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Archive for the ‘funny’ Category

Fake News: Mixing sodas

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

There are reports of middle school kids all over the U.S. getting high in a new, legal kind of way. Apparently some of more than fifty Coca Cola and Pepsi flavors, when mixed together and heated up, synthesize a powerful chemical similar in its structure to THC, the main ingredient in marijuana. Which precise soda flavors need to be mixed, in which proportions and the details of the heating process are unclear; the “recipe,” as the youths impudently call it, has managed to be kept secret among the fourteen-year-olds, just like the contents of their diaries, despite the likely popularity such a revelation would cause the potential whistle-blowers (or — experts argue — precisely because of the embarrassment such a revelation would cause the potential whistle-blowers).

Our reporters scoured the Web looking for further explanation; however, seeing as there are about thirty-five hundred Facebook groups, each of which claims to be named after the recipe, it is unclear whether the information will see the light of day.

The spokespersons at Coca Cola Co., and Pepsi Co. refused to comment on this speculation.

In Fairfield County, Connecticut, local government officials, prompted by pressure from the wives of several affluent residents, said that, pending the verification of the reports, they would begin drafting legislature aimed at limiting sales of certain combinations of flavors. More drastic measures include the introduction of regulations that prevent young people below the age of 21 from purchasing sodas, or a ban of certain flavors altogether.

IE team crashing the CSS standards meeting

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

IE team crashing the CSS standards meeting

IE: Sorry we’re late guys, we didn’t know about the meeting until this morning
Everyone else: Uhmm, we have had this meeting in the same place every week for the past four years
IE: Oh really?
Everyone else: Yes. You know, we’re trying to set some standards so that web developers can write clean code that is interpreted the same way by every browser.
IE: Of course we think it’s a good idea for all browsers to interpret websites the same way IE does.
Everyone else: No, no no no! That would be a very bad idea.
IE: How come?
Everyone else: It’s stupid for one company to set the standard, especially if the standard is not really a standard but a collection of random fuzzy rules that aren’t consistent, are hard to interpret, and consist of hundreds of exceptions.
IE: We don’t buy it. You’re just jealous of our 95% market share.
Everyone else: We are a standards group, we don’t care about your market share. We’ve invited you to these meetings from day one. In fact, didn’t Microsoft push for technology standards in the first place?
IE: Of course, provided that they come from Microsoft.
Everyone else: That’s retarded.
IE: Look, we’re innovating here and you’re just slowing things down. Like when we introduced image effects.
Everyone else: Oh, you mean the Wave effect?

IE: Yeah, isn’t it awesome?
Everyone else: Looks like something from a 1990s website.
IE: Our design group sees nothing wrong with that filter.
Everyone else: Oh, you have a design group now? But, we digress. You’ve got to start complying to some of these standards, complying to both IE and other browsers is a headache for most developers.
IE: What are those standards?
Everyone else: We’ve published them and even sent you a paper copy. What the hell are these proprietary filters doing in your dynamic HTML? filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=20). The notation is awful and does not conform to any of the other style properties.
IE: You’re just pissed because it has Microsoft in its name.
Everyone else: And what about your lenient interpretation of identifiers? Why does Microsoft continue, over and over again, to put so much emphasis on case insensitivity? Every programming language other than… let’s see… BASIC! is case sensitive.
IE: You’ve got to allow mediocre developers to make some money too.
Everyone else: And the conditional comments in HTML? <!–[if lte IE 6]> This is only encouraging people to add IE-specific stuff.
IE: Okay, it seems we won’t be able to convince you guys to embrace innovation. Maybe at least you’ll approve our OOXML standard?
Everyone else: Are you serious? The spec that ignore industry standards like SVG, MathML, XForms and even XML?
IE: There’s no reason a reinvented wheel must be worse.
Everyone else: Oh yeah, how about how within the spec, the same element has multiple conflicting definitions (‘e‘ has eighteen of them!) and some elements are just aliases of one another? It’s almost as the people in your team didn’t even talk to each other when they wrote the spec!
IE: Screw you. We’ll win anyway. We offer the world’s most popular operating system and browser family. Can’t beat us.

Wit and The Art of the One-liner

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

My three friends and I were driving to a music festival. My friend, seeing a police car parked on the street, instantaneously responded: “There’s my ride home.”

There’s something beautiful about one-liners: a perfect narrative compression of the situation, an almost poetic ability to synthesize while retaining information (I compare poetry to lossless data compression: a way to say to much in so few words). They are closely related to the concept of wit: the ability to comment on a situation with insight and humor. Probably the most extreme — and hilarious — example of that relation were “the battles of the wits” that my friends would engage in: a dialogue where each subsequent response built upon the previous but towered over it in wit. Unsurprisingly, the dialogue consisted almost entirely of one-liners.

Things everyone should know

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

I had this idea to write a book that enumerates and explains all the concepts that I think the general population should know (and often see people not know). It would span all disciplines from finance (how interest rates work), chemistry (the difference between an acid and a base), psychology (selection bias and other kinds of fallacies), history (for example, the history of the conflict in the Middle East), etc.

I thought that with just a little bit of the basics that probably a significant fraction of the population doesn’t have, they will be able to avoid making bad decisions in life, avoid some of the conflicts that stem from ignorance, and maybe even communicate better.

Then I realized the futility of this endeavor — the people who will pick up such a book are most likely the people who already know these things. They are not the people who I need to reach out to — because in a twisted application of selection bias, if you read books with a goal to allow you to make better decisions and communicate better, you probably already know these basics.

There again, I may still write that book.

Double-flush Systems and motion-activated flushing

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

Double-flush (two buttons, one for mini-flush and one for regular flush) is a great idea, but whenever I use such a toilet, I think hard about the symbolics behind its UI design — does the large button signify the release of a larger amount of water, or does is signify the more “preferred” and frequent mode of flushing (with less water)?

And can somebody teach me how to use the toilets with the motion-activated flush? About 80% of the time, it either doesn’t flush when it has to, or it flushes some four times before I actually leave the stall. I must be doing something wrong.

Rhetorical questions in advertisements

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

