Hey, what happened to acronyms all of a sudden? SAT no longer stands for anything, we are informed. Neither does AT&T, KFC, or AARP. Their meanings are obsolete, but their organizations keep using them. The whole thing is vaguely Orwellian.
Good acronyms are useful because they're simple and memorable. But for every perfect flower (BASIC = Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) there's a misbegotten weed (USA PATRIOT = Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism).
Deeper in the muck are bureaucracy-spawned monsters like ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC, Navy-speak for "Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command."
And only the Soviet Union could have produced this:
NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT
It stands for "The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete, and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR."
Even proper abbreviations can have sadly unintended meanings. In 1945 Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, founded the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, or ALAS. They stressed the first syllable, understandably.
And I think the American Symphony Orchestra League must be very careful in training its receptionists. You can't have them saying, "Good morning, ASOL."
|W|P|110649618904918722|W|P|WTF?|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAt DigiBless "your file, website, or message is blessed using our consecrated server and algorithm, to protect them from evil and touch them with the power and glory of Jesus Christ."
|W|P|110711636226190646|W|P|Digibless|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA guy walks into a store and says, "Excuse me, I'd like to buy a guitar pick and some strings."
The clerk looks at him uncomprehendingly. "Pardon?"
"I'd like a guitar pick, please, and some strings."
The clerk thinks for a moment and says, "You're a drummer, aren't you?"
"Yeah! How did you know?"
"This is a travel agency."
|W|P|110714264679951985|W|P|Rimshot|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Upload your own photo into this face transformer and you can change your age, race, or sex, or see yourself as a Modigliani, Botticelli, or El Greco, or even as manga. (This Mona Lisa is half chimpanzee.)
The software was developed by Bernard Tiddeman and David Perrett of Scotland's University of St. Andrews. Earlier this month they estimated how Elvis Presley might have looked on his 70th birthday, and they've also rendered John Lennon at 64 and morphing videos of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.
Tiddeman says, "This technology was designed to help psychologists understand how our brains interpret faces, an immensely important social function, helping us to recognize friends, choose a mate, or read people's emotions." They're also using it to plan facial surgery and to help find wanted and missing persons.
Why do we recognize each other by the fronts of our heads? Because hair and clothing change too much, and because people's hands are too similar. Studies involving prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, imply that there may be a specific face perception system in the brain.
Even stranger is Capgras delusion, in which you recognize the faces but lose the emotional response to them, which makes it seem as though your friends and family are being replaced by impostors. Creepy.
|W|P|110696338982735674|W|P|St. Andrews Face Transformer|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDead or Alive settles bar bets and morbid curiosity. Brooke Astor is still alive at 102, and Richie Valens was only 17 when his plane went down.
The data seem pretty accurate, overall, even the strange cases. Jimmy Hoffa is listed as "missing"; Deep Throat and D.B. Cooper are "unknown." Fifty-seven people have died in the last six months. How on earth do they keep this thing up to date?
|W|P|110704318133529244|W|P|Dead or Alive?|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1931, George Bernard Shaw wired Winston Churchill: "Am reserving two tickets for you on opening night of my new play. Come bring a friend—if you have one."
Churchill wired back: "Impossible for me to attend first performance. Would like to attend second night—if there is one."
|W|P|110698615670464225|W|P|Churchill Anecdote #7|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Zoom in far enough on this giant photo of Delft and you'll see a random guy giving you the finger. Wow, the clarity!
|W|P|110668538448693954|W|P|High-Resolution Bird|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Buffalo Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America brilliantly summarizes Dick Cheney's character:
The kind of guy who starts talking cannibalism the minute he steps on the lifeboat.
Exactly.
|W|P|110693083576700530|W|P|Cheney's Character|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The upshot of all this is that Mothra is going to have to add a lot of tracheal tubes to maintain a sufficient oxygen supply. Of course, the more of its volume that is tracheal tubes, the less is biomass that needs oxygen, but this implies that although Mothra may be heavy (because it's big), its density is going to be very low—about the same as your average cotton ball."
Zoologist Michael LaBarbera deconstructs classic monster movies at The Biology of B-Movie Monsters.
|W|P|110691687658498685|W|P|Creature Physics|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."—Eleanor Roosevelt
|W|P|110668163952359778|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Gone And Forgotten honors great moments in bad comics.
|W|P|110411955503016583|W|P|Gone And Forgotten|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCats and their owners:
- Hodge: Samuel Johnson, British writer and lexicographer
- Selima: Horace Walpole, British writer and historian
- Langbourne: Jeremy Bentham, British writer, reformer, and philosopher
- Old Foss: Edward Lear, British poet and humorist
- Siam: Rutherford B. Hayes, American president
- Appolinaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskaite, Buffalo Bill: Mark Twain, American author
- Bismarck: Florence Nightingale, British nurse
- Cobby: Thomas Hardy, British writer
- Chess, Checkmate: Alexander Alekhine, Russian-French chess player
- Taki: Raymond Chandler, American novelist
- Jellylorum, George Pushdragon: T.S. Eliot, American-born British critic and writer
- Blackie, Jock, Nelson, Tango: Winston Churchill, British politician and writer
- Beppo: Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian writer
- Gujarat: John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-born American economist, writer, and diplomat
- Fuckchop: Trent Reznor, leader, Nine Inch Nails
"The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement," wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1779. "Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions."
