This is a public service announcement directed at the world's five-year-old children. I am aware that if you decide to attack me, I can be overwhelmed by a sufficient number of you. However, I will not go down without a fight. And according to this test, I am capable of taking almost two dozen of you with me:
Bear this in mind as you make your plans.
In the latest Dork Tower strip, the characters tackle one of the classic stupid questions: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
Why do I call it a stupid question? Because it is. Fish and reptiles were laying eggs for millions of years before the first bird appeared on Earth. Obviously, the egg came before the chicken. I don't understand why anyone thinks this question is remotely challenging.
Okay, actually, I do. Generally, when people treat this as an insoluble conundrum, their unspoken assumption is that "egg" really means "chicken egg". So eggs laid by fish and reptiles are excluded. I see no reason to limit the question that way, but fine. Even if we accept that interpretation, answering the question is no problem. It becomes a simple matter of definition. Here's how I would handle it:
SILLY PERSON: Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?
ME: Define "chicken egg."
SP: An egg that a chicken hatches out of.
ME: Okay, by that definition, the very first chicken hatched from a chicken egg. So the egg came first.
SP: No, wait! A chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken.
ME: All right, then the chicken came first. Obviously.
SP: But --
ME: I think we're done here. Why don't you take this amusing quiz?
This scientific paper is a triumph of form over content. (How do I know it's a scientific paper? Well, just look at it. What else could it possibly be?)
It's also available as a PowerPoint presentation -- but this video of the author presenting it to the American Association for the Advancement of Science is, perhaps, more amusing.
UPDATE: Was Doug Zongker inspired by this children's book? Or this comic strip?
Last year I took the Nerd Test, and it rated me as a High-Nerd with a score of 81 out of 100. Today it came to my attention that the creators of the Nerd Test have developed a follow-up: Nerd Test version 2.0. Naturally, I had to take it too. The result:
Uber Cool Nerd King. I like the sound of that. Time to order new business cards, I think.
Ruth brought this cartoon to my attention:
This reminded me of something from my own experience. When Bob and I were at university together, the main cafeteria at the student center had several serving lines, one of which specialized in Mexican fast food: tacos, burritos, chimichangas, and so forth. The food was pretty good, but the staff didn't seem to understand burritos. They were folding the tortilla instead of rolling it, so the burritos came out square, which is just plain wrong.
Bob found this greatly annoying. The cafeteria had a suggestion box, so he wrote what was undoubtedly the most detailed suggestion they ever got: a page-long set of instructions on how to roll a burrito properly, complete with diagrams. (This was many years before either of us had any idea that Bob would end up pursuing a career in technical writing.) I don't think the cafeteria's burrito-rolling technique showed any improvement as a result, but at least Bob knew that he had done all he could to address the problem.
Since this story is all about Bob, you may wonder why I'm telling it instead of him. Actually, I suggested that he write a blog post about it, but he says he has no memory of the whole thing. Well, I was there, and it really happened, no matter what he says.
UPDATE: Ben points out this Consumerist post: Subway's Incorrect Use Of Isosceles Cheese Actually A Vast Conspiracy
I recently became aware that some people are supporting Zombie Reagan as a presidential candidate in the 2008 election. Their Reagan nostalgia is understandable, but the idea is doomed to failure.
Most people don't know this, but zombies are not eligible for the office of President. After the constitutional crisis of 1945 (in which Zombie Roosevelt challenged the succession of Harry Truman), the Constitution was amended to specifically prohibit undead Presidents. The amendment has been the focus of continued debate among constitutional scholars, some of whom have suggested that a zombie would have been preferable to certain postwar Presidents. But no proposal to modify the prohibition has gained sufficient support in Congress. This is is probably because undead politicians prefer to pursue careers in the Senate (which has no ban on zombies and no term limit), and would rather not call attention to the issue. Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd, and Ted Stevens have all reportedly used their influence to ensure that any zombie-related bills die in committee.
Some students of Futurama have suggested that the repeal of the no-zombie-Presidents rule is inevitable, citing the victory of Richard Nixon's head in the 3000 election. Critics have countered that Nixon's head was elected President of the United States of Earth, not the USA. And it remains unclear whether a severed head kept alive in a jar meets the legal definition of "undead". The question will probably have to be settled by the Supreme Court, and we won't know whether this has happened until new episodes of Futurama are produced.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion is a tough read, even for dedicated Middle-Earth fans. If you don't think you can get through it, there's a condensed version: The Entire Silmarillion of J.R.R. Tolkien in One Thousand Words. It's actually several years old, but I didn't encounter it until this week.
