A Venn diagram: my next car

The problem with Corvettes is, once you buy one, you become a Corvette Owner.  A lot of people say the same about BMWs, but I like the cars so much I'm willing to let people assume I'm a jackass and learn otherwise later.

But seriously, the candidates for the bullseye position are:  (a) used Hyundai Genesis Coupe, or (b) rather-more-used Infiniti G35.

There are, of course, other circles not pictured:  Reliability, Wife Acceptance Factor, etc.

Realistically Titled Manila Folders

When I was in grad school, my boss had a file folder with "USELESS INFO" written on the tab.  We ridiculed him, but I thought it was a refreshingly honest assessment.  Here are some more - you probably have some like this in your own desk, but with less candid names.

• Solutions for Problems that Don't Exist
• Plans that will Never Get Executed
• Paperwork I Want to Forget About
• Expensive Fantasy Projects
• Time Bombs
• Clear-Headed Visions Nobody Wants to Hear
• Job Security for Some Bureaucrat Somewhere

Do you have any to add?

What do those function keys do?

There's a row of keys on my laptop with little blue symbols on them.  If you hold the blue "Fn" button and press one of these keys, interesting things happen.

Summon Alien Invasion:

Make Laptop Larger than a House:

Raise and Lower the Half Moon:

and lastly, my favorite...
Break Computer:

A typical Facebook profile timeline

2/14/2012:  Engaged in historical revisionism
2/14/2012:  Converted his profile to Timeline
1/8/2012:  Posted a status telling someone to go to hell, which Timeline interpreted as a visit to Hell, Michigan
12/24/2011:  Accidentally typed the name of a porn site into the status posting box instead of the browser search box
11/28/2011:  Posted a picture whose zoomed-and-centered thumbnail looks like an elephant having sex with a tank
10/31/2011:  Was checked in to a gym, a church, two bars, and a strip club on the same day, with the same friends
8/3/2010:  Drunkenly tagged himself in several photos he wasn't in, attaching his name to several women's crotches
2/14/2010:  Looked at his Timeline and contemplated an infinitely self-referential future where everything is recursive
7/22/2009:  Joined a group he's not interested in, to impress a girl he met at a party the night before, who had given him a fake phone number, which he never called
6/11/2009:  Was tagged in a status whose first words were "Hey assholes..."
2/4/2009:  Posted a link, which is now broken, to an argument, which is long forgotten, over an event which was predicted but never actually happened
5/28/2008:  Posted a status update excitedly declaring that he was out drinking, which Facebook geotagged at his mother's house
1/1/2008:  Wished someone a happy birthday on the fake birthdate that they typed in when they opened their account
10/6/2008:  Publically acknowledged friendship with several dozen high school classmates he doesn't remember, including several who don't remember him, including two who attended a school of the same name in another state
9/27/2008:  Joined Facebook
9/26/2008:  Left AOL

Former Cell Phone Alert Panic Syndrome

BE-DOOT BE-DOOT.  BE-DOOT BE-DOOT.  That's the default alert sound for one of my old cell phones or PDAs - probably the Palm or iPod Touch.  I heard it while I was walking around on a different floor of my office today and I momentarily freaked out.  What appointment was I missing???

I get a strange nostalgia when I hear the noises of electronic devices that I don't use anymore.

See also:  phantom cell phone vibrate syndrome.

Fonts and their meanings

Much has been said about the need for a "sarcasm font". What does a font tell you about the tone of what's written in it, or the personality that chose it?  Here's a pictorial guide.

Comic Sans:

Old English:

Copperplate:  (note - copperplate is the font on my personal card.)

Courier:

Harlow Solid Italic:

Papyrus:  (my company used to have a safety poster about forklifts written in this font.  really.) 

Showcard Gothic:

Stencil:

Do you have any to add?

How did they know???

I regularly caused consternation among the nuns at my Catholic grade school.  During one religion class, we were being taught what "AD" and "BC" meant for calendar dates.  I raised my hand and asked how the people back then knew what to call it.  The teacher reiterated, "it's After Death and Before Christ, Jeffrey.  Now moving on..."  And I said:  no, no, back in 100 BC, how did they know to count the years backwards?  Did they know Christ was going to show up in 100 years??

The class erupted, of course.  This was a head-scratcher.  Nobody really had the presence of mind to tell me that they probably called the years something else back then.  I guess it's hard to see out of such an ingrained way of looking at things.

And now I have my answer:  over at The Renaissance Mathematicus, thonyc tells us that the use of "AD" started around the year 525, and "BC" came into use in the 1600s.  Apparently beforehand, they had numbered the years by the reigns of the popes.

And that's your history lesson for the day.