I'm not so sure. Franklin says the royal game fosters foresight, circumspection, caution, and optimism, but he's really writing metaphorically. It's not clear whether playing chess offers mental training in skills that can be used elsewhere.
In 1894, Alfred Binet found that chess masters had unusually good visual memory, and in the 1960s Adriaan de Groot noted strong problem-solving ability in good players. But:
- Correlation ain't causation. Chess attracts smart people, it doesn't necessarily make people smart.
- Like math and music, chess talent is inborn, at least sometimes. I once lost a tournament game to a 10-year-old prodigy. He was clearly stronger, despite my experience and study.
- If anything, chess seems to foster skill in visual memory. That's useful, but not universally so.
The U.S. Chess Federation offers a research bibliography claiming that chess improves kids' academic performance. But I think that's largely a wedge to get chess into the schools; I used to work with music educators who made the same claim.
I may start playing again, but only for the game. "Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more," wrote George Steiner. "As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise."
|W|P|110057248704611310|W|P|Chess as Mental Training|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLittle-used measurements:
- 1.2096 seconds ≈ 1 microfortnight
- π seconds ≈ 1 nanocentury
- 3.085 centimeters ≈ 1 attoparsec
- 2 mm square ≈ 1 nanoacre
- 2.263348517438173216473 millimeters ≈ 1 potrzebie (the thickness of MAD magazine issue 23)
- 20 terabytes ≈ 1 Library of Congress
After Jurassic Park came out, some paleontologists started measuring Tyrannosaurus rex food consumption in lawyers. If the average attorney weighs 150 pounds, they figure, a warm-blooded T. rex would eat 292 lawyers a year. A cold-blooded one would eat 73. I guess that means they were cold-blooded; there's certainly no shortage of lawyers today.
|W|P|110668701390539754|W|P|Fanciful Units of Measure|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I have only one superstition. I touch all the bases when I hit a home run."—Babe Ruth
|W|P|110683176476733643|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The smallest park in the world is Mill Ends Park in Portland, Oregon. You're looking at it: 452 square inches, barely two feet across. The nearby Forest Park is 60 million times as big.
Mill Ends started in 1948, when Oregon Journal journalist Dick Fagan noticed a forgotten hole outside his office on Front Street. He planted flowers and began to write a weekly column about goings-on there, including "the only leprechaun colony west of Ireland."
When Fagan died in 1969, Portland took up the tradition, dedicating Mill Ends as an official city park in 1976. Today it has a swimming pool for butterflies (with diving board), a miniature Ferris wheel, and statues, and it hosts snail races, weddings, and regular rose plantings.
Just goes to show, you don't need a large lot if the location's good.
|W|P|110668548974724159|W|P|Mill Ends Park|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I once was waiting for an elevator and when the doors opened, there was a baby there on the floor of the elevator in the car seat. Instead of taking the baby out, I instead waited for the doors to close and take the baby to another floor."
Group Hug lists 167,394 anonymous confessions.
|W|P|110674400452068066|W|P|Group Hug|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comClarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Benford's Corollary: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Raymond's Second Law: Any sufficiently advanced system of magic would be indistinguishable from a technology.
Sterling's Corollary: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
Langford's application to science fiction: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device.
|W|P|110668687123023263|W|P|Clarke's Law|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Who says atheists don't have a sense of humor? The Invisible Pink Unicorn ("blessed be her holy hooves") was "revealed to" the Usenet newsgroup alt.atheism in 1990.
Since then, she's acquired all the trappings of a real deity: gospels ("according to St. Sascha"), revelations (to "St. Bryce the Long-Winded"), relics (the Holy Sock of Bob), scripture, and historic artworks.
Because she's invisible, it's impossible to prove she does not exist. "The Invisible Pink Unicorn is a being of great spiritual power," say the faithful. "We know this because she is capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that she is pink; we logically know that she is invisible because we can't see her."
Followers debate her attributes, but it's generally agreed that she prefers pineapple and ham pizza to pepperoni and mushroom, which is said to be eaten only by followers of the Purple Oyster of Doom. The IPU also "raptures" socks from laundry as a sign of favor.
Is this harmless fun or awful blasphemy? It's getting hard to care. As the French writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote, "If there is a God, atheism must seem to him as less of an insult than religion."
|W|P|110660869586659718|W|P|Invisible Pink Unicorn|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA newlywed couple, a blind man, an Iranian mullah, a chicken, a used car dealer, Judith Regan, a proctologist, and a Hollywood starlet, along with a nun, a man who just received a gorilla brain transplant, two Hassidic Jews, a stuttering hotel clerk, and a can of Spam are riding in a compact car.
Suddenly, they hear a siren and a state trooper motions the vehicle to pull over. "License and registration," says the cop. "You've exceeded the legal character limit in this joke."
|W|P|110667038462410930|W|P|Meta-Joke|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Don't be humble. You're not that great."—Golda Meir
|W|P|110643804212257681|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
YuppiePunk's Serial Killer Art Review presents the jailhouse compositions of 14 career murderers.