A penpal of mine in upstate New York once told me that that region has just two seasons: "winter" and "July". Years later, after I moved to North Carolina, I learned that there were four seasons in that state, but they weren't the usual four. The North Carolina seasons are "almost summer", "summer", "still summer", and "Christmas".
I've heard other variations of the Seasons Joke, and I've come to believe that every region of the U.S. (if not the world) has its own version. Gerard Van der Leun, who used to live there, wrote that New York City has two seasons: "winter" and "road work". Southern California reportedly has four: "wildfire", "mudslide", "earthquake", and "riots". What are the seasons in other parts of the country? If you know another version of this joke, post it in a comment.
If you haven't bought a pumpkin yet, it's probably too late. But you can still carve your jack-o-lantern online. There's even an UNDO button in case you mess up, a feature no real-world pumpkin supports.
On Saturday I went to Raleigh Little Theatre to help hang lights for Blue, the next play that opens February 11. Rehearsals for Blue are already in progress, and I saw that the call board (a sort of easel-mounted bulletin board) has been set up in the house near the stage. Along with the rehearsal sign-in sheet and a couple of other routine notices, I spotted this on the call board:
Warning - New Virus!This virus could definitely be a problem for RLT. I'm sure WORK can disrupt the process of rehearsing a play. Fortunately, most of the theatre people I know are already applying the recommended countermeasure on a regular basis.There is a new virus. The code name is WORK. If you receive WORK from your colleagues, your boss, via e-mail, or from anyone else, do not touch it under any circumstances. This virus wipes out your private life completely.
If you should happen to come in contact with this virus, take two friends and go straight to the nearest bar. Order drinks immediately and after three rounds each, you will find that WORK has been completely deleted from your system.
Forward this virus warning immediately to at least five friends.
Should you realize you do not have five friends, this means you are already infected by this virus and WORK already controls your life.
If this is the case, go to the bar on your own and stay until you make at least five friends. Then retry.
I think I have five friends, but am not entirely positive so I'm headed for the bar anyway.....it never hurts to be safe.
My last couple of posts have been kind of grim, so it's time for some frivolous, inconsequential things.
Check out this freaky optical illusion -- it looks like it's constantly moving, but it's not. Notice that the apparent motion only takes place in your peripheral vision. The circle you're looking at doesn't move, but all the other circles seem to. And if you don't look at any of them (for example, while reading the text above the picture), they all seem to move. Weird!
Be careful on this page. The little creature that lives there collects mouse pointers, and it will steal yours if you get too close. Don't say I didn't warn you.
My alma mater, the University of South Carolina, scored a victory at bowl game on New Year's Day -- specifically, the Capital One Bowl in Orlando. It's true that the Gamecocks did not, technically, play in the Capital One Bowl. But team mascot Cocky won the College Sports Mascot competition. According to this newspaper article, Cocky defeated 11 other finalists, including "a bear, an alligator, two fierce felines and two large dogs."
When I pointed this out to Bob (who also went to USC), he commented that a popular vote was a lame way to resolve such a competition. "It should have been a fight to the death," he said. "I'd like to see how a chicken would fare against bears, alligators, and dogs."
"Well, remember that this is a cockfighting chicken with razor-sharp blades strapped to his feet," I said.
"Yeah, but it's still a chicken." Bob replied. "Unless it's wearing armor and is packing a gun, my money is still on the carnivores." I can't argue with that.
Ruth says that she plans to take some brown paper bags to the prom in case she and her friends get bored. This is an excellent idea. In addition to the "lookin' at a thing in a bag" joke, the bags have lots of other uses:
UPDATE: Ben points out that Flaming Dog Crap would be a good name for a rock band. (It's an excellent description of several rock bands I could name.)
Matt has a point , but I think his analysis is somewhat simplistic.
Sure, simply being chronically unemployed will dramatically reduce your income taxes. But it also leaves you without any money! The trick is to become unemployed at just the right moment, so that you end up with a bunch of money when you can really use it. Here is the strategy I used:
In a recent post to his blog, Bob wondered why it's so much easier to acquire stuff than to get rid of it. This was obviously a rhetorical question, but I e-mailed Bob the following answer anyway. He insisted that I post it here.
