Overheard only to be shared

Major League Baseball is holding auditions for fans to sing that ol' ditty Take Me Out to the Ballgame, the winner to sing at the All Star game. A pack of twenty-something males belted out a not-too-bad rendition, after which one was overheard to say they possessed "the best heterosexual elements of the Back Street Boys, N Sync" and a few other groups I didn't recognize.

Nice.

Sent from my iPhone

Well, duh

From the department of: Why Didn't I think of This?

So there I am, surfing the net, contently and quietly belching as the evening's salad digests. Tis true, fair reader: I managed to eat a salad while the veggies were still in their pre-compost form. It's a rare event but it happens.

Anyway, I come across this brilliant idea:

found at Neat-O-Rama

Well, duh. My kingdom for a chopstick!! Single portions of massive amounts of meat. All in the same bag.

This is great! It cuts down on the number of plastic bags I'll use in a lifetime, it's quick, efficient, and so damn simple! Ugh. I never would have thought of it. I've been spending my time studying the best way to stack sausages, bags of grated cheese and bagels while maintaining the primo access space for the coffee. Moving on.

Wait, before I go there's one more thing. The woman behind this idea, according to her blogsite is: I'm Biggie: avid cook, speedy lunch packer, mom & former expat fluent in Japanese. I'm tripping over the former expat part. It's almost worse than a double-negative. Does she live in the States now and didn't at one time? Is a former expat now just a pat? Is she even an American? Perhaps she's Canadian. What does one call a maple-leafian who lives away from the tree? An expuck? Oh, ponder, ponder, ponder.

What I Found Today

I'm fried. We're only three weeks into the quarter and mentally I'm toast. I have nothing else to say to y'all but wanted you to know I'm thinking of you and your internet needs. Enjoy these finds.

Three Philosophies.
Found at tweebiscuit.net

Honey, could you bring in some wood for the fire?
Found at the artist's site.


What happens when eBay, Amazon, Google and MySpace show up at a party....
The Internet Party, at Cracked.com

Old pictures, new taglines. Brilliant.
Married to the Sea


What I won't be doing on the long weekend: going for an infinite walk. Check out the movie to see how this path was made.


Either someone has too much time on their hands or some whiz-kid in marketing has earned a vacation and a promotion. Hilarious. Click to see the rest of the book, the newsflash, etc.

Random

File under:

a) Things I never want to see again: a hot pink velour jogging suit. Those four adjectives never need be lined up again. Unfortunately, you can't erase your retinas.

b) New words in my vocabulary: negify verb to change the sign of a number. -ied -ing ex. we can negify +2 by changing its sign to –, thus obtaining –2.

c) Longest period of measurable time: the time period beginning when you know your new office computer has arrived on campus and the moment it is placed on your desk. I've aged weeks in the past few days.

d) Do I really want to think about this?

The basic facts: Toxo can infect many species, but it undergoes sexual reproduction only in cat digestive tracts. Once the parasite reproduces, the cat passes it in its feces, where the next unwitting host picks it up by digesting it (intentionally or unintentionally). Then the cycle starts again. In the long run, Toxo must find its way back to a cat’s stomach to survive. So the parasite has evolved a complicated system for taking over its hosts’ brains to increase the likelihood that they’ll be eaten by cats.
(c) New York Times Magazine 12/09/2007

I clean four litterboxes every night. I'm going to freak if any of the grrllzz start licking me.

Too many chefs at the keyboard

A few days ago, I was repeating the ritual of restocking the dairy at home and inadvertently grabbed fat-free half-and-half. I think the cartons of this product should be neon in color and include a symbol warning consumers of impending doom. Something along the lines of Mr. Yuck would warn folks quite nicely. What is the point to fat-free half-and-half ?! Doesn't half-and-half exist in the first place so we can get our hands on the good part?

This morning, I was plodding through some newsprint, sipping contaminated coffee—what exactly is in fat-free half-and-half, anyway?—and reading that obesity is a social epidemic. I am paraphrasing here but the idea is that if your sibling is obese, your chance of becoming obese increases 40%. The conclusion was not that you share your sib's genes, rather that obesity spreads much in the same way fashion does. Fashion! Good grief. My morning angst slowly changed from "what poisons am I ingesting by using fat-free half-and-half" to "ohmigawd keeping up with the ever-spreading Joneses is not causality IT'S THE FOOD, STUPID!!" I love this comment:

" ... The study found a person's chances of becoming obese went up 57 percent if a friend did, 40 percent if a sibling did and 37 percent if a spouse did. In the closest friendships, the risk almost tripled. ...

Despite their findings, the researchers said people should not sever their relationships. ... "

Sheesh. I can just hear phone lines buzzing with the following: "I'm really sorry, Sally, I can't go for lunch with you at The Trough today because hanging out with you might make me fat."

To sum it up nicely, I point you to Inkling. She spent some time reading the comments to the story when it ran it the NY Times and describes the experience as the fascination of the abomination: much like a train wreck, you can't turn your eyes away from the gore. Rather than suffer through the comments myself, I find it easier to point you to her summary.

Aside: One of the studies Inkling links to studied multiple social factors on eating behaviors. As the number of people at a meal increases so do the size and duration of the meal. Meals eaten in large groups were over 75% larger than when eaten alone. Wow! My comment about eating at The Trough was done tongue in cheek. Good to know research backs me up.