This piece is the work of Henry Lee Lucas, whose pathetic life was dramatized in the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Born to a legless alcoholic and a violent prostitute who shot his pony and beat him into a coma, Lucas lost an eye and experimented with bestiality as a teenager before stabbing his mom and launching a one-man crime wave.
He eventually confessed to 3,000 murders; if that's true, he killed someone every day between 1975 and 1983. Kind of explains why he didn't paint still lifes.
If you're into this stuff, check out John Douglas' disturbing book Mindhunter. A former FBI profiler, Douglas inspired Scott Glenn's character in The Silence of the Lambs.
After studying sociopaths for 25 years, Douglas could examine a crime scene and give an uncannily accurate description of the killer: he has a speech impediment, he drives a red Volkswagen Beetle, he owns a German shepherd, he lives with sisters. And he'd be right. That's one talent I don't envy.
|W|P|110653344609953090|W|P|Serial Killer Art Review|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1610, Ludolph van Ceulen died of exhaustion after deriving 35 decimal digits of pi.
They're engraved on his tombstone.
|W|P|110547993835008335|W|P|Irrational Slumber|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLondon, 7 January 1918
Never saw it or heard about it until your letter came. It is no use: I can't be sympathetic; these things simply make me furious. I want to swear. I do swear. Killed just because people are blasted fools. A chaplain too, to say nice things about it. It is not his business to say nice things about it, but to shout that the "voice of thy son's blood crieth unto God from the ground."
No, don't show me the letter. But I should very much like to have a nice talk with that dear Chaplain, that sweet sky-pilot, that ...
No use going on like this, Stella. Wait for a week, and then I shall be very clever and broadminded again and have forgotten all about this. I shall be quite as nice as the Chaplain.
Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN.
And oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dearest!
—Letter of George Bernard Shaw to Mrs. Patrick Campbell on the death of her son, killed in action in World War I
|W|P|110643843643443090|W|P|Bernard Shaw on War|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Create your own Windows error messages with Atom Smasher's new utility.
|W|P|110648157752402924|W|P|Error Message Generator|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Rx.com is no longer filling prescriptions."
The Museum of E-Failure collects the farewell pages of 900 failed dot-coms. Bring flowers.
|W|P|110644949196909339|W|P|The Museum of E-Failure|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comRules, Mt. Holyoke College, 1837:
- No young lady shall become a member of Mt. Holyoke Seminary who cannot kindle a fire, mash potatoes, and repeat the multiplication table and at least two-thirds of the shorter catechism.
- Every member of the school shall walk a mile a day unless a freshet, earthquake, or some other calamity prevent.
- No young lady shall devote more than an hour a day to miscellaneous reading.
- No young lady is expected to have gentlemen acquaintances unless they are returned missionaries or agents of benevolent societies.
If there's a master's cup for science-fiction visionaries, it might actually belong to Herman Hesse. In a late novel, the German author seemed to imagine the World Wide Web, and its kaleidoscopic hyperlinks, fifty years before it existed.
Das Glasperlenspiel, which won the Nobel Prize in 1946, centers on "the Glass Bead Game," in which players combine the symbols of world cultures into new and insightful combinations. Here's his description of the game—see if this doesn't sound like the Web:
"The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe."
Hesse never quite explains how the game is played, which has set a lot of modern designers working on playable variants. The most popular is Charles Cameron's HipBone Game (here's an example of a board game, but Cameron's working on a web-based version). This bears watching: The web is constantly evolving, and perhaps Hesse's vision is still ahead of us.
|W|P|110633453849039097|W|P|The Glass Bead Game|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion."—Abraham Lincoln
|W|P|110540253893528372|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe This Page Intentionally Left Blank Project "offers Internet wanderers a place of quietness and simplicity on the overcrowded World Wide Web."
|W|P|110411875815807655|W|P|" "|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I think Jorge Luis Borges' fiction is growing on me. I still find the stories don't work well as stories, but the images behind them—labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, and infinity—are really compelling. Like M.C. Escher, he conveys a mathematical sensibility without ever invoking math.
One story, "The Library of Babel," flirts enough with combinatorics and topology to earn a spot in Alex Kasman's Mathematical Fiction database. Kasman, a math professor at South Carolina's College of Charleston, has collected 469 novels, stories, plays, and scripts touching everything from number theory to trigonometry.
Twenty-three of these works are available for free online, from Poe's "The Purloined Letter" to Cory Doctorow's "The Rapture of the Nerds." "Mathematicians should be interested in these works of 'mathematical fiction' even if we do not enjoy them," Kasman writes, "because they both affect and reflect the non-mathematician's view of this subject."
One thing I'm coming to like about Borges is that he wrote only stories, essays, and poems, no longer works. I suppose that's in keeping with their dreamlike quality, but I also appreciate it as a reader. Short is good.
|W|P|110622973377723317|W|P|Borges and Mathematical Fiction|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Creationist Fossil Shop: "Selling Unancient Artifacts of Life's Not Evolving"
|W|P|110632920135661689|W|P|On the Fifth Day ...|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSlovenian mathematician Andrej Bauer's Random Art program converts phrases into art—some of it stunningly good, and some even on display at a Ljubljana internet cafe.