Getting rid of things, even things we have no use for, is difficult because we, as a society, lack a single clearly understood definition of value. Instead, we have several mutually incompatible notions of value, most of which are bogus. First of all, the myth of "intrinsic value" persists, bolstered by such things as the appraised and/or tax value of real estate, the "manufacturer's invoice" or "book value" of cars, and buzzphrases such as "fair market value." Many people also confuse price with value, which leads them to believe that an item must be worth what they paid for it, even if that was decades ago. Then there is the idea, championed by Labor types, that the value of a thing is derived from the amount of work that went into its creation. In general, there is poor understanding among non-accountants of the concept of depreciation; many people find it hard to believe that an object's value can decrease over time while it still works, to the point where it's worth less than the raw materials that were used to make it.Let this be a lesson to those who tell me that I should post to this blog more often. Be careful what you wish for -- you may get it.I'm not saying that you don't understand these things; I'm just saying that the whole notion of value is severely muddled in our culture, and that we all have to make an effort to dismiss these popular misconceptions about it. Even if you know, in an abstract sense, that a thing is worth only what someone will willingly pay for it, it's very difficult to accept that a gadget you spent your hard-earned paycheck on, that still looks brand new, and that functions as perfectly as the day you bought it, can be worthless. It doesn't seem fair. But it's often true.
The only thing more worthless than an obsolete gadget is a gratuitous lecture on economics.
Now that this week's Terror Alert has turned out to be a false alarm, what are you supposed to do with all the duct tape that you rushed out and bought because the government told you to? Well, you could just add it to your stockpile of Y2K supplies (snort). Or you could use it to make a costume for your local Duct Tape Ball.
What do you mean, your community doesn't have a Duct Tape Ball? Organize one!
It was only a matter of time:
Sources inside the State Department have indicated that Colin Powell will reveal top secret evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Hollywood movie star Kevin Bacon. This evidence, in the form of satellite images and tapes of Iraq Cinemax, could be revealed as early as Wednesday.There's more, including evidence that Iraq is producing Movies of Mass Destruction.
Bob reports that, while sorting through some old documents, he discovered a scrap of paper that reads as follows:
"Everything explodes eventually."At first glance, this would seem to be an insupportable assertion. After all, it's not difficult to find examples of objects that have existed for centuries or millennia without exploding: the Great Wall of China, the Rock of Gibraltar, Strom Thurmond, and so forth. But before we dismiss the notion out of hand, we should examine our definitions of "explodes" and "eventually."
-- P. Berry
"Eventually" means that there is no time limit whatsoever. We have to consider the explosive tendencies of any object not just over a period of centuries or millennia, but over the entire remaining lifetime of the universe. On that time scale, no object can endure forever, no matter how durable it is.
With "explodes," there is also a question of scale. When an object like a bagel or Adam Sandler's head explodes, we know this has happened because it's an event on a scale that we're able to perceive. But if the explosion takes place on a microscopic scale, we may not notice it. Individual atoms explode all the time; it's called nuclear fission, and every atom of an unstable isotope does it sooner or later. If theories about proton decay are correct, even stable isotopes eventually break down at the subatomic level (although this will take place over a period of time far greater than the current age of the universe). So it is possible to maintain that everything explodes eventually -- with the qualification that most objects will do so very slowly, one particle at a time.
I can't say whether this is what I had in mind when I made the statement; I don't remember saying it, so I have no idea what the context was. At one time, I had a journal in which I recorded everything I said to anyone about anything (along with the date, time, place, and circumstances), which would have been enormously helpful in investigating this matter. Unfortunately, the journal spontaneously detonated in 1997. I'm afraid the origin of the quotation will have to remain a mystery.
In an open letter to the terrorists (posted to a CNN message board), Laurence Simon points out that they should be afraid of us because we are crazier than they are. You should read the whole thing, but here's a sample:
We sell hot dogs in packages of ten and the buns in packages of eight.We can't even decide if pitchers should have to bat for themselves or not. All those baseball fields we've got... none of them are even remotely the same size.
We think Elvis is still alive.
We put our money into dot-com businesses that have no imaginable source of revenue whatsoever, and then scream when their stock values plummet to zero in the frenzy of sudden realization. We lay off thousands upon thousands of workers because it is good for the bottom line and stockholders, when it's the bosses who are the real stockholders with options for even more stock.
We gave millions of dollars to a guy that told us that God was going to kill him if he didn't raise enough money. When he didn't get enough money, he didn't die. So we gave him more money in celebration of the fact that God didn't make him die.
We've managed to keep the formulas for Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken secret for decades, we encrypt the most banal communications on our Information Superhighway, and yet we given away our most important nuclear secrets to the Chinese and Russians at the drop of a hat.
He's right. Heck, this explains why so many of our former enemies (Great Britain, Mexico, Germany, Japan) are now staunch allies. They realized that we're heavily armed and stark raving mad, and decided that it is much safer to be our friends.
Historical note: When it first appeared, the open letter was attributed to someone else by a lot of people, including me. But Laurence Simon sets the record straight on his own blog, and also provides annotations for all of the things he alludes to.
