Plurp: What to do with all that bandwidth

Bigger!

2001.08.12 : 2001.08.18

Saturday, August 18, 2001
Blab. The blind URList emits:
http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/filing.html
We too, are pure fighting energy. (Note: Blatant Anglo-Saxon terms are used in the page referenced above, and in these other pages as well.)

Blab. A reader with specialized knowledge informs us of this.
I know my Triscuit lore - Look under RECIPES for the Triscuit Pizza. HA! Pizza on a bagel AND pizza on a Triscuit!
We bow to the superior knowledge of Triscuit abominations portrayed by our cherished reader. We do wonder that that Chinese character means, though.

Blab. A reader clears up our massive confusion about a previous reference to something (or some things) called The Purple Book.
THE PURPLE BOOK "contained the hardware schematics for the IBM PC as well as the code listings for the ROM BIOS" [...]
.. hereinafter called, of course, The Welch's Book.

Blab. In response to our query as to how recently our readers have consulted an (analog) dictionary, a fan of such objects writes:
Paper Dictionary? Within the past 48 hours. Paper just works better for some things. Somehow, one gets different results when thumbing through paper pages than clicking through links. Your milage may vary.
An interesting point, and see below!

Blab. Another fan of (analog) dictionaries writes:
I last looked up something in a real, paper, dictionary today. 'Hotdog' is listed as a variant form of 'hot dog' in my trusty two-volume OED, so perhaps it should have counted?
Before that, I last looked something up a few days ago -- I wanted to know how to spell a word that completely escapes me now. This is a regular event -- every other day or so I'll be turning to the real dictionary.
The problem with dictionaries on the web is that you don't get to encounter other interesting words as you flick the pages towards the word you're looking for. Think of the words that would remain forever undiscovered if we all used web dictionaries that hide everything apart from what we said we were interested in. You can't browse a web dictionary.
Mind you, I still write letters (real letters) with a fountain pen...
Hmm. We're not sure we can count those paper dictionaries as reliable any more, given that their glacial rate of change cannot possibly keep up with the language today. But whatever.
The reader makes a good point about books vs. Web - serendipitous browsing is much easier with paper books, simply because their access methods are so crude (relatively). It might take you half an hour to find that stirring passage in Grapes of Wrath in book form, but you'll encounter lots of other good memories in the process.
This is also true of (analog) newspapers. You might only be interested in a few percent of the stories they contain, in the sense that you'll actually read a substantial part of the article, but the headlines alone inform you of things you didn't know. Many people with whom we've spoken express great doubt that they would ever abandon their (analog) newspapers for a Web version for this reason. They want to be exposed to stuff for which they weren't looking.
Some Web sites try to get the best of both worlds. News cites (Web sites run by newspapers, CNN, etc.) try to have little titles and teaser lines, then full articles that are a click away. But, often, you have to wait so long for the article to come up that you don't care any more whereas, with an (analog) newspaper you would simply have glanced through the article in that time.
There's no reason in principle that you can't have the best of both worlds. You need high(er) bandwidth to transfer information quickly, and larger, high resolution displays to show it to you. But that's coming. It will be interesting to see what happens when it does.
A fountain pen. Hmm. What's that?

Plurp.
The blue dog
tried to look up that
Chinese character
in an (analog)
dictionary

Friday, August 17, 2001
Blab. A reader teases us with another brain teaser.
There is a pole in a lake. One-half of the pole is in the ground, another one-third of it is covered by water, and 9 ft is out of the water. What is the total length of the pole in feet?
Ah, a trick question! The pole is in a lake, not in feet.

Blab. One of our more competitive readers writes:
IQ test. My score was 134. What's yours?
We scored a whopping 118, which we can only excuse by noting that we had two impromptu meetings in the middle of the test. Or that our mind has turned to jelly in our old age. Or ... uh ... what was the question?

Blab. Speaking of Five Nonexistent Words ...
urinalysis trophy fortitude disciple impeach
That works! Though the thought process that led our erstwhile reader to put those five words together rather worries us.

Blab. A reader finds another Five Nonexistent Words.
quark lugubrious gnu algebra fence
Very nice!

Blab. Perhaps that same lugubrious reader pushes the limits of nonexistence with this stunning combination.
lugubrious algebraic blistering
Sounds painful!

Blab. Then, flush with success, that reader (or another) steps off the edge.
parsimoniously hotdog
Bzzt!
Hotdog is not a word.

Blab. Regaining his or her balance, a reader again impresses us.
otter fritters algebra
Help! I can't stop.
Otter fritters? Yum.

