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2003.08.10 : 2003.08.16
Saturday, August 16, 2003
Blab. The famous Michael Menkin, inventor of the thought
screen helmet, takes notice of our humble blog.
 Thanks
for mentioning the thought screen helmet from stopabductions.com on your
website in July of last year.
You may be interested in my new website,
aliensandchildren.org which has drawings of aliens made by children
and more evidence that the thought screen helmet works.
Michael Menkin
Inventor
Sure thing, Mike! In fact, we mentioned that aliens and children
site in the same posting as
we mentioned the stop abductions site. But the Velostat probably
blocked that, right?
Blab. On that amusing blackout thing, a reader writes:
I thought people were saying
that Canajuns caused it? -AJL
As far as we can tell, everybody is blaming everybody, while at the same
time saying they don't know what caused it. Impressive.
Blab. A reader advances a theory on why London swelters based,
as far as we can tell, on sympathetic magic.
few of the buildings in london
have ac because if they did the city would be thrust into darkness like
the ne of america
No kidding? Funny it didn't happen in Dallas.
Blab. A reader uses that same algorithm to generate a reader
contribution to Plurp.
The "Statistically Optimal
Music" from MIT is definitely cool if you happen to like hearing the inner
strings of quarks screwing, which I do. If you pay careful attention
you can hear these very sounds in the sap of the trees, inside the glances
of the eyes of the bees enthrawled at the nectar font of nightblooming
jasmine, and within the singing knees of crickets.
Having spent a considerable amount of our meaningless life attending to
the knees of crickets (don't ask), we can attest to the veracity of this
report. Well, of that particular part of the report.
Blab. A reader wishes to contribute to our vast
storehouse of peculiar knowledge.
I found this on the USA Network/Monk
messageboard:
"I am the king of hunt and peck (with
a minor in
backspace!)"
Is that a Helenism?
Golly. We have no idea. Readers?
Blab. A long-time reader
writes:
Do you have a pence?
Even a pence would help.
Do you have a pence? Even a
pence would help.
Do you have a pence? Even a
pence would help.
Do you have a pence? Even a
pence would help.
Do you have a pence? Even a
pence would help.
Do you have a pence? Even a
pence would help.
A man, wrapped in a nylon sleeping bag, sits on a landing in the Charing
Cross station. A young boy, holding his mother's hand, asks, What are
you doing there? The man replies, Just trying to make some money
and get by.
Yow. Idi Amin is dead.
That's nice.
Yo. Military
gestures. Study up. (/usr/bin/girl)
 Plurp.
Do you have a blue dog?
Even a blue dog
would help.
Friday, August 15, 2003
Blab. A reader surprises us - shocks us, really - by
getting one of our many obscure
jokes.
The Boys of Sumer: that's
funny!
Why, thank you! We appreciate your appreciation. We are amazed by it, but
we also appreciate it.
 Blab.
Another reader gets it.
spongebob is now scaring
me
Those who do not fear the squarepants are doomed to resquish it.
Blab. A reader who understands our deep psychological need for
statistical optimality writes:
Eigenradio:
Statistically Optimal Music
Yes, it's a hideously designed Web site from MIT, this one claiming to
listen to Internet radio stations and offer statistically similar, synthetic
feeds. Cool or cruel? You decide.
Blab. A reader frightens us with a DIY opportunity for midgets.
Watch out, it's the Swamp
Man!
Watch out? We shall, indeed.
Blab. A reader informs us of even stranger goings on than we
had anticipated, left-coast-wise.
The california guberantorial
recall is a goat rodeo.
They've got goats running now? Sheesh. What's next? Actors?
Blab. A reader with a timing problem writes:
Getting a taste of what London
will be like without air conditioning, eh?
Yes! And it's lovely.
Blab. A reader suggests that we get a new car.
fiat lux
No thanks. We're happy with the one we have.
Blab. A reader observes certain ominous correlations.
"The Blue Dog Coalition (a
group of conservative democrat congressfolk whose focus is on a balanced
budget) have a budget deficit ticker on their home page."
Perhaps it will not surprise you that the
NYSE was also up today.
Blab. Another asynchronous reader writes:
|\_._._/|
|
o o |
\
.` /
|`---|
|
| Der blaue Hund
is in the dark
|`___|\_
looking up at the stars
/|
|\ and dreaming...
##
## dreaming ...
dreaming ... of plurp.
It is neither dark nor dreaming. It is merely Plurp.
Plop. We just can't leave you people alone for a minute, can
we? We're scarcely out the door and you Merkans go and have the worst
electrical blackout ever, and one that includes our assigned quarters
at that.
