Questions I didn't know I had

How to Pour Ketchup - with diagrams and the physics behind the phenomenon. If you click to the homepage, you can also learn about the physics of a soccer ball.

I'm not complaining about the weather around here but I'm starting to prune. Oh, for a few days hot enough so that the words "iced coffee" sound refreshing rather than just the result of entropy. Here's an alternative method for making ice coffee without leaving the mug sitting out on the desk all day.

ǝǝɟɟoɔ ɥƃnouǝ pɐɥ ǝʌ,noʎ 'sıɥʇ pɐǝɹ uɐɔ noʎ ɟı

˙ʞɔıɹʇ ǝlʇʇıl ʇɐɥʇ pıp ı ʍoɥ s,ǝɹǝɥ

Another example of things I thought I knew and actually don't: all the presidents. I only scored 33 out of 43 on this quiz. On the other hand, how many names of dead white specifically-American guys should one be expected to recall? I knew all the assassinated ones because I recently listened to Assassination Vacation read by the author, Sarah Vowell (reviews and excerpt with audio option). I like when audio books are read by the authors. They can hit every inflection the way they meant it to be, uh, heard by the reader. Anyway, it was downright hilarious and educational. Why is it that I remember most the things I laugh at the hardest? Hmm. Note to self: ponder a new theory of education.

Here's something else to ponder: in 1984, AT&T was declared a monopoly and broken into 9 smaller entities. As of today, all but 4 of these original little bits are once again under at&t ownership. In fact, there are only 3 telecommunication companies today. Let's here it for choice! Cue the graphic.


Here's a timesaver: a list (requires registration) of 101 meals ready in 10 minutes of less. Hey, we all gotta eat right? But filling the gastric void takes away from all sorts of other summer activities, like blogging, so any quick eats are a good thing ... right? Pray tell, who is Mr. Bittman addressing when he suggests boiling a lobster for a quick meal (#12 on list)? I know the minimum wage just got bumped to a whopping $5.85 per hour but c'mon. Lobster prices are currently at or near an all time high of $15 per pound. Since these cuddly crustaceans average 1 1/2 to 2 pounds in size, one hour of toil gets you maybe a couple of legs and an antenna. Forget the claws where the real meat is found.


This talk about food has made me hungry. I'ma hankerin' for a hunk o' cheese.

Almost made coffee come out my nose

Today's giggle:



The video itself made me laugh but not as hard as the fact that some technician in the studio kept playing the clip over and over. As the first gent demonstrates, the job of the talking heads is to explain the obvious. When the giggles start to hit, somebody kept replaying the tape. That's the part I find especially hilarious.

Let's get organized (or at least talk about doing so)

Here's the trend of the day, kids: let's clean up the squalor! But first, an anecdote.

The Boy, genetically related to The T, has been staying with us. The question arises: what does The Boy eat? Well, any food starting with a 'P' is a good candidate for ingestion. This list includes pizza, pizza Hot Pockets, pasta, Pop-Tarts, and pgrapes. I experienced what might have been a rustic living versus appliance technology gap when The Boy took his mug from phot pchocolate into the kitchen and put it in the sink. You might be thinking to yourself, where is she going with this? Well, when I say "The Boy put the mug in the sink" what I mean to say is that he balanced it atop the pile of drying clean dishes rather than set it in the empty sink just inches to the right. I took the scene in and realized he is a child of his upbringing. His parents went without an ice cream scoop for a time rather than bring one into the house that was not dishwasher safe. Everything gets put in the dishwasher. The Boy may not have recognized the pile of dishes for what they were: clean and drying and waiting to be put away rather a pile of dirty dishes waiting to be put in our non-existent dishwasher.

Add this perspective to the list of Beloit College Mindset List.

Speaking of lists, here's a list of Ten Things to do in 10 minutes so you can feel like you accomplished something and possible rediscover a flat surface in your home. I particularly like the suggestion to clean up something virtual (TiVo season pass subscriptions) and the comparison of closet hangers to Tribbles.

If books are your own version of Tribbles and happen to cover every surface in your abode, flat or otherwise, here's a list of 20 ways to set them free and/or possibly acquire others. Remember, if they love you, they'll return.

If you recently heard yourself saying, "Where's my %^&# hair clip?" you should curse no more. The iPod Shuffle has become a hair accessory.


That's all for now. I'm off to move a pile of books so I can sit and read anything other than the latest way-too-long tome by JK Rowling.

À boire ou je tue le chien! (brought to you by French expressions you won't learn at school...)

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.