Blab. Dissatisfied with the ease of merely finding five words that aren't on a Web page, a reader with a mathematical fetish proposes the following.
A proposal for scoring the set-of-words-with-no-hits-on-Google game:
For each word, N represents the number of hits it gets when entered into Google alone.
The score of a set of words is the inverse of the sum of 1/ln(N).
Example: directory iconoclasm dood
directory: 52.2 million, ln = 17.77
iconoclasm: 13,600, ln = 9.52
dood: 263,000, ln = 12.48
Sum of 1/ln = 0.241
Inverse of that is 4.14
This scoring rewards finding a small set of high-incedence words that just happen to never appear together.
Whip up a quick excel scoresheet and watch the hours of fun roll in!
-pTang
Cool! We could see this as a very popular feature on our Web site. Enter a list of words and get a score. Keep the Top Ten scores, ala video games.
If only our brain had not turned to jelly, we would whip up a Perl module and get it going today. Ah, well.
(Careful, though. Dood is not a word. You must have meant d00d. :-)

Blab. What must be that same inventive reader writes:
processor dildo shortstop
scores 4.61.
This is the mark to beat.
We should use pTangs as the units for this quantity. Presumably the base unit is the Tang but, like the Farad, it's too large to actually find utility in its raw form, and the pico-Tang (pT) is the more common unit.
So that's 4.61 pT. Can anyone beat that?

Blab. Again, our readers take time to ponder the Big Questions.
So what ?
Well, we don't know.

Blab. A solicitous reader writes:
you come here!
Black Dog. Old hat. Hmph.

Blab. A reader reminds us what Danny Hillis is up to these days.
Among other things, Danny Hillis is co-chairman of the board of directors of the Long Now Foundation.
We must admit we've never understood this. Here's the deal. Hillis says our thinking, as a people, is too short-term, We don't really consider the long term, he says. So he plans to build a clock. A really big clock. A really, really big mechanical clock that, with generations of appropriately subservient acolytes maintaining it, will keep on ticking for many centuries.
And that, somehow, will get us to think long-term. Somehow.
Dunno. It always seemed to us that, if you were looking for long running processes to impress people with the Vast Span of Time, you could point to things like, oh, the orbits of the planets, or the evolution of the galaxy. You don't have to build them, you don't have to maintain them, and they last a lot, lot longer than some dopey clock. And that's a plus.
But - hey - Hillis got rich from his defunct company. He can do whatever he wants.

Blab. An eagle fingered reader notices the following.
The other problem with the International Connectivity Map is that it bears the legend, in small letters at the bottom right:
    Updated in '97 by [ ... ]
I can only assume that it's 1997 (in 1897, the Internet had not reached Papua New Guinea) -- _four_whole_years_ago_!
My _GOD_, Man -- I'm surprised they even had GIFs then. Sheesh.
Shame on us for not noticing that. Imagine, Internet data from the last millennium! We're surprised you can even click on it.

Blab. A reader enters our Starting Lines contest thusly:
Of all the lies my Aunt and her lover had told me, it was slowly becoming clear that one, at least, had been entirely too true.
We like that, pregnant with possibilities as it is.

Blab. An enthusiastic reader is ...
Kull wahad!
... not shaken.

Blab. A reader of ambiguous capitalization and sticky key exclaims:
PARTY, PArty, party!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Quite.

Blab. A reader alerts us of a larger problem.
The Purple Book
Hmm. Which is it?

The Greene & Knuth book on analysis of algorithms?

The Cambridge University GayBiLes site?

The handbook that tells how Harvard does titles and appointments?

The Compendium of Macromolecular Nomenclature?

The System V Interface Definition, in an amazingly nauseating shade of off-lavender?

The NHS book on outpatient waiting times?

... ?

Perhaps the problem is that there are too few colors. Or rather, that we conceive of there being too few colors. So they get overloaded.
What we'd like all of you Purple Book people to do (and we'd guess that this applies to all of you other primary and secondary color people too) is to pick a more descriptive, less conventional color for your book.
You know. Fuscha. Cabernet. Frozen Steel. Bruise.
Let your imaginations run wild.

Plop. Does it surprise you to discover that even hands free cell phones are dangerously distracting to drivers?
Sixty-four participants were asked to conduct various tasks, such as changing radio stations, listening to the radio, listening to books on tape, talking on a hand-held cell phone and talking on a hands-free cell phone.
As they performed these tasks, their response times were measured during stopping or braking.
Researchers found when participants were using a cell phone their response times were dramatically slower than when listening to the radio or a book on tape.
When using cell phones, participants came up late in braking for a red light or missed the light entirely. Researches found no significant difference to response time whether a hand-held or hands-free phone was being used.
So, hang up, darn it!

