The Devil’s Night
The church/school that I used to go to would hand stacks of these out, seriously, as an “evangelical activity,” even though they look so ridiculous to most people that you’d have to assume they were printed as a joke.
After growing up in that kind of environment, I really should be (even) more messed up than I am today.
Fortunately for me, though, even as a kid I never came close to taking them seriously. My reaction to them back then was pretty much the same as my reaction to them today: “WTF?” I remember I used to try to collect one of each “comic” they made to see how much more ridiculous they would get.
Some other notably ridiculous ones:
- Are Roman Catholics Christians?: “Religion can’t save, only Jesus can!”
- Last Rites: “When this Catholic dies, he learns that his church couldn’t save him.”
- Fairy Tales: “They were just fantasy games … all in fun. But they influenced Harry to make the biggest mistake of his life.”
- Who Is Allah?: “The message of ‘Allah Had No Son’ redrawn for black readers.”
The point I’m trying to make by linking to these is that as ridiculous as they may seem, there are actually people (lots of them!) out there who actually believe this stuff, wholeheartedly and without question.
I’m moving to Japan.
Daily Show on FOX News on SoCal Fires
Last week, with no actual evidence, FOX News decided to repeatedly report that the fires in Southern California were the work of Al Qaeda operatives.
Instead, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart wonders if “perhaps Al Qaeda is trying to infiltrate a cable news channel and staff it with morons.”
http://foxattacks.com/blog/17360-daily-show-al-qaeda-infiltrates-fox-news
Ninja Parade Slips Through Town Unnoticed
Ninja Parade Slips Through Town Unnoticed Once Again
From The Onion:
Modesto, CA residents turned out for the city’s annual Ninja Parade, where no ninjas were seen for the 30th year in a row.
The Fastest Vista Laptop? A Macbook Pro.
Now I literally cannot think of a single reason why my next computer won’t be a Mac.
Fanboys on both sides can yell all they want, but the fact of the matter is that operating systems are tools meant to facilitate accomplishing tasks. There are things I want to do that Macs do better (running anything Adobe, resource/window management), and there are things that I want to do that Windows does better (like computer games, wider variety of random apps). (Tangent: There are probably things I want to do that Linux also does comparably well, but in all honesty I don’t think I could deal with Linux because I am a very lazy person.)
With things like Parallels for the lighter apps and Boot Camp for the more intensive things like gaming, it’s seemed to me for a long time that Macs had the upper hand in terms of versatility (that is, Macs can do Windows but not the other way around). One thing I always wondered about, though, was whether I’d be sacrificing any performance by booting to Windows on a Mac, rather than having a high performance laptop designed for Windows in the first place.
Well, it looks like PC World has answered my question. They tested a slew of laptops from the most popular manufacturers, including Gateway, Dell, Alienware, etc. Ironically, the Macbook Pro outdid all of them in terms of performance in Windows Vista.
From the article:
The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.
Play a Word Game, Give Free Rice to the Hungry
This website appeals to me on several levels. In a nutshell, they make you play a word game: they give you a word, and you choose a synonym from a list of four. If you get it right, they give you a harder word, and donate 10 grains of rice to the hungry through an international agency. This stokes my inner:
- Altruist: I can help feed the world’s masses of hungry people.
- Lazy American: I can do it without standing up, or even leaving my computer.
- Gamer: Even better, I can do it while playing a computer game.
- OCD Gamer: The bane of any RPG player with obsessive-compulsive disorder, they were smart enough to display your current “Vocab Level.” Get the word right, and it works towards raising your vocab level (and thus giving you harder words). Get the word wrong, and your vocab level goes down, giving you easier words. Furthermore, they keep a running tally of how much rice you’ve earned in a bowl on the right, which to me is even more delicious than EXP.
- Linguaphile: Oh, and I get to do it while exercising that expanse of obscure English words I’ve learned but can’t use in normal everyday conversation, for fear of encountering the blank faces of non-English majors? I’ve found the game I’m going to play until my mouse hand is a withered claw.
The Monkeysphere
“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”
This article is by far the best explanation I’ve heard to date for why human beings as a whole have such a natural predilection towards jackassery. And it explains it with monkeys.
In a nutshell, some scientists performed a study on the correlation between monkeys’ brain size and their social dynamics. They found that in general, the size of the monkey’s brain determined the size of the social groups they would form, and that this correlation also held for other creatures with well-developed brains. For most monkeys, they found that most groups had 50 or so individuals. Interestingly enough, for a brain the size of a human’s, the estimate was that the ideal group size would be about 150.
This basically explains why we all go a little insane when we’re in a group of more than 150 people or so.
The StupidFilter Project
“Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.”
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-10-15 – 1900-08-25)
As the size of a group of people goes up, the IQ generally goes down. We’re starting to accept it as a fact of life that on uber-popular sites (such as YouTube, MySpace, etc.), 99% of the user-generated content is just completely and utterly inane. For example, I think reading YouTube comments out loud is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, and one of the tactics for which the CIA is currently under fire is forcing detainees to read MySpace pages for 8 hours a day.
While we have a number of filters to block spam from our inboxes and epilepsy-inducing Flash advertisements from websites, there isn’t currently a filter to block stupidity. Well, now there’s the StupidFilter Project. From the project’s site:
The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.
It’s time to fight back.
The solution we’re creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we’re collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.
Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a WordPress plugin.
“Serenity” Sequel Possible?
It was a sad day for all the Browncoats out there when we found out there was little to no chance of another Firefly movie, due to Universal’s disappointment at the low box office numbers. However, in a recent interview Alan Tudyk (a.k.a. Wash) has once again stoked the rumor fires with this quote:
“They had to put [the new DVD] out because they’ve been selling out of the other one and so Universal’s like ‘So, let’s do another one’. And now… there’s now a chance there’s going to be another movie.”
“Everybody in the Firefly crew – and that includes the ones who died in the movie – are excited about the prospect of doing another.”
Telemarketing Prank Response
Now, on an intellectual level I can understand that when telemarketers call me, they are just doing their jobs for an hourly wage, and that it their employers – the unholy beings compelling them to call me during breakfast or dinner – that are the appropriate targets of my righteous anger.
That being said, however, I can’t help but feel a twinge of irritation when I receive one of these unsolicited phone calls for insurance, credit card services, etc. When I receive several in a row, it’s difficult not to try to set the person on the other end of the line on fire with my mind alone. Last time I got three such phone calls in a row, I politely declined the first, declined the second somewhat less politely, and by the time the third guy got to me I cut him off by saying, “I’m sorry, I really don’t care,” and hung up. I’m sure if a fourth telemarketer called, I probably would have responded by trying to hate them to death.
But I digress. The video below is the recording of someone with a novel approach to telemarketers. Enjoy:
iTunes album art grabber
And on a philosophically lighter note, the iTunes Album Art grabber.
Basically, just type in the artist and album name, and if the music is available on iTunes it’ll give you a link to the official iTunes album art for that album, either in jpg, or sometimes in tiff.
If you’re as OCD as I am, you’ll enjoy (or be compelled to) updating the art in your iTunes library.
Goodbye, free time.
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