Math in the Wild

Yum. Unnecessary Dairy Overlap. Is it cheese or a pasteurized cheese-food product, ala Kraft slices?

Everything new is recycled old stuff, Take 2

Look what I just found! This was an ad in the inaugural issue of MacAddict magazine in 1996. It looks eerily like the Mac vs PC ads of today. Are there no more original ideas out there?


While I have your attention, here's a blow-up of the box under the PC dweeb:

Nothing has changed. Vista users of today don't have any hobbies either—for the same reason!!! Somebody wiser than moi once said the world will keep giving you the same lesson over and over until you learn it. Stay tuned for the next version of Windows for yet another learning opportunity.
Factoid alert: Melinda Gates (neé French) herself was the product manager for Microsoft Bob, rated the worst product of the decade by CNET.com. This illustrious history makes me think malaria is going to hang on for a while.

To give equal time to the Mac dude, here's a blow up of the description near his head:
I can honestly say I have no idea what this means.

Microsoft Bob is the father or grandfather of that other MS debacle, Clippit.

Questions, always questions

I've been putting this post off for a while because I have no idea how you follow "Nice web, Mr. Crack Spider" without lowering the bar.

Question of the day: does Seattle have a comic book analogue? Gotham City is architecturally designed in the style of New York City. There really is a Metropolis in Illinois, as well as comically both in Kansas and on the eastern seaboard. You are not worthy to wear the bracelets if you don't know that Wonder Woman hails from Themyscira and originally landed in Boston. Central City, home of The Flash, is in Ohio, Florida, and in Missouri on the Kansas border, across from Keystone City, home of, uh, The Flash. Keystone City also has a history of being a blue-collared town so placing it in Pennsylvania, the Keystone State and home to many mines and mills, is also plausible. No worries about finding or not finding Coast City, home of the Green Lantern Hal Jordan, since its total destruction plummeted Hal into madness. It may have been in northern California, near Star City, home of Green Arrow, which has also been located near the Great Lakes and Massachusetts Bay.

Oliver Queen, aka Green Arrow, did live in the Pacific Northwest for a time, hence the donning of a protection-from rain hood rather than that oh-so-cute Robin Hood cap. Which brings us full circle back to my question: Does Seattle have a comic reference, some fictional city used as a stand-in for a city here in meatspace?

Since it is raining outside and we have plenty of time to ponder today, I'll leave you with another question: why does no one ever want to play the part of Luke?

Savage Chickens are copyrighted by Doug Savage.

More educational movies: I'm Joe's ... Spider ?!?

I must have been sick the day they showed this educational movie about drugs.

iY-Yi-Yi

The iPhone has been out for almost two weeks now and while I still don't have my own, I feel the need to contribute to the mayhem.

First up: my newest iPlacebo. The paper one wasn't cutting for me anymore, especially not after Three sat on it with her furry butt. I upgraded to this one which is a little more durable and has a feature even Mr. Jobs' gadget doesn't have:


Here are the directions, in case you want to make your own. I used licorice Altoids since the tin is already colored similar to the iPhone.

And while I was cutting and taping I was humming the tune to "I Want an iPhone". Way to go, Mr. Pogue.

So here I sit, phondling my iPlacebo while lots of other folks have been intentionally destroying iPhones. This is killing me. Every time one is lost, I feel a disturbance in the Phorce*.



I am so copyrighting the word Phorce right now!

Always funnier without the citation

The quality of the internet that I love the most is the aura of mystery surrounding what lies at the end of a link. Even though there may be some context clues available that can help define or categorize the general topic of a link, there is always that little bit of wonder lurking around the edges. It is this edginess that keeps us looking over our shoulders for nosy co-workers while we surf since we never know when links such as Mysteries of the Tax Code Revealed!!! are going to result in yet another link to really badly done porn.

The same is true for Wikipedia links. This factoid behemoth has cast more doubt on what I thought I knew than any other website besides the Microsoft Word Help pages. For instance, just this very morning, a mere few moments ago, I found at the site grow-a-brain a herd of links dealing with lists of items: a list of premature obituaries, a list of lost and found grocery lists (which has achieved what all lists hope to be some day: a book) and its accompanying newspaper article written in list format, and—the topic of my own post today—a list of fictional colors.

Before I get to why I called you here today, can we just for a moment revisit the fact that a newspaper in a major metropolitan area had nothing else to report other than a man collected lists found in grocery stores and then wrote a book about them?!? Is the war over? Has my universal health care card come in the mail and it's tucked under my latest Netflix dvd? The national food supply is safe? All the droughts have ended? Whew.