Plop. Poor, poor Be, the company that had the world's greatest, completely redesigned, elegantly architected new operating system. They just had one little problem: Nobody wants a new operating system these days. In 1996, they turned down $125M from Apple to buy them out. Their stock IPOd at $6 in 1999 and hit $40 later that year. They were going to take over the world.
Now their stock is selling at $0.25 and they've sold themselves to Palm for a measly $11M. We don't mean to be rude, but businesses that we built up have been sold for more than that.
We never got our impish face on the cover of magazines. But then again, we're still employed. It's probably a good tradeoff.

Yow. Want to watch the Russians lift the Kursk? Naturally, it's on the Web, including a 3d model (you have to allow them to download and run their software on your PC; we're too chicken to do that). Pretty cool. (Also fun is the slightly fractured English, translated of course from the original Russian. We don't know whether or not they use Babelfish.)
In true Russian form, the Web site tells us that this is official information. We wonder what that is.

Plop. Today's Really Bad Idea:
Renting sushi
Don't do that.

Yo. How long has it been since you looked up a word in a (paper) dictionary? Stop and think about it before reading further. When was the last time?
We've been asking this question of people lately. The answers are very interesting. Before we reveal the results of our hopelessly unscientific survey, perhaps our readers can tell us their own experience.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was Sky,
Azure,
Tropical Ocean

Thursday, August 16, 2001
Blab. Our very first entry in the Five Nonexistent Words contest.
Cockroach Moonrock fingernail soul cabernet
They don't draw any hits on Google!
Um. Moonrock does not appear in the dictionary. The judges say: Bzzzt.
And the reader who submitted this entry says in reply: Fine. You make dinner.
So maybe the judge's decision isn't really final after all.

Blab. A reader makes a dizzying discovery.
I was surprised to see that Google has already caught up to the Plurpers of the world.
I tried the five-word sequence
zillion, kazillion, bajillion, jillion, bajillion
Google came up with one link - Plurp.
However, I was able to fool Googlers and Plurpers alike with
zillion, kazillion, bajillion, jillion, trillion
which had no links....
How ironic that Google decided to crawl our site just last Tuesday!
Sadly, the judges Bzzzt this entry on the same grounds as the previous one. Don't you love it when we don't tell you all the rules?

Blab. A reader tries a good trick, which backfires.
I was going to submit
illegal spontaneous misspelled laboratory mileage
figuring that it would be funny ha-ha, 0 hits except that you just used them in your challenge. Searched on google and.....DOH.
That is funny!

Blab. A reader grabs the brass ring from the nose of our Nonexistent Word challenge.
four English words not found on Google:
operational malapropism fricative homomorphism
Very good! This was how we eventually found three word combinations not indexed by AltaVista. Pick words that are, themselves, rare or obscure. Technical terms (e.g. homomorphism) are particularly good in that regard, especially when you pick technical words from different disciplines (e.g. homomorphism and fricative).
But again, when Google deigns to crawl us next, these four words will get a hit - on this page. It's a bit like the Borg. A given technology works against them only once. Then they adapt.
Congratulations to all of today's entrants!

Blab. A reader inscribes hypotheses about that curious image from yesterday.
It's a tongue measurer for determining the effectiveness of various tongues on licking ice cream cones. I saw it on one of those silly cable stations late one night last week. I want one to prove my own tongue's efficency! LICK!
Imagine what we are thinking. Just imagine.

Blab. Along these same lines, another reader writes:
For those of you not adept at the human body, the picture is CLEARLY of a human tongue, and that person is CLEARLY sticking it out for the camera. I sure hope no one other than Plurps editorial staff had trouble with this one!
Now just what that silly metal thing is anyone's guess....
Ah! Now we get it.

Blab. We now turn our scant attention to solving yesterday's Triangle Puzzle.
Well, your triangle puzzle/paradox requires more paradigm shifting than it does mathematical ability.
My only hint to those who A) don't yet know the answer, and B) care (though I suspect this is a very small subset of Plurp readers):
The pictures are NOT of right triangles, but rather two mis-shapen 4-sided figures.
And just what does the reader think lies at the heart of mathematical ability, hmmm?

Blab. A more explicit reader writes:
The key, of course, is the red triangle and the green triangle. The angle of the slope on these two triangles is not the same -- look at the little squares upon which the puzzle is so helpfully laid out.
The green triangle is five little squares long by two high. The red triangle is eight little squares long by three high. The angle of the slopes must therefore be different, as the ratio of the sides is not the same.
The 'triangle' formed by the combination of the shapes, therefore, is not actually a triangle. The diagonal line of the 'triangle' in the top image is, in fact, slightly concave, whereas the diagonal line of the second 'triangle' in the lower image is slightly convex. Hence the missing space is, to no one's surprise, not missing at all.
We see that we just can't fool our readers!