You can submit your own phrase, if you like, though Bauer warns that there's no telling how it will turn out. Past visitors have tried "Bon Jovi", "Malignant Brain Cancer", "The Bible Is Fiction", and "Homer Simpson", with, ah, mixed results. Vote for your favorite.
|W|P|110588952452722348|W|P|I Know What I Like|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The Greeks believed diamonds were tears of the gods. The Romans thought they were splinters of fallen stars. Today, "Diamonds are a con, pure and simple."
So says Cecil Adams, and as usual, he's right. Over the last 60 years South Africa's De Beers diamond cartel has manipulated emotions, markets and social conventions to make a fortune out of thin air. And you may well be one of their victims.
De Beers didn't invent the diamond engagement ring—that goes back to 1477—but it was their 1938 marketing campaign that established it in the popular consciousness as the final symbol of true love.
The company's PR agency, N.W. Ayer, created a new form of advertising, with no brand name, just the idea of "the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond." They planted romantic stories in movies and magazines; they paid fashion designers to promote the trend; they even got the English royal family to promote it.
Meanwhile, the slogan "A Diamond Is Forever" discouraged women from selling diamonds or from buying them secondhand from other women. With no secondary market, the cartel controlled the price, which explains why it varies widely, unlike gold's. De Beers focused on controlling supply, too, limiting production, cutting off competition and buying up surplus gems.
It worked. Worldwide diamond sales rose from $100,000 in 1932 to $2.1 billion in 1979, all on the strength of a manufactured emotional impulse. Japan even adopted them as a Western status symbol—today it's the second largest market for retail diamonds.
It's De Beers that tells you to spend two months' salary on an engagement ring, and it's probably De Beers who's selling it to you. "The value of diamonds rests on a number of assiduously cultivated myths," write David Pallister, Sarah Stewart and Ian Lepper in the book South Africa Inc. "One is that diamonds are special."
That's why my wife wears a sapphire.
|W|P|110618204051877750|W|P|A Girl's Best Fiend|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Is nine squared and not a bit more.
The Covers Project is a big database of cover tunes—songs recorded by bands other than the original artist. The idea is to create "cover chains," sort of like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or UVA's Star Links:
- The Beatles covered "I Wanna Be Your Man" by the Rolling Stones
- The Rolling Stones covered "Come On" by Chuck Berry
- Chuck Berry covered "Rip It Up" by Little Richard
- Little Richard covered "I Saw Her Standing There" by the Beatles
The database is actually pretty comprehensive, and useful in its own right. I had no idea that Elvis Costello had covered the Shirelles ...
|W|P|110596737530274530|W|P|Play It Again, RAM|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
|W|P|Unfortunately, I'm afraid that "I Wanna Be Your Man" was actually a Lennon-McCartney composition, putting the Beatles' version's categorization as a true cover in doubt. The Beatles provided the Rolling Stones with this song, which became the Rolling Stones' first chart hit.
Greg Ross|W|P|You're right. They still show it as a cover in the database -- I'll send them a note.
I've been sleeping badly this winter. I'm dead tired in the evening, but I wake up unaccountably at 3 a.m. I'm not positive what the reason is, but I'm going to blame daylight saving time.
I had to do some research even to understand why we follow this barbaric practice. Some people think farmers are somehow to blame, but farmers actually hate DST, because farm animals, pretty sensibly, don't observe it.
The real point is supposed to be that when the days are long we shift an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening. That way, there's still plenty of daylight after work, so everyone uses less light, TVs, VCRs, etc., which together use 25 percent of our energy. In the winter, pitch-black mornings start to take their own toll, so we shift the clocks back again.
That's the idea, but it doesn't make sense. I may use less light if the sun's up, but I'll still be watching Scrubs. And now I'll have my A/C on. I guess they figure I might go out and play football instead, but is that really happening? Two-thirds of this country is overweight.
Worse, the time change zonks people out. This country loses $56 billion a year to sleepiness, plus 24,000 deaths, 2.5 million disabling injuries and 52 million work days. Sleep deficits contributed to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Challenger disaster, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. We're actually sleeping 2 hours less each night because of Edison's light bulb.
So what's the answer? Just drop it. Arizona, Hawaii, and most of Indiana stay on standard time year round. And having lived in Indiana, I can tell you it's wonderful.
In 1947, the magnificently crotchety Robertson Davies wrote: "I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." Hear, hear.
|W|P|110584237066439398|W|P|Photon Finish|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSt. Ambrose is the patron saint of beekeepers.
|W|P|109996555827622810|W|P|Ow!|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I've had eighteen straight whiskeys; I think that's a record."—Dylan Thomas' last words
|W|P|110571234162825607|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I've noticed that an impressive feat is often just the product of time and care. The Taj Mahal is immensely impressive, and learning that it took 23 years to build somehow doesn't diminish that. If anything, it amplifies it. Rousseau wrote, "Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet."
That applies to pasteboard as well as marble. Bryan Berg builds houses of cards—mansions of cards—and his Cardstacker Gallery has some astounding photos, including a record-breaking 25-foot tower.
When the Christian Science Monitor asked whether he could build a 100-foot tower, he said, "Sure. But it's going to take a while."