Back to my story about fictional colors. So there I was in graduate school, having successfully put off joining the real world for yet another year. This was my single semester attending graduate studies in anthropology. I look back on these 15 weeks fondly. I recall one class taught by a woman who made a career of studying blood in populations who don't mingle with the rest of us, aka: the Amish. One day, she was on a real roll and I was quite gripped. It was fascinating. One particular gem I remember is that it takes longer than you would think for inbreeding to result in a short bus candidate, although the actual number of generations has been lost to me. The other gem involves a lecture when, in the middle of her talk about characteristics of Amish blood that differs from non-Amish blood, she realized there was something missing from her lecture notes. As she moved to the door, a student who sounded remarkably like Johnny Olson said, "I happen to have an Amish gent right out here in the hallway. Let's bring him on in."

But, you ask, what does this have to do with colors and lists of colors? Well, nothing.

Another class I was taking that quarter was a basic course in everything you need to know about anthropology. And in this class, the professor talked about the art and science of anthropology, specifically he talked about dropping yourself into an unknown culture and trying to make understanding of what was happening around you. The demonstration accompanying this was great. He had a box of cups, mugs and glasses and he brought them out one at a time and asked us eager young graduate students to identify each. It was easy for the first few, we had no problem agreeing as a group that exhibit A was a "mug" and that exhibit B was a "glass." But things got pretty sketchy pretty quickly. Was exhibit C a mug or a glass and why? We needed a new term: cup, and things went downhill from there. The presence of a handle was not enough to define it as a mug. Nor was the material it was made from, the color, the size, or the dimensions. He made his point that so much of culture is based on shared agreements about definitions and even those raised in the culture may not be able to agree totally. And let's not even get into what happens when nobody but white men start defining terms for the rest of us.

But, you ask again, what does this have to do with colors? Well, think about the color red. The perfect red. The ideal red that you think of when someone says "think about the color red." Got it? Well, the shade and vibrancy that you have in your mind is very likely the same as the image in my head as well as the images that Francois in Paris, Kaleem in Riyadh, Santiago in Brasilia, and Foster in Canberra all thought of. RED seems to be universally agreed upon, regardless of culture—and it is the only color for which this is true.

When archaeologists and anthropologists studying ancient Greek texts found no mention of separate colors for water and grass, the question was asked: could the ancient Greeks not see the difference and therefore there is a physiological reason or was the difference visible to the ancient Greeks and they just didn't care to differentiate by using two words? Even though we might not agree that blue is the correct term for that hue, shouldn't there at least be a term for blue? Rather than the blue of the water and the green of the vegetation, the Greeks talked about the deep grue of the sea and the rich grue of the fields. (I don't think grue (or even eta-rho-upsilon-epsilon) is the actual term the ancient Greeks used.)

As the professor droned on (at this point the fascination of the mug/cup/glass demo had worn out), a note began circulating around the table. The effect the note had on each individual was striking. Each person who was respectfully listening, taking notes, or lightly snoring before seeing the note began to giggle before sending the note on. On the note was one word: bleen.

To this day, more than 10 years after the grue-bleen lecture, I still giggle when I think of grue or bleen. And THIS is the point of today's post. The fact that the words grue and bleen can make me laugh out loud!!—and then I go and learn something by clicking on the link.

Aside: I want a pair of Crayola crayons, one labeled grue-bleen and the other bleen-grue.

It turns out I have been practicing some scientific philosophy by throwing the words grue and bleen around willy-nilly. According to The Wik (can I call you The Wik?), X is grue if it was green when it was checked before some specific time. X is blue if it was not checked before said time. Seems like time is once again the variable here, kids. Let's not leave out bleen. X is bleen if it is blue and was checked before time t or green and was not checked. From The Wik:

The problem is as follows. A standard example of induction is this: All emeralds examined thus far are green. This leads us to conclude ... that also in the future emeralds will be green, and every next green emerald discovered strengthens this belief. [A smart person] observed that (assuming t has yet to pass) it is equally true that every emerald that has been observed is grue. Why, then, do we not conclude that emeralds first observed after t will also be grue, and why is the next grue emerald that comes along not considered further evidence in support of that conclusion? The problem is to explain why.

OK, I need to go to the local java hut in my outfit of the day which has no color coordination whatsoever and mixes both a soothing plaid pattern and a shocking yellow and ponder the grue-ness of my beverage. Just because all cups of joe have been brown up until today, will they still be brown tomorrow? And how do I know this???