Blab. In reply to our Triangle Puzzle, a reader goes for the bonus points.
The Vanishing Area Paradox in various forms is attributed to Martin Gardner.
http://www.sandlotscience.com/Ambiguous/vap_1.htm
http://www.sciam.com/1998/0898issue/0898math.html
We love it when readers not only correct the name of our puzzles, but provide Web documentation for their solution. Very nice!

Blab. Finally, a reader suggests:
The missing space in the triangle puzzle is with the extra dollar from the infamous innkeeper puzzle.
Ah, the infamous Innkeeper Puzzle! It, and the Vanishing Area Paradox, and a number of other good brain teasers, can be found here.
Enjoy!

Blab. Worried about the implications of that Archbishop who married a Moonie, a reader frets:
If that article about the Archbishop is accurate, the Roman Catholic Church has BIGGER problems that marriage and celibacy.
If word gets around that the Archbishop IS in fact on drugs, it will send out a wave of rampant drug-use among Roman Catholic clergy world-wide.
Now let's not get carried away. Remember this?
After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.
And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.
And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.
And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.
And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.
And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.
And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.
And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, LORD God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
We are forced to conclude that there is a long tradition of drug use in that particular religion. Or not. Hey - what do we know?

Blab. What may be an entirely new reader (bringing us to a total of eight, or maybe even nine - gosh, we've lost count!) writes:
Like being lost in the Twilight Zone, I stumbled upon your website. Using it as an achor to reality, I became more lost.
We find ourselves in just that state. All the time.

Blab. It's well known that when pizza's on a bagel, you can have pizza any time. A reader attempts to generalize this fundamental principle.
Pizza on a bagel? Pizza on a Triscuit, too!
Sadly, there is no associated Web reference, so we must discount this wild claim.

Blab. Possibly on the topic of an ancient Plurp entry, a reader writes:
hmmm, whatever happened to the stump you called Xerox? I see how reliable your opinions are. Thank's alot
Xerox? They died. Y'ou're wel'come.

Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for a dentist's office, a reader writes:
My teeth are mossy. :(
Indeed.

Yow. Lots of Blab today, for some reason!

Yak.
What's the prize for winning a Plurp contest?
A free year's subscription to Plurp, of course.

Yow. A long time ago, we pursued an undergraduate education at UCSB. Needless to say, it eluded us.
But while it was busy eluding us, we made master keys to the whole campus. (It turns out you only needed two: one for all the dorms and one for all the academic buildings. Even the Security folks on campus didn't know that.)
Other than a midnight dip in the Faculty Club pool and an unsponsored tour of the top of the bell tower, we never really did anything with them. But we did have a Great Plan.
There was an art exhibition space associated with the Art Department. Naturally, it displayed art made by the faculty and their buds. Our roommates were all technical types, by which we mean math and physics majors. (We never really accepted the soft sciences, like biology.) You could say we didn't have the greatest appreciation for the kind of art the arty crowd did.
So we devised a Great Plan. The Great Plan was to break into the art space (this was complicated by the fact that they also had an alarm system that we would have to disarm) and mount a new addition to their collection: A pedestal on top of which would be, well, feces, encased in resin. A little card beside the piece would read Art, by Anonymous. The idea was to see how long it remained there before someone noticed. We all figured it would be a long, long time.
We never carried out the Great Plan. That might have been why it still seems Great. But now we see that someone else did, at least approximately. Very cool! (They also did other rather funny pranks. We like these guys!)
We're feeling very vicarious today.