I escaped the newsprint and went to the internet, coffee in hand. You may be wondering why I'm even using the abomination known as fat-free half-and-half. Well, I can only justify my actions by hating waste more than than taste (should I have written waist instead?). I'll drink the swill rather than just dump it and lose the $3, add the carton to the landfill and the contents to the water treatment plant without trying to learn from my mistake. Anyway, while reading RSS newsfeeds, I came across the following list of stories at The Consumerist, defender of those buy things. This is a non-doctored screenshot of the order in which the stories hit the wire:

I think Meg and Ben need to have a little inter-office convo as they're posting stories. I believe Meg's question about why people are fatter now than ever before, posted at 9:11 AM, was at least partially answered three minutes earlier when Ben posted the video of McD's rolling out a bigger bovine-on-a-bun menu item.
Links: obesity article, McBeef video

Once these words were out, I was gussing them up a bit and pulled down the following menu:
I propose a change to these menu options. How about instead they range from Smallest to OBESE ? Then we can justify the research into a link between typing and gaining weight.

Are you gonna eat that?

Good Clean Fun

In the spirit of keeping you amused, I offer the following selection of games.

The Wikipedia Game
Goal: Get from one Wikipedia page to another by only clicking on links in articles. Players start from the same page for one topic, say the female mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. Another topic, say Jell-O, is chosen as the target. Players can only click on links to reach the target. No typing is allowed.

This takes the Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon game to a whole new level. In the interest of research, I did a solo run connecting Hypatia to Jell-O in 17 clicks. I believe the breakthrough click was "screaming jelly babies" which led me to "gelatin" which I called success so I could go back and read more about jelly babies, screaming or otherwise. Here's my path:

Hypatia --> Mathematics --> Scientific method --> scientific community --> popular culture --> commercial --> advertisement --> brand --> jingles --> snacks --> list of snack foods --> geplak --> sugar --> calorie --> food energy --> screaming jelly babies --> jelly baby --> gelatin

Thanks to Writing as Joe for bringing this to my attention. Should I have called this entry I'm Joe's Game to keep in the spirit of previous posts?

White Jigsaw Yeah OK, so Flash based jigsaws aren't really all that hard because the pieces will snap into place at some point ... right? Well, this was amusing when the pieces got small and the playing board seemed to get bigger.

Sheep Dash! How fast are your reflexes? Five sheep are going to bolt and your job is to stun 'em. I was remarkably consistent:



Too many games to count. Well, I haven't finished counting them, anyway. What a great use for Flash. Very creative, simple, amusing. Give 'em a go.

I'm going to see how many Wiki clicks it takes to get from Apple, Inc. to tooth decay. See you next time.

Too much information

Before I turn to my pile of grading, I thought I would bring this tidbit of info: It is illegal for more than the last five digits to appear on any receipt handed to a customer.

Check out the story at the WSJ

Granted the story is coming at you from the angle of YALO (Yet Another Lawyer Outbreak) and mentions the onslaught of class action suits against retailers in order to get them to change their ways. I post it here to inform you, not to encourage you to sue.

People smarter than us

OK, I'm back. Sorry about the hiatus. Got busy and then I got sick and then I ... lost my password? ... got a cramp? ... got trapped in a litterbox inexplicably filled with quicksand rather than litter?

Sorry, I drifted there for a moment. I'm back now. School's been fun. I've been working with a student who is very, very close to sounding like that old joke about x: What do you mean x equals 25? Yesterday you told us it was 12!" This student—who is an absolute joy to work with and my tongue is nowhere near my cheek when I say that—really works hard and has no problem asking questions. The issue of note recently involves x and y and the issue of independence and dependence. Think back to a (stereo-)typical math problem. In such a problem, you would choose an x-value, plug it in, do the arithmetic to find the corresponding y-value. In that case, y is dependent upon x because we had no idea what y was going to be until we plugged in an x.

Well, my student is so fixated on the fact that we "usually" choose x first and find y second that when the variables change roles, it is a brand spanking new world for her. Even when the variables are given a context but remain as x and y she struggles. Here's the example from class:

Variables: Number of gallons of paint and Area to be painted

Scenario One: I want to paint my room. When I go to the store, I first need to know how much area I want to paint. Then I know how many gallons to buy.

Scenario Two: I happen upon a pyramid of stacked cans of paint in my garage. I wonder to myself, "How much area can I cover with this paint?"

The variables are the same in both cases yet in the first scenario Gallons is dependent upon how much Area and in the second scenario Area is dependent upon the number of Gallons. Make sense? To my student it made sense too. She was fine and cruising along until we substituted an x for gallons and a y for area and ran through the second scenario where where Gallons (x) is dependent. She could not see how that could be the case. How could we choose y first?

Some days I'm glad classes are only 50 minutes long.

Here's a code that could give Eniac a run for its money. This is how the wise folks at Waffle House code your order using condiments on a plate. For example, a sausage omelot is jelly at 3-o-clock where as a plain omelot is jelly at 9-o-clock.


Click for a fuller, deeper explanation that does not involve either x or y.

How many of you are still wondering what I was doing in the quicksand-filled litterbox in the first place?

Let me state what should be obvious

When applying for a job, here are a couple of tips to get you started off on the right foot.

a) After executing the File Merge and dumping the name of the business or institution to which you are applying from the database of all the job listings into the cover letter you have spent mere minutes or infinite hours crafting, it behooves you to check that the font is consistent across all text.
Reason for this tip: The recipient may realize that their job posting is not the only position you are applying to as you search for an escape route from that deadend life-sucking career position you currently hold but said recipient would like to think so.

b) Following the aforementioned File Merge and preceding the licking of the envelope or the clicking of the Send button, confirm that all materials are actually addressed to the business or institution to which said materials are being sent and not the next institute in your alphabetical data base. See Reason as stated above.

We wish you well in your continued job search.

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The following may help you in your search for organization, beginning with Visualization Methods. This is so very cool.

In an effort to maintain our goal of attending to diversity as well as mentioning the word "shoe" at least every other posting, we bring you the shoe designed for the Beijing Olympics.