A Restaurant Menu in Hell, Michigan

Meatball with Sauce of Reduced Circumstances
Existentially Sharp Knife
Squid Ink Immersion of Diner
Steak Bordelaise with Marrow Transplant
Pesto Won't Leave You Alone-o
All The Thyme In The World
Chili Con Carny
Pollo en a Dobro

Comparative symbolism of wealth displays: Pharaonic and Gangsta cultures

Let's begin with contemporary Gangsta culture, where displays of wealth and power involve US currency, weapons, and gestures related to gang membership:

http://www.demotivationalposters1.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/17-dollars-now-thats-gangsta-poster.jpg

The Pharaohs, in contrast, saved their best bragging for after they were dead:

Those hieroglyphs are Egyptian for "one time, my dad donated 309,950 sacks of grain to this one temple.  He was standing next to some gods when they drew this."  And that, my friends, is badass.

Inspired by this.

The Flaming Cheeseburger Incident

Here's another attempt at short fiction.  Actually, it is not all fiction.  More about that later.

The lab had its share of accidents - moreso than the one down the hall, with the robots handling plutonium behind lead glass.  Those guys really had to dot their i's and cross their t's, but nobody cared too much about us diddling around with fuel injectors.  Well, not nobody.  See, in silhouette, the fuel injectors look a lot like rifle shells.  One of my Middle Eastern colleagues had a tiresome discussion with the TSA when he forgot to take them out of his bag before he went to the airport.

The fuel injectors did have a sinister look to them.  They were a glossy, featureless smoky near-black color - if I could get a car painted that color, well, that would be gangsta.  And you couldn't scratch these fuel injectors with anything.  That miracle coating was what we were all working on.

The thing we used to make the coating was basically a radio transmitter inside a fat drum up on a table.  The lab administrator came by one day (Lord knows why; he's a physicist, he must have been slumming to check out what us engineers were doing) and missed an important call on his cell phone.  He told us the call was about his car getting stolen, but my theory is that his wife had called him home for a nooner and that was why he was so pissed off.  Anyway, that was the "a-ha" moment when we realized why we all complained about our cell phones at work - the coater was trashing all reception for a half a mile around.

It was picturesque.  Even the administrator was impressed by the purple glow of the plasma inside the drum, which you could see through a glass porthole.  We'd pump out all the air, pump in a chemical called silane, then fire up the radio antenna.  It was so powerful in there, it lit the silane into a plasma which then condensed onto our fuel injectors.  Cormac (the "rogue with the brogue" we called him, privately) ran the thing most of the time, and one day he decided to roll a chair into the crowded little lab and read his hometown newspaper.  For weeks afterwards his pallid complexion was set off by a deep tan on one side of his face.  Sort of like a human half moon.  Apparently there was some ultraviolet coming along for a ride with that radiant violet.

Then there was the time the firemen came.  Silane, you see, is pyrophoric.  The gas burns on contact with air.  Remember how I said we pumped all the air out of the drum before we filled it with silane?  Well, one time we didn't.  It wasn't Cormac on duty that day, but whoever it was, they should have seen the flames through the porthole.  The air in the drum must have been used up pretty quickly, but eventually enough silane was pushed in that the pressure was higher than the air pressure in the lab.  And the silane began to leak out.  Fingers of orange flame shot outwards in every direction from between the two big beige steel pucks.  The fire alarm went off.  Cormac skidded into the room and all he could say was "CHAYSBAIRGER?"

The firemen knew what to do in the event of a nuclear robot running amok, but the flaming cheeseburger wasn't covered in their standard operating procedures.  They opened the drum.

They were commended for it, later, as were we all.  Not for valor though - as we were picking through the rubble, somebody noticed that the cieling tiles had an odd sparkle along with their shiny smoky near-black glaze.  The place had been built in the days when asbestos was considered a wonder material and it was put everywhere, so maybe that mineral catalyzed the formation of the new compound.  I don't know how it happened, but it was basically diamonds.  We all got rich for burning the lab down.  Especially the firemen.

A short catalog of purists

• Vodka martini hater
• Vinyl LP nut
• "Everything is better in Europe" dude
• That one guy who refuses to buy a car with a spoiler unless the car needs it for downforce at 150mph

Unnecessary things

Directions on boxes of macaroni and cheese
Standard operating procedures for toilet paper
Warning labels on handguns
Meetings about meetings about meetings
Ingredients on bottled water
Use and care tags on babies
User reviews and star ratings for continents
Photos of knees and fingertips
Instructions for toothpicks

Why is absurdity my favorite form of humor?

For example, this post on 3/15/10 on Texts From Last Night:

(301): the majority of my texts from you are at 3 AM & consist of either "I'm drunk", "you're asian", or "bratwurst".

I laughed my ass off when I read that.  Bratwurst non sequitur.

I first saved this post as a draft at least a year ago, but I didn't have anything to put in the body of the damn thing.  I figured if I left it there, I'd see it whenever I scanned through the drafts, and eventually I'd think of some kind of answer to the question.  Finally I have one:  absurd humor is like play. 

