me. First Mom kind of whined and sounded as if she was gonna sneeze. Then nothing for a while. And then you started sounding like an elephant! You made one heck of a racket -- Det var ett jäkla liv."
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2009One of the best friends I made during my decade in the Tolkien Society is Florence Vilén; poet, novelist, connoisseuse of art and letters. She recently published a volume of poetry, Purpurpränt. Dikter med rim och reson. And earlier tonight when she visited us she threw out one of the aristocratic one-liners she delights in.
Florence once told me off the cuff, "The educated layman became extinct about 1940". Tonight she happily proclaimed, "I have learned my entire vocabulary of obscene English words from the Times Literary Supplement".
aardvarchaeology | September 29, 2009
11-y-o Junior bought his first own album last Saturday: Mika's The Boy Who Knew Too Much. (My own first was Depeche Mode's Some Great Reward, bought at age 12 in '84 or '85). It's an excellent record once you've gotten used to Mika's queeny (and Queenish) style of singing: catchy studio pop. And Junior has this awesome "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" mishearing of one of the songs. When he told me about it and played me "By the Time" I couldn't hear it any other way either.
"By the time I'm dreaming
and you've crept out on me sleeping
I'm busy in the place for underwear"
What Mika actually…