"I have to look twice before I move," he says. "I basically go into slow motion."
(A 100-foot tower could actually be dangerous. The 25-footer took more than 1,500 decks—about 250 pounds—of cards. "With something that big," Berg says, "if it fell and you were near it, you'd run the risk of being buried.")
From his FAQ:
Do you shake?
Yep.
Do you ever get paper cuts?
Nope.
Do you drink coffee?
Yep.
Shouldn't you have been a brain surgeon?
Yep.
Did your mom ever tell you to stop?
Nope.
Do casinos give you cards?
Nope.
Do you ever sneeze? Does it knock them down?
Yep. Nope.
Berg teaches architecture at Iowa State University, but he says his training didn't help with the cards. Vice versa, actually: "I would even say that the majority of what I know about the structural behavior of real buildings and building materials came from my experiences building with cards." And putting in the time.
|W|P|110520480411461687|W|P|Well Suited|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCost of War tots up the cost of the, um, you know.
|W|P|110599138589513565|W|P|All Guns, No Butter|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
My horoscope today on astro.com says "this is a good day for a short recreational trip to indulge your desire for beautiful surroundings," "you should be able to negotiate in business to your advantage," and "anything that you buy today should prove to be a worthwhile investment."
Now, let's think about that. The current world population is about 6.5 billion, and a twelfth of us are Pisces. Can 540 million people all negotiate favorable business deals on the same day?
Astrologers would say no, those general predictions are worthless, what really counts is a personal reading. Okay, then astrologers should be able to match a person's birth data with a personalized questionnaire, right? Well, no: A 1994 experiment showed they might as well flip coins.
Even if you accept astrology's tenets, its reasoning doesn't make sense. For one thing, the stars are drifting. Due to the precession of Earth's axis, the stars have moved by 24 degrees during the last 2,000 years. Following the old charts, astrologers are now placing planets in the wrong signs.
For another, that 2,000-year starting point is arbitrary. The heavens change all the time. Four thousand years ago Taurus was the constellation of the vernal equinox. Six thousand years ago it was Gemini.
Anyway, if you're into this stuff, the rather creepy Horoscopes of Our Time lists precise birth dates and times of various famous people, so you can practice.
|W|P|110584243645191137|W|P|In the Stars|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHow many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?
"We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that a light bulb works for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your personal relationship with your light bulb (or light source, or non-dark resource) and present it next month at our annual light bulb Sunday service, in which we will explore a number of light bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life, and tinted—all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence."
|W|P|110554385724158492|W|P|Enlightenment|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child—if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender."—W.C. Fields
|W|P|110397927360989493|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Type in any surname and Hamrick Software's free widget will show you how it's distributed across the United States.
This map shows where the Epsteins are. (That's my wife's maiden name. My own name, Ross, is spread boringly across America like a bland, tasteless oleomargarine.) The distribution seems about right—high concentrations in New York and Florida, and practically no one in Montana.
These data are taken from phone books in the 1990s, but you can also use census data back to 1850. You can even generate an animated GIF that shows a tide of Schneiders settling in the Midwest, migrating to California, and then overspreading the country.
It's a neat tool, but it doesn't capture people who rely on cell phones, or who have unlisted numbers. And it includes only the 50,000 most common names in the U.S. Search for Schwarzenegger and you'll come up empty.
|W|P|110418548754238682|W|P|State and Main|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYe gods. One trip to the Museum of Food Anomalies and you'll never eat Honey Combs again.
|W|P|110520495906455202|W|P|"I Still Ate It"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This is just outrageously, transcendently cool. The first images and sounds are arriving from the Huygens probe that landed on Titan yesterday.
Saturn's moon is one of the few places in the solar system that might harbor life. No data yet on that. (It would be ironic if the probe introduced life there. Hmm. I'm sure some smart person has thought of that.)
Sounds and images from the European Space Agency are here; amateur mosaics, stereo images, and animations are here. Much more to come. This Onion headline best sums up my personal feeling.
As usual, the blogosphere is miles ahead of traditional media in grokking what's really important. In terms of human history, this is already the most significant thing that'll happen this year. (Who remembers the politics of 1492?) But most news reports I've seen include it as a colorful closer, or drop it altogether.
This proves two things. First, we don't need humans to explore space. Scrap the shuttle, scrap the space station. The Mars rovers are still going strong nine months after they were expected to fail. But, second, the lack of media coverage for Titan shows that people won't find space exploration dramatic unless the explorers are human. And no interest = no funding, despite the success of this mission.
I think the answer is better science education, but maybe that's too ambitious.
|W|P|110582501889214772|W|P|Sirens of Titan|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe stupendously brilliant Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks and Conundrums, with Answers, originally published in 1914, is now available online.
The riddles are pathetic ("What vine does beef grow on? The bo-vine"), but the rest is mostly terrific. One problem: Loyd withheld the solutions to some puzzles, offering a cash prize. He never followed up with the solutions, so they've become stumpers. Here's one, called "The Trader's Profit":
A dealer sold a bicycle for $50, and then bought it back for $40, thereby clearly making $10, as he had the same bicycle back and $10 besides. Now having bought it for $40, he resold it for $45, and made $5 more, or $15 in all.