Plurp. At a conference last year, I was talking about computers (duh) with a person of approximately my age lamenting how today people's understanding of computers is so compartmentalized. The following conversation ensued.
Person: When I was in grad school, I understood everything about computers. I understood them all the way down.
Me: Meaning ...
Person: I understood them all the way down. Every layer of their behavior, from the software, all the way down.
Me: That's amazing. Superstring theory hadn't even been proposed then.
Person: What do you mean?
Me: Well, you understood computers all the way down.
Person: Yeah ...
Me: So you must mean that you understood the application software, and how that was compiled to assembly language ...
Person: Yeah ...
Me: ... and how that was translated into machine code, and how that was processed by the various registers and ALUs and memory units ...
Person: Yeah.
Me: ... and how those were made up of gates and wires, and how those were made up of transistors and such.
Person: Exactly!
Me: And how those obeyed semiclassical quantum mechanics because of their relatively large size in those days.
Person: Well, yeah ...
Me: And how, underlying that, the crystals were composed of atoms, which were composed of protons, neutrons and electrons, which were composed of more fundamental elementary particles.
Person: Wait a minute.
Me: Which, in turn, were composed of quarks and then of superstrings, at least according to current theory. But no one had proposed that back then. And that's what amazes me.
Person: That's not what I meant!
Me: My point exactly. We all pick the explanatory layer below which we choose not to understand in detail.
And that's fundamentally true. In science, we choose to disregard stuff above some explanatory layer as not our concern. Elementary particle physicists don't care, really, about atomic physics. Atomic physicists don't care about organic chemistry. Organic chemists don't care about molecular biology. Molecular biologists don't care about cellular biology. And cellular biologist don't care about population biology.
But more important is the reverse direction. Population biologists take for granted cellular biology. Cellular biologists take for granted molecular biology. And so on, and so on.
Now, in fact, the world is not so neatly divided. When, in The Once and Future King, Merlin turned Arthur into a goose, Arthur, flying high above Camelot, could not see the borders between kingdoms. So it is in science. The borders between sciences are artifices of our own conceit. Nature does not acknowledge them any more than she acknowledges the borders between kingdoms.
But we do. We choose a firmament on which to build our conception of the universe. From there on up, we may feel comfortable, even clever, in our understanding. But from there on down, we don't really understand it at all.
This is not to say that the world doesn't make sense from bottom to top. Indeed, I believe it does. I am merely trying to point out that you, as I, take certain things for granted, don't probe into them deeply, figure that other people are the experts in those areas, that we are not, and that we don't have to be.
And that no one, no one, really understands computers, or anything else, all the way down.

Plurp. That Person in the above entry? That was Danny Hillis, formerly famed founder of the now seriously defunct Thinking Machines Corporation, formerly of Disney Research (whatever that was), and currently, well, we dunno. We didn't want to pollute our story with name-dropping. But, conceited fool that we are, we also couldn't resist it.
Maybe you hate us. But you know what? We don't care. We enjoy putting the famous in their place. Don't you?

Yow. We're all online, pretty much. Don't believe it? Check out the International Connectivity map. Yeah, it's on a nation by nation basis, which is basically irrelevant. The relevant measure is the person by person basis. But it is an interesting indicator!

Plop. Dave cites an utterly trivial paper in which the author concludes (d'oh!) that the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implies immortality. Of course, it also implies that, in some universe, the local cluster of galaxies will shortly form into a gigantic bust of Bill Gates, but so what?
Sheesh.

Yow. Helen made the most amazing trout dinner last night. Now, I grew up eating trout - trout that I had caught myself in the Sierras, pan fried over a campfire.
But this was the best ever. Really! It helped that they were little tiny trout, less than half a pound each, and hence fabulously tender, and very fresh. But still! The wonderful part was the skin, cooked crisp on the barbeque, reminiscent of eel sushi, or salmon skin sushi. I had never eaten the skins of trout before. Fantastic! I ended up eating them with my fingers, sucking up every gooey drop I could.
I do so love food. Who invented food?

Yak.
Steve, you're so easily amused.
Yeah, just give me a Web log and I can keep myself occupied for months.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had intended to provide
the raw materials for the
Great Plan

Wednesday, August 15, 2001
Blab. Allegedly from the Kappa Delta 2001 White Rose Formal at Mississippi State:

Formal dress: $120.00
Dinner and drinks before formal: $80.00
Having a picture passed around on the internet that shows you duct taped your boobs together: PRICELESS
Sure. But that Lady In Red? Yow.

Blab. A reader after our own waistline writes:
viva la flab!!!
Thank you.

Blab. An astonished reader writes:
Mariah Carey has a cat?
Actually, all we know for sure is that her bathtub has a cat.

Blab. A reader of a certain investigatorial bent writes:
Noted: "bats cluster like grapes on the seams of her nylons" has no link reference within the world of Google.
Please also note: "bats cluster like grapes on the seams of lemon cheese" does have several links.
I figure it's only a matter of time (certainly less than 1.63 bajillion seconds!) before Google catches up and finds the former in a future search.
I am curious, on a similar note, the statistical odds that a diceware sequence (any five english words) would result in a link out of Google....
When AltaVista first came on line, we used to play a game. We would try to think up three words that, when typed into the AltaVista box, resulted in zero Web pages. It turned out to be really hard, in part because people have (for reasons unfathomable) lists of every word in the known universe on their Web pages, and those pages get indexed.
You might, for instance, think that tesseract, kumquat and stilton don't appear on the same Web page. And you would be wrong.
Readers are invited to submit lists of five English words that are not found by Google on any page. (Note that misspelled words are illegal. Use of misspelled words may result in cerebral detonation. Misspelled words have been linked to spontaneous self-digestion in laboratory animals. Your mileage may vary. Not to be used except under the strict supervision of people you have never met. Your activities are being monitored for quality control purposes. Thank you.)