 Helen
is all freaked that Him Whose Name Was Formerly Up In Lights will
come to grievous harm. We suspect he hasn't noticed.
In either case, we appreciate you waiting until we were someplace else
before indulging in this display of technological superiority. We particularly
like the fact that, some twelve hours after it started, nobody even knows
what
caused it. Outstanding.
Plurp. Today in News That Isn't News.
Remember when news outlets reported interesting facts? Yeah, those were
the days.
Plurp. The power seems to have gone off in the heads of certain
Nigerians as well, as this missive from BARRISTER. JIM OBINNA. attests.
I then came across your address
on the Internet as I was browsing through a Christian site, and as a matter
of fact, it is not only you or your ministry that I picked on the Christian
site initially, but after my fervent prayer over it, then you were nominated
to me through divine revelation from God, so these are how I received such
a divine revelation from the Lord, how I got your contact information,
and I then decided to contact you for the fund to be used wisely for things
that will glorify the name of God.
The first reader to correctly identify all of the errors, both factual
and grammatical, in that most astounding sentence wins the Plurp
Award for World Dimness.
Plop. In a rare tip of the hat, Kafkaesque
denigrates our
admiration for that there site of hermit crab accoutrement.  The
nerve! Just for that, we are buying a dozen of those
hideous American Flag hermit crab shells for the little fellas (we
think they're all male) at our Caribbean hideaway. We would not, previously,
have bought them under any circumstances.
That'll teach him
Plurp.
The blue dog
was still admiring the
views that isn't views.
Thursday, August 14, 2003
Plurp. So here we are in a far off Zone of Unpredictable
Connectivity, in which we have discovered several curious facts.
-
Sleeping most of the way over, and then most of the day after arriving,
does little to stave off jet lag.
-
A blistering summer and thousands of feet can reduce Hyde Park to the moral
equivalent of a public beach in New Jersey, with expanses of blowing sand
instead of grass. Nevertheless, a man of questionable previous employment
still wants to collect £1.50 from you to sit in lawn chairs in the
hot sun.
-
No building in London has air conditioning because, well, it's London.
-
No B&B that we can afford has heard of ice. And their plumbing has
all been done by Joe Bob's Outdoor Toilets & Grubs Sold.
-
A room on a busy street in Marble Arch sounds pretty much like a room on
a busy street in midtown Manhattan.
-
After all this time, the British still think of television as educational.
-
The British military doesn't march. It sallies.
Study up.
Plurp.
The blue dog
could watch the history of England
all day long
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Blab. A reader has an opinion on that little glimmer
of joy that entered our life yesterday.
We just reclaimed a GB of
unusefully occupied space, and had fun doing it!
You are tragic.
Thus has it always been, Treasured Reader.
Blab. A reader suggests that ...
|\_._._/|
|
o o |
\
.` /
|`---
|
|
| Der blaue Hund
is red hot
|`___
|\_
/|
|\
##
##
Truer words were never blabbed.
Blab. A reader reader is both confused and profane.
I have found myself in a
delicate conundrum. I'm not sure what "THE D*MN THING," is.
Can anyone help?
(Splat inserted - Plurp.) We recommend Google.
Plurp. The usual suspects.
-
helen naked pitures
-
iris chacon
-
chihuly
-
imani
-
arsenic poisoning pictures
-
naked female dogs
-
britney
-
mia
-
virtual helen naked pictures
-
don t trust
Nice to see such predictability.
Plurp. Today the voices put on a stage play in our head.
| Adult Voice: |
Joey Banana and Big Johnny D. |
| Kid Voices: |
Sponge Bob, Square Pants! |
| |
|
| Adult Voice: |
Sleep with the fishes now, under
the sea. |
| Kid Voices: |
Sponge Bob, Square Pants! |
| |
|
| Adult Voice: |
Who's the assassin who's still after
me? |
| Kid Voices: |
Sponge Bob, Square Pants! |
| |
|
| Adult Voice: |
If you hear him coming, then you'd
better flee! |
| Kid Voices: |
Sponge Bob, Square Pants! |
| |
|
| Adult Voice: |
Sponge Bob, Square Pants! |
| Kid Voices: |
Sponge Bob, Square Pants!! |
| Adult Voice: |
SPONGE BOB, SQUARE PANTS! |
| Kid Voices: |
SPONGE BOB, SQUARE PANTS!! |
| |
|
| All: |
[Hold soaking wet sponges out
in front of themselves and squeeze the water onto a tile floor.] |
Plurp.