"But," says a bookkeeper, "the man starts off with a wheel worth $50, and at the end of the second sale has just $55! How then could he make more than $5? You see the selling of the wheel at $50 is a mere exchange, which shows neither profit nor loss, but when he buys at $50 and sells at $45, he makes $5, and that is all there is to it."
"I claim," says an accountant, "that when he sells at $50 and buys back at $40, he has clearly and positively made $10, because he has the same wheel and $10, but when he now sells at $45 he makes that mere exchange referred to, which shows neither profit nor loss, and does not affect his first profit, and has made exactly $10."
"It is a simple transaction, which any scholar in the primary class should be able to figure out mentally, and yet we are confronted by three different answers," Loyd says. "The first shows a profit of $15, such as any bicycle dealer would; while the bookkeeper is clearly able to demonstrate that more than $5 could not be made, and yet the President of the New York Stock Exchange was bold enough to maintain over his own signature that the correct profit should be $10."
I'm thinking the accountant's right, but then I was a journalism major.
|W|P|110544659167330804|W|P|Null and Loyd?|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Determined Luddites can now send telegrams by e-mail.
I suppose this would be a good way to send a ransom note these days—suitably creepy, and no fingerprints.
|W|P|110528112400678327|W|P|This Just In|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."—Harlan Ellison
|W|P|110530596206514941|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."
That's Samuel Johnson, the English critic, poet and essayist. I'm about halfway through his Life, and I'm finding it terrifically readable, even after 200 years. That's partly due to James Boswell, his famously able biographer, but I think it's mostly due to Johnson himself, who manages to be epigrammatic without seeming extravagant (like Oscar Wilde) or pissed off (like Mark Twain).
I first stumbled into Johnson through Frank Lynch's frequent citations in alt.quotations, and then I found Lynch's Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page, which has more than 1,800 quotes:
"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good."
"Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess."
Johnson even squeezed some wit into his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, defining patron, for instance, as "A wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery." (Johnson's not too bitter, though, and the Dictionary is generally just a dictionary. If you want acid by the gallon, see Ambrose Bierce's Cynic's Word Book of 1906 instead. It defines white as "Black.")
All in all, a gold mine worthy of Montaigne. I'll keep reading Boswell for now, and maybe branch out into Johnson's own writing later. But I could be very happy just sticking with the quotations:
"The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in few words."
|W|P|110548334654030313|W|P|A Notable Quotable|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFor the itinerant gregarious insomniac, here's how to say "hello" in more than 800 languages.
|W|P|110412103165491222|W|P|Yeah, Hi|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhere can you see pi expressed to 1 million decimal places?
http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com.
Some questions are pretty easy.
|W|P|110547985851638661|W|P|Pi A La Mode|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
We need some new wonders. The old ones wore out some time ago, as you may have noticed. Of the seven wonders of the ancient world—the Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus, the Temple of Artemis, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria—only the pyramids are left. The hanging gardens may never have existed.
Well, there are lots of wonderful things in the world. Can't we just choose a better list? That depends on who does the choosing. In 1994 the American Society of Civil Engineers took a shot at it and proposed these modern replacements:
- Empire State Building, New York
- Itaipu Dam, Brazil and Paraguay
- CN Tower, Toronto, Canada
- Panama Canal, Panama
- Channel Tunnel, United Kingdom and France
- Delta Works, North Sea protection works, Netherlands
- Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
Not so great. I mean, you can't compare the Chunnel with Zeus.
Fortunately, now we can all vote on it. In 2001, the Swiss filmmaker, adventurer and explorer Bernard Weber founded the NewOpenWorld Foundation to reach a global consensus on seven new wonders. It hasn't made a big splash in this country, but it's been huge in China and in India, which is lobbying hard for the Taj Mahal.
With 17 million votes in, here are the current leaders:
- Wall of China (11.01 percent)
- Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet (8.52 percent)
- Taj Mahal, India (7.70 percent)
- Colosseum, Rome (7.00 percent)
- Pyramids of Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico (6.33 percent)
- Statues of Easter Island, Chile (6.03 percent)
- Tower of Pisa, Italy (5.98 percent)
So that's looking pretty good. They'll announce the final list next January. I figure if we can get 2 million Americans to vote, we can push Wal-Mart to the top of the list.
|W|P|110541498991799447|W|P|So Long, Khufu|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI've always thought dictionaries were interesting because they're entirely self-referential. They use words to define words. You could shoot a dictionary out toward Alpha Centauri, and a smart alien who studied it long enough could eventually decipher the whole language.
blather uses hypertext to amp this idea up to 11. About a given word—"restaurant," say—you can write anything you want, however expansive. Every word in your contribution is linked automatically to its own page, where people can riff on it.
It's hard to describe, but pretty intuitive when you see it. Sort of an experimental cross between poetry and a stream-of-consciousness community diary. Theoretically someday it'll exhaust the language, but I don't know whether any alien could make sense of it. This is the kind of art that wasn't even possible 10 years ago.
|W|P|110453454355001746|W|P|Reflexive Poetry|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Mirror Project has more than 27,000 self-portraits photographed in reflective surfaces.
"You tend to see people as they see themselves," said designer Heather Champ in a 2002 interview.