Blab. Meme-mixing soars to new heights as an episode of a story.
Benford was astonished. Why had 2,5,6,9 worked for Dubya, but not for him? No matter--the door was open now. As Dubya and the Hound Not Of This Earth stared each other down, neither noticed as Benford slipped through the door. Maybe now he could discover the true identity of Captain Plurp.
Maybe ... maybe ...
We wonder what happens next!

Blab. In a lovely illustration of the Banach-Tarski paradox with only four pieces, the Masked URList contributes this:
http://www.karplus.org/eli/puzzles/triangles.gif
Interesting! We once knew a mathematician named Karplus. And the site seems to be (badly) password-protected. We wonder if our old friend is a Plurp reader.
Readers are also invited to submit their solution to the triangle puzzle.

Blab. One of our readers exposes an uncertain assumption.
I hope you have sent new reader Keg membership information into Pay for Plurp. Though your other seven devoted readers try to keep the log going, I figure any chance to double Plurp's revenue flow should be pursued....
By our calculation, a jump to positive revenue from no revenue is more than a doubling.

Blab. Perhaps as an entry to our Starting Lines contest, a reader writes:
my sweat doesn't satisfy him.
Hmm. We can think of a story from our own life that starts that way. Scary, eh?

Blab. A reader sends a link to this unusual image.
Readers are invited to submit their learned explanation of what the heck that thing is and what this person might be doing with it.

Yow. The National Museum of American History has lots of stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that they couldn't figure out where to put it all, and couldn't possibly display it all.
Until now.
Announcing HistoryWired, the online museum. Present and accounted for are Kermit the Frog and the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Among other dignitaries, of course.
In addition to the stuff they're showing, they have a curious navigational tool. We first saw it used as a way of describing the many different kinds of companies whose stock is available on the NYSE. It's curious to see it appear in this new guise. Do you think it works well?
This is the site's first day up so it is, of course, hosed. Be kind.

Yo. Religion can be so complex!
A Zambian archbishop whose marriage scandalized the Vatican is leaving his wife and returning to the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican said Tuesday, quoting the archbishop as having told the pope, "I am your humble and obedient servant."
Ignoring his celibacy vow, Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo was married in a mass ceremony conducted by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon on May 27 in New York.
"If he says he wants to leave me, in his own voice, I'm sure he's under the effect of drugs," [his wife] told reporters after the Vatican announcement.

Yak.
Gladys Knight and the RosettaNet PIPs.
If you don't understand it, don't worry. But it is funny.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was featured in the National Museum of Bits
as the first icon to marry a Korean
cult leader

Tuesday, August 14, 2001
Blab. The Blind URList writes:
Dubya had been left in the dark again. He slithered to the cyber-lock, clumsily fumbling across the hot buttons to input the secret pass-code - 2,5,6,9. The door creaked open and Dubya quickly found himself staring into the glowing eyes of the Blue Dog.
Sound like those Call of Cthulhu movie clips! (See below.)

Blab. We thought it was fun sometimes to find a "wrong number" on the Web. A reader wryly agrees. Or disagrees. We're not sure which.
I decided to dial the iSphere number myself (which, since it was done on purpose, is no longer a "wrong number"). I was intrigued by the choppy yet inanimate motion of the gerbil, and after long, careful thought and some laborious experimentation in my shoddy basement laboratory, I've concluded that the brain is actually powering the treadmill, which in turn jostles the gerbil around the cage.
I further found that when dragging the pointer to the gerbil, the pointer takes on a long, curved shape, and serves to physically grab the gerbil and hold him in place. This acts as a braking device, forcing the brain into a temporary comatose condition (since the mechanics are rigidly connected). And, oh by the way, the gerbil ends up being a mouse once he is thusly stopped for closer examination.
I do wonder, however, if we were dependent upon gerbils (or mice) for stimulation of human thought, how many gerbils (or mice) would it take to get through a day at work. A zillion? A kajillion? A bazillion perhaps?
We are given to understand that it would be 7.3 kajillion. Approximately.

Blab. A reader highlights an unanticipated consequence of our recent actions.
No wonder you only got one Plurp entry for Monday. You put it together before 3PM EDT! Most of your loyal readers are still recovering from weekend hangovers or playing catch-up all day. You need to submit your Monday entry later in the day, or just accept the low Plurp-count.
It never occurred to us that opening up our Pay-Per-Plurp service, published daily at exactly noon and chock full of high-quality content instead of the foolishness you find here, would siphon off our more sophisticated readers, leaving behind only those who spend their days in an alcoholic haze looking for childish humor.
We suppose we will have to get used to it.