A couple weeks ago I asked about play at a "Thinkrs & Drinkrs" gathering.  My question was:  "How do you play?  Alone or with others?  Physically or mentally?"  I expected to hear about musical instruments and sports, but the question had a life of its own.  One of the most useful responses was John Heaney's:  that he doesn't set aside time to play, rather, he's constantly playing by choosing to improvise the way he gets routine tasks done.  Drive a different route to work, see different buildings, think of new possibilities.  Innovation happens when you think about the problem in front of you in a new way because you were exposed to something totally unrelated.  So a functional definition of play is that it's an activity that seeks to provide these mental collisions between unrelated thoughts.  This is very much in line with the Stephen Nachmanovitch post I quoted a long time ago about its importance in science.

Absurd humor is also a collision of unrelated thoughts.  I'm drunk, you're asian, bratwurst.  The outcome is laughter instead of innovation, but the mechanism is the same.  It jiggles the brain the same way a flash of insight does.  And I'm addicted to that.

How to: annoy rock musicians

via Allmusic:  

Def Leppard’s [lead singer] Joe Elliott will release his own beer, which will be bottled by Dublin’s Porterhouse Brewing Company and served in their bars. Elliott said, “Over the years I’ve noticed a lot of musicians putting their names to a variety of wines etc which, as nice as a glass of red or white is, well, it’s not very rock and roll is it?!”  Source.

Subtext:  "Please do not throw the bottles at my head while I'm on stage."

A perpetual fuddle

The World Atlas of Wine contains this gem noting that for much of recorded history, wine was the only liquid that was always safe to drink:

Europe drank wine on a scale it is difficult to conceive of; our ancestors must have been in a perpetual fuddle. 

Johnson and Robinson go on to say that with the later inventions of beer and tea, wine finally had some competition.  And that's all fine information about the history of wine, but today we have a word for someone who gets all their liquid in the form of wine:  an alcoholic.

Were our ancestors used to a constantly elevated BAC?  Sure.  Did it affect their productivity?  I would guess that it did.  I can't see how it couldn't have.  Which brings me to my point:

Did the invention of purified municipal water supplies lead to the acceleration of technology that characterizes the modern age?  After millenia of inebriation, did western society have a nice greasy lunch and get to work one Monday?

Jared Diamond would say no, no, it had everything to do with Europe's grains and large mammals and so on, but I prefer my theory.

Easily overused but don't throw them away

Things I own that I would like to put in a box and store in my attic:

• My righeous indignation
• My territorialism
• My libido

The Peter Principle of multitasking

The Peter Principle states that in a hierarchy, individuals are periodically promoted as long as they continue to perform adequately. When they stop, they are said to have risen to their level of incompetence.

A corollary for multitasking: an individual performing all their tasks adequately will add tasks until they can no longer do any of them well. This miserable state is called being "busy".

At this point I could pontificate about quiet, but I'll just say this: busy kills. Hang up and drive, folks.

The tangent of a relationship

The trigonometric tangent is defined as:I hereby define the tangent of a relationship as the time spent together vertical divided by the time spent together horizontal.

Table I. Tangents of common relationship types.

Theta_____Relationship
90 deg.___Friend, coworker, etc.
45 deg.___Friend with benefits
30 deg.___Spouse, significant other
0 deg.____Booty call you can't stand

Amusing etymology:

1590s, "meeting at a point without intersecting," from L. tangentem (nom. tangens), prp. of tangere "to touch," from PIE base *tag- "to touch, to handle" (cf. L. tactus "touch," Gk. tetagon "having seized," O.E. þaccian "stroke, strike gently"). First used by Dan. mathematician Thomas Fincke in "Geomietria Rotundi" (1583).

Modern Koans

Modern pseudo-koans to use when you need to distract someone:

1. How wide is a mountain?
2. What emoticon would best represent schadenfreude?
3. What is the minimum number of PowerPoint slides necessary to convey the entire content of the Bible?
4. How could you make coffee using only a toaster, the Chicago Tribune, and a gift certificate to Home Depot?
5. If Apple Computer were to hang a plaque in your honor in their lobby, what would it say?
6. What is the secret ingredient in goulash?
7. When you thump a perfectly ripe muskmelon, what musical note does it make?
8. What television program would be most likely to air a quote from Voltaire--with attribution?
9. What are the lyrics to "Copacabana?"

That's not good.

I'm curating a little flickr photoset of found images I've tagged "not good". In a nutshell:

A collection of internet photos that made me say, "ouch", or "someone's having a bad day", or just "that's not good".

They're not my photos; I don't mean to make any judgements about the events depicted; I can't even say they're not photoshopped. This is just part of my effort to be more conscious and active while I'm cruising the web. Enjoy.