The blue dog
was about to be in a
Zone of Unpredictable Connectivity
for a week or so
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Blab. A reader explains that fertile melting ground
thing.
it really wouldn't be a fertile
melting ground long after the ground had cooled from the lava and had produced
"stuff".
We're overjoyed that you cleared that up. What would we do without you?
Melt into that fertile ground, probably. Or worse.
Blab. Indulging in a little digital archaeology, a reader writes:
In an entry from February
2002 you wrote the following w.r.t. the smallworld experiment at columbia.edu:
By asking each of us to select
only one next person to whom they send mail, they're likely to establish
a really long chain between us and Pavia, if they get there at all.
They reported their initial results,
which don't appear to support your intuition. Here's the abstract from
their report in Science 2003 301 (pp. 827-829):
An Experimental Study of Search in
Global Social Networks
We report on a global social-search
experiment in which more than 60,000 e-mail users attempted to reach one
of 18 target persons in 13 countries by forwarding messages to acquaintances.
We find that successful social search
-
is conducted primarily through intermediate
to weak strength ties,
-
does not require highly connected "hubs"
to succeed, and, in contrast to unsuccessful social search,
-
disproportionately relies on professional
relationships.
By accounting for the attrition of message
chains, we estimate that social searches can reach their targets in a median
of five to seven steps, depending on the separation of source and target,
although small variations in chain lengths and participation rates generate
large differences in target reachability. We conclude that although global
social networks are, in principle, searchable, actual success depends sensitively
on individual incentives.
Cool! And that's pretty much consistent with our
own experience from the month after we foisted that incorrect theory
on you:
[W]hen we received
the official Columbia email from a Treasured Reader, we saw that it
was destined for a particular writer in New York and sent it off to a New
York blog friend who actually writes stuff. Like that's gonna work!
Now this.
Heh. I finally got around
to forwarding your "Small world" thing to my friend Leslie and it turns
out she knows the person you were looking for, Pavia something. Umm, so
that's what, 3 degrees of separation? Not bad.
We hate it when our irrational prejudices are challenged. Stop that.
Blab. A reader practiced in the Manly
Arts writes:
Touche!
Pucha!
Blab. Taking our little proselette
from yesterday seriously, a reader writes:
I hope you DO love me
Oh, yes, Treasured Reader. We do love you. Desperately and eternally.
We do, we do, we do.
Blab. Love is in the air, as a reader forces our consciousness
into certain painful configurations.
Gotta love this
Ouch!
A virus-like infection that
was the subject of urgent U.S. government and industry warnings spread
rapidly Monday across the Internet, causing computers to mysteriously restart
and coordinating an electronic attack against Microsoft Corp.
Security experts said the infection,
which exploits an unusually dangerous flaw in Windows software, wasn't
yet seriously disrupting Internet traffic but posed that risk as it was
expected to continue spreading quickly overnight.
You know the phrase we like best? An unusually dangerous flaw in Windows
software. It's like An unusually dangerous nuclear weapon, or
An
unusually large sumo wrestler.
Plop. Can someone please explain to us why buffer
overflows are still possible? 'Cause we're too stupid to understand
it. In any universe other than the Bizarro universe in which we apparently
live, no one who started programming in the last two decades would have
even heard of a programming language that allows such stupidity.
Yow. Ian gets all the credit
for introducing us to the Cool Frob O' The Day: SequoiaView.
Fantastic! A viewer that shows you your entire file system (or any part
thereof), laid out in the directory hierarchy, with the files represented
by tiles whose sizes are proportional to the size of each file. And gorgeously,
too.
It's the first tool we've seen that lets us easily answer the question
What
junk can we get rid of to make more space on this stupid disk? Which
we ask a lot, as it turns out. (We just reclaimed a GB of unusefully occupied
space, and had fun doing it!)
And what's taking up a full 3.3 GB of our 19 GB disk? Email. It figures.
Way cooler than words can describe. Oh, and it's free. Go download
it now.
Plurp. We're not sure if we should file this
under snowball's chance in hell or pigs flying. What do you
think?
Convicted Unabomber Theodore
Kaczynski wants the U.S. government to return a pipe bomb and other items
seized from his Montana cabin so that they can be used for "research."
Yow. Moons.
Plurp.
The blue dog
existed only because of
buffer overflows
in the "stuff".
Monday, August 11, 2003
Blab. We seem doomed to deal with Helenisms
today. Not that we mind.
First, we wonder if last week's He put his name in the ring is
a Helenism. We got the part about throwing his hat in the ring, but not
the other part.
I think the second one is:
"He put his name on the ballot"
Although it's not really a saying
as much as an accurate statement of what he is doing (assuming the CNN
anchor was talking about some election.)