Blab. An extremely clever reader submits an answer en genre to our challenge to put the following terms in ascending order.
gabillion - 394
kabillion - 474
kajillion - 1330
kazillion - 1870
bajillion - 2560
katrillion - 3130
jillion -    6200
bazillion - 18,500
gazillion - 26,000
zillion -    84,800
These are the values given them according to Google....
We are so impressed!

Blab. A reader who has somehow discovered our Cherokee name writes:
Why keep up the charade? Open the curtain, admit that you yourself actually write all the so-called "Blab" items with your own hand. No one (else) actually types (anything) into those boxes, and even if someone did the boxes don't actually /do/ anything! Look: bats cluster like grapes on the seams of her nylons. Look: Politics is like lemon cheese. Not everything is a reverse link, snuffy-kins! The world is wider than then Web. Well... At least it should be! How long is a day when there is no sun?
We admit it. You know, the funny thing is that the two phrases at which we were instructed to look will be - in a month or so, when Google gets around to it - inverse links. To this very entry. We love self-reference.
But we must take exception to the foolish notions that there are things that are not inverse links, and that the world is wider than the Web. The very idea! How long is a day when there is no sun?

Blab. A reader alerts us to an important upcoming event.
http://www.amazon.com
/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786926392/
Looks like Wizards of the Coast is about to publish a much fancier rule book than Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG that we used back in those halcyon days when we actually had enough time to sit around the table, pass the Nacho Doritos around, and play it all evening. Sigh.
It looks further like WotC got the rights to publish Call of Cthulhu rules from our dear friends at Chaosium. Sheesh. They're becoming the Microsoft of gaming! And all from that rather silly card game. Hey - it was a mildly interesting game, but it wasn't D&D, OK? Get real.
The world is very strange.

Blab. A reader writes:
Blab Good!
Jane's in a meeting, Mr. Tarzan, but we will make sure she gets the message. Thanks so much for coming by.

Blab. A kindly reader apparently volunteers to engage in criminal activity for our sake.
I just happened to find your website while doing a search on the local jug band Cranberry Lake. I noticed in your log from sometime in 2000 that you lamented not being able to find their song "Einstein the Genius" or the words anywhere on the internet. Well, I happen to have all three of their albums, which I recently converted to MP3 format, and could send you that song if you're still interested.
--
keg
Naturally, we would never suggest that anyone violate copyright laws, or even think immoral thoughts along these lines. But we are very interested in the libretto to this astonishing piece of Americana. Perhaps some day we will receive enlightenment.
Thank you, keg. In advance.

Blab. A reader submits a Babelfish puzzle.
Went a nun walking by the street and happens next to a drunkard.
Then coje the drunkard to blows to the poor nun.
After which drunk I leave him to the poor nun in the finished ground one rises and he says:
- you disappoint BATMAN to Me.
The puzzle is: What original story (in English) can be submitted to Babelfish, then translated to and then from some other language, to result in the above fascinating bit of prose? And what language or languages are involved?
(Note the non-English word coje. This may be a partial clue.)
Readers?

Blab. Always anxious to keep us informed, a reader writes:
http://www.mariahonline.net/gallery
/OKMag3August3Mcfanatic.jpg
Did you know that Mariah Carey bathes with her cat? We didn't either, and we'll certainly file that for future reference.

Yow. Ultra-mega-way-cool movies of the upcoming game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth by the folks at Headfirst Productions. (One hopes their vapid Web site is a sign that they're working hard on the game.) Note realistic physics, incorporation of fear and visual effects of induced neuroses. Note also that, as with all software projects, it's late. Originally scheduled for this year, they're currently saying it'll ship in first quarter 2002. In programmer-speak, that means maybe next June.
We'll be lurking. With bated breath.

Plurp.
The blue dog
and the nun
had a Batman with
the coje drunk

Monday, August 13, 2001
Blab. Our sole reader contribution today is from the Latino/Franco contingent.
VIVA LE BLAB!!!
Ay! Ay! Viva la cocina! Donde esta el borracho?

Yo. It's so much fun "dialing wrong numbers" on the Web. Don't you think? Today's wrong number is iSphere. What a bizarre intro screen! And what's that gerbil doing down there?

Yo. Hmm. Max Payne. New first person shooter.
Some people say that in extreme, life-threatening situations, time slows down so that even a gunshot seems to last several seconds. "Max Payne"'s Bullet Time feature simulates this effect with stunning results -- its third-person gunfights are spectacularly cinematic, and it manages to look as cool and dramatic as a film noir while being more fun than most other shooters.