The "random" button is the best part of any site, and this one is no exception. In five minutes I saw images reflected in a Singapore bus mirror, a Chinese houseboat, and a Danish funhouse. Neat idea.
|W|P|110411841184992374|W|P|Reflection Time|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."—Bertrand Russell
|W|P|110523526830363421|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Last month, Donald Rumsfeld got into a flap when it was revealed that his condolence letters to troops' families were signed by a machine.
Some critics, like retired Army colonel David Hackworth, compared using a machine to "having it signed by a monkey." But in the digital age, signing your name on paper is a pretty quaint custom. Was Rumsfeld's decision really inappropriate?
Legally, your signature shows you've deliberated about something and given your informed consent. So if you asked Donald Trump to "autograph" your mortgage, you couldn't claim he'd agreed to pay it.
But if it's really the act of consent that's significant, then how you express it shouldn't matter, right? When I sign a credit-card receipt, most retail clerks don't even glance at my signature. This guy tried signing his name with hieroglyphics, geometric patterns, and even the words "I STOLE THIS CARD," with no problem.
Congress even ratified this view when it passed a new law in 2000, legally recognizing an "electronic sound, symbol, or process" as a signature. That means you can now "sign" an Internet transaction with an e-mail message or even a Touch-Tone beep.
So is Rumsfeld still wrong? Unfortunately, yes. In this case his signature is neither an autograph nor an endorsement, but a sign of his personal attention.
As Hackworth told Stars and Stripes, "Using those machines is pretty common, but it shouldn't be in cases of those who have died in action. How can [officials] feel the emotional impact of that loss if they're not even looking at the letters?"
That may be one thing a technocrat can't understand.
|W|P|109855850331444781|W|P|Sign Here|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWell, hey!
Ted Kennedy's Senate phone number, 224-4543, spells A BIG LIE.
How about that?
|W|P|110411883788615761|W|P|Directory Assistance|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBig Numbers gives real-world examples of various orders of magnitude, from the number of Earths that would fit into the sun (106) to the number of fish in the world (1012).
The only trouble is, once you get past 1042, it's hard to find things to count. There are 1057 atoms in the sun, and 1066 atoms in our galaxy. An octovigintillion (1087) is a lonely number—outside of pure math, it has almost nothing to do.
|W|P|110418597311403571|W|P|Can We Start Over?|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI'd beware of anything called www.clean-your-screen-for-free-now.com.
See? Told you.
|W|P|110520525040799406|W|P|TANSTAAFL|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHobbit names for the Sex Pistols:
- Glen Matlock: Posco Overhill of Nobottle
- Steve Jones: Podo Boffin of Whitfurrows
- Paul Cook: Hambut Moss of Lake-by-Downs
- Johnny Rotten: Pimpernel Bumbleroot of Haysend
I sense some new marketing opportunities ...
|W|P|110453581230191321|W|P|Anarchy in Bag End|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This spring will see the opening of the world's tallest and fastest roller coaster. New Jersey's Kingda Ka will accelerate to 128 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds, drop 418 feet into a 270-degree spiral, soar over a 129-foot hill and glide back into its station.
Statistically, roller coasters are actually safer than lawn chairs. But riders are drawn to the illusion of danger, and that's spawning a new science of fear.
"We always try to make them look and feel more dangerous than they really are," Michael Boodley of Great Coasters International told Psychology Today.
Good coasters exploit the universal fears of heights and falling. Riders want to feel a loss of control. "The closest thing to compare it to is driving with an idiot," Boodley says.
Purists like rickety wooden coasters, where there's a slow buildup and more time to fret about safety. "There's a lot of self-abuse on that chain lift," Boodley said. "Your own mind puts you in a state of paralysis."
"LIMs," the newer rides driven by linear induction motors, forgo that in favor of raw power, but they do exploit psychology by inverting the cars and suspending riders in space. (At Busch Gardens Tampa you're actually dangled over a pit of live crocodiles.) And the very violence of a LIM ride—on some you'll pull up to 4 Gs—is unfamiliar and thus scary.
Whichever your choice, your ride will probably last only a minute. That's because the ride is accurately named: After the first burst of speed, the rolling cars are literally coasting.
|W|P|110505573901957890|W|P|Speed Freaks|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
There was a young man from Lahore
Whose limericks stopped at line four.
When asked why this was,
He responded, "Because."
Also:
There was a young man from Iran
Whose poetry just wouldn't scan.
When they said, "But the thing
Doesn't go with the swing,"
He replied, "Yes, I'm aware of that, but I like to put as many syllables in the last line as I can."
The Old Car Manual Project now has 4 gigabytes of scanned manuals and brochures.
The 1925 Model T sold for $580, including storm curtains and a gasoline tank "that may be filled from the outside."
|W|P|110491258644249634|W|P|Grease and Roam|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Motion pictures need dialogue as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics."—Charlie Chaplin
|W|P|110432870184357838|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHere's a masochist's lunch menu, courtesy of various bad-food gourmands:
- Basil Seed Drink. "Forcefully overrides the throat's core instinct not to swallow tadpoles or chilled vomit."
- Squid Ink Pizza. "Looks terrible & stains your mouth black, so I have never found a reason to eat more than a spoonful of the stuff."
- Happy Plum Candy. "There is no way to describe the horror of the sweet/sour spicy coating as it smothers you physically and emotionally and drags you, screaming and kicking, into a hellish, fiery pit of excruciating pain and agony, where it slowly flogs and tortures you in the sulphurus recess of your darkest fears for hours on end, before finally leaving you, mangled beyond recognition, to die. And that's not the worst part."
You can wash everything down with Boo Koo Energy Drink, "the giant bastard son of Mountain Dew and 7UP, with a bit of mineral water thrown in to add just a hint of inbreeding."
Bon appetit!
|W|P|110411998630393236|W|P|A Plate Worse Than Death|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comGarden gnomes unite! You have nothing to lose but your pointy hats.
|W|P|110411919784309799|W|P|Elf Help|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
A lot of mathematicians are bad writers. I think they're trained to value efficiency so highly that they make a fetish of it, and their writing becomes compressed and opaque. Given a choice, it seems, many of them would rather be concise than understood.
That's why I'm so much enjoying David Foster Wallace's Everything and More. I've raved elsewhere about Wallace's prose style, but that's in essays and novels. In Everything he applies it to mathematics, specifically to historical conceptions of infinity.
And it works. Wallace is forever backtracking and footnoting, but that's forgivable because he obviously cares whether he's getting his point across. His tone is intelligent but informal, like a smart TA scribbling on a bar napkin:
This is why trying to settle the credit question by saying that Newton invented differential calculus and Leibniz invented integral calculus (which some math teachers like to do) is confusing and wrong. The whole point is that N. & L. understood the Problem of Tangents (= instantaneous velocity) and the Problem of Quadratures (= areas under curves) to be two aspects of a single larger problem (= that of continuity) and thus treatable by the same general method. The whole reason N. & L. are math immortals is that they didn't split calc up the way intro courses do.
I've taken calculus twice—I've even tutored calculus—and I hadn't understood this fundamental idea. I don't know much about math, but I do know something about communicating, and it's not enough just to express your point correctly. You have to care whether the reader gets it. Wallace does. I wish more math writers would read him.
|W|P|110479416993848714|W|P|Numbers Game|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMatch wits with a remorseless computer opponent in Virtual Rock, Paper, Scissors.
|W|P|110411937326011189|W|P|Playground Justice|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDoctor Zebra's Medical History of American Presidents gives the lowdown on all 43 commanders-in-chief. Excerpts:
- George Washington really did wear dentures, made of hippopotamus ivory, seahorse ivory, and lead. "Other sets used the teeth of pigs, cows, elks, and humans."
- A dentist once broke off part of Lincoln's jawbone while pulling a tooth—without anesthesia.
- JFK was diagnosed with Addison's disease in 1947 and given less than a year to live. In October he was actually given last rites.
- Reagan quit smoking easily, which can be an early sign of Alzheimer's disease.
- George W. Bush has creases in his earlobes, which may be a marker for increased cardiovascular risk. No one knows why.
The Constitution explains what to do if the president dies, but not if he's incapacitated by illness. "Note the heavy burden of disease that has afflicted our presidents," writes the anonymous doctor. "We have been very lucky indeed."
|W|P|110411856910062458|W|P|Doc Holiday|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom A.J. Ayer to Xenophanes, TPM Online's online quotation database serves up shining pearls from philosophers new and old:
- Seneca: "There is no great genius without some touch of madness."
- John Dewey: "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."
- Miss Alabama 1994: "I would not live forever because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."
Wait, how'd that last one get in there?
|W|P|110453202512932681|W|P|"A Stubborn Attempt to Think Clearly"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI can make an airplane out of paper. Harold Gregg can make a Mercedes 320 SL, the Sydney Opera House, or the Taj Mahal.
See all this, and Gregg's plans for the Louvre and the Crab Nebula (I'm not kidding), on his PaperToys site.
|W|P|110410879392672093|W|P|Fold Your Applause|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Seek simplicity, but distrust it."—Alfred North Whitehead
|W|P|110440959229276517|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This is Pierre. I made him last night using Nearlife's Virtual Fishtank.
Right now he's swimming in a "tank" at the St. Louis Science Center; today I may move him to the Boston Museum of Science.
There are plenty of fish in these tanks, but Pierre will eat only fish food. The game designers disallowed cannibalism, presumably to limit the bloodiness. Was that the right decision?
Rambling Brand addresses these issues in an interesting series of essays on the ethics of game design.
Ultimately it's the game designer who decides whether you can kill, steal, lie or hire a prostitute. Is it wrong to permit, or even encourage, these actions? When?
I think playability is the deciding factor. Vice doesn't always equal fun, as hundreds of first-person shooters have proven. But virtue can be pretty tiresome, too. What matters, I think, is that the player is always working toward a challenging goal.
Which brings us back to the fishtank. Pierre doesn't really do anything all day. If he had to eat other fish, and avoid being eaten, it would be a much more compelling experience (and would have made for a fascinating Darwinian experiment online).
As it is, I'm unlikely to return soon.
If I wanted boredom, I'd buy a real fish.
|W|P|110412049323934844|W|P|Grinding Nemo|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com