Possibly! Or:
he put his name in the hat?
And, even more succinctly:
put his name in the hat?
That sounds right to us. Note the interesting cognitive intermediary hat,
which is included in both constituent phrases but omitted from the Helenism
itself.
Wild!
Blab. On to New Business.
Two candidate Helenisms from
a recent NPR report on
DARPA. First, this one -- which
I'm sure is a Helenism,
but I'm unsure on the second constituent
phrase:
It really is a pretty fertile
melting ground.
+ ... melting
pot.
+ ... fertile
ground [?].
And later, this one:
... in part through constant
churnover
+ ... turnover
+ ... churn
{inw}
What does that first one mean? Is the image that lots of stuff goes there
and grows?
The second one is quite funny, and we like it a lot, but we have arbitrarily
disallowed single-word Helenisms. (How rude of us!) So we can't help you
there.
Blab. One of our fashion-conscious readers seeks to help us avoid
the apparently terrible faux pas of wearing our sweater over our
shoulders.
i tie my sweater around my
waist
Hmm! We started tying ours over our shoulders when someone said we looked
like a geek with it tied around our waist. We just can't win!
Blab. Fanning our fashion fire, a reader suggests something else
to wear on our shoulders.
Jesus
Wig Set. 100% Flame Retardant.
How confusing! Wouldn't that have been more useful to Joan of Arc?
Blab. Testing the limits of our disdain for blind links are these
two readers.
hermie
Hermit crab supplies? We love the Web! Now we know just where to
go to buy shells
for our little crabbie friends before
we go on vacation.
OMG
Have you seen the new J. Lo / Affleck movie? If not, better hurry.
[T]he Jennifer Lopez-Ben
Affleck bomb "Gigli" slid a provisional nine places to No. 17 after earning
just $640,000 -- a huge 82 percent slide from its opening weekend. The
$55 million film's 10-day total rose to $5.6 million. Final data will be
released on Monday.
10% in 10 days? Gotta be a record.
Blab. On that same ragged edge, a reader points us at the ...
Journal
of Manly Arts
Weirdly, they're serious. It is, or at least appears to be, the ...
Journal of Manly Arts:
European and Colonial Combatives,
1776 - 1914
A special section of the Journal
of Western Martial Art
You know, around work, Dave
and Ian and we keep talking about
how cool it would be to build a Web site that was the universally known
authoritative reference on something that was entirely false. We wonder
if these folks have beaten us to it.
 Plop.
We are going to England soon. We are speaking at a conference, and visiting
London just for fun. We arranged this trip several weeks ago. When we arranged
places to stay in London, we decided that we didn't need air conditioning,
even in August, because, well, it's London after all.
Now all
hell's broken loose in that part of the world, and temperatures in
foggy London are in the 80s and 90s (and
above!) for the foreseeable future. We are so doomed.
Plop. Do you remember why the U.S. went to war with Iraq? If
so, prepare to be surprised.
The new information indicates
a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates
-- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's
nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent
in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration
advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White
House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence
in information upon which it had previously relied.
We think of it as a failure of the educational system to teach critical
thinking. Or just thinking.
Plurp. A fortune cookie that we opened by mistake last night.
A way out of your a financial
mess is discovered as if by magic!
We apologize to Gray Davis, for whom it was so obviously intended.
Plurp. Gaming history is about to be made. In one
way or another.
Twenty-one years might seem
a long time to wait for a game sequel, but not if you're Disney.
Buena Vista Games, the video-game
division of the entertainment giant, is bringing back the sci-fi cult classic
"TRON" August 26 as an interactive adventure for Windows-based computers.
Frankly, we are not optimistic. It was modestly cool as a virtual world
20 years ago. But, you know, time has, like, passed, OK?
Yo. We were aware that images are digitally retouched for a variety
of reasons these days. We were particularly aware that images of women
are retouched, presumably because the visual appearance of women is so
important in Western culture. (Or culture in general. We're not sure.)
We were not aware of how
dramatic the changes are. It's really quite
amazing. Go look. Honest.
How do women compete with such visual fictions? (caterina)
Plurp. AOL Time Warner? Possibly!
Plurp. Last night, on the word almost.
It seemed as if he loved
her. It was, without any doubt, as close as he had come. He felt warm when
he held her, and happy when she smiled. But looking in her eyes (or was
it his own, as he examined himself in the morning mirror), he wondered.
Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be
a flame-retardant
financial mess
discovered by magic.
Sunday, August 10, 2003
Plurp.
 |