Must focus on Thief II. Must focus on Thief II.

Plurp. The odd thing about our new Doodles section is that it took us far longer to put them online (scanning, cropping, finding the right bit depth, cleaning up, making GIFs, formatting them on the page) than it did to doodle them in the first place.
Aren't computers supposed to make things easier?
Yeah, silly us. What were we thinking?

Plurp.

Plurp. Readers are invited to place the following in ascending order.

A zillion

A kazillion

A bazillion

A gazillion

A kabillion

A gabillion

A katrillion

A jillion

A kajillion

A bajillion

(Hint: The above is not the right order.)
Kindly explain your reasoning.

Yak. Lunchtalk today orbited around parents who let little Billy do anything he wants, no matter how destructive.
Some parents think it's bad to set limits on kids.
That just makes no sense to me.
They say you can't punish kids for what they do.
Sure you can. Just swat the little blighters!
Well, not you specifically ...

Plurp.
The blue dog
took far longer
to ...

Sunday, August 12, 2001
Blab. Somehow stumbling on our Magnetic Poetry, a reader whose presence we had not previously noted writes:
Here's my version of magnetic poetry. Use it, abuse it...laugh at it.
Fun stuff.
We whisper of beach dreams
Some grow inside me
Imagine rain with gold
And laugh before the ocean moon
Nice!

Blab. Mystifyingly, a reader writes:
You are too smart for your own good. I banish you to PLURP-dom!
We're not at all clear on the former, and we thought we already were the latter. We're so confused!

Plurp. Another gloriously lazy weekend, in which we proved that, even when pizza's not on a bagel, you can have pizza any time.

Plurp.
Exhibit: Frank Gehry Architect at the Guggenheim
Demographic: Modern architecture freaks
Exhibit Summary: Surely you know Gehry, if from nothing else than the widely publicized Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain or, if you're a New Yorker, from the proposed Guggenheim Museum in Lower Manhattan. Yes, the Guggenheim likes Gehry, and nothing illustrates this love affair better than an entire museum full of Gehry, which is what this exhibit is. Staged in Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, the curators draped the interior with long curtains of curling chain mail, obscuring Wright's graceful, symmetric curves, which might otherwise have been too strong a contrast to Gehry's style. It's hard to know what to think of Gehry. On one hand, he's wildly innovative, using unique materials (titanium!) and hitherto undreamed of shapes. On the other hand, his more recent buildings look like piles of aluminum foil, paper and sticks, and indeed that is exactly how the conceptual models are made. Gehry's architecture is Cubist: each fragment of the building looks like a building, but the arrangement and combination seem schizophrenic, self-consciously disintegrating form and function. (Was it accidental that the Thannhauser Gallery within the Guggenheim has classic Cubist compositions by Picasso and Gris?) His buildings are clearly centerpieces, intentionally sticking out of, and often fighting against, their environment. But what would happen if everyone said Hey, that's great stuff, let's all build in that style? The resulting Gheryland might look like Toontown, or a monumental trashscape waiting to be dumped. But I've never been in a Gehry building, so I'll reserve judgment until then.
Award For: Most Extensive Gehry Show Ever
Verdict: Recommended

Plurp.
Exhibit: Light Screens: the Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright, at the American Craft Museum
Demographic: Frank Lloyd Wright fans (only, we suspect)
Exhibit Summary: Wright was never fond of plain windows and almost never used them where a wall would do. When he did, he loved to make them into art, using his own interpretation of the stained glass window. The result was always striking and often beautiful. This exhibit brings together more than fifty of these windows, though apart from the rooms that were their homes, they are strangely isolated. Copies of Wright's drawings and a few models don't quite let you see why they were where they were.
Award For: Windows in Places That Would Have Driven Wright Nuts
Verdict: Mildly recommended

Plurp.
Exhibit: Origamic Architecture at the American Craft Museum
Demographic: Paper freaks and engineers
Exhibit Summary: Imagine an intricate construction of Escher's staircases from his Relativity. Imagine it made from a single sheet of paper, cut and folded but with nothing added or detached. Now imagine that it can also be folded flat, as inside a greeting card. Sound impossible? It probably is, but this exhibit shows over a hundred such examples: geometric shapes, reproductions of famous art and architecture, or just plain whimsy, mounted ironically on long rolls of corrugated cardboard that are suspended from the ceiling. The engineer in you will be trying to figure out how they do it the whole time.
Award For: Best Impossible Art
Verdict: Recommended

Plurp.
The blue dog
was just a pile of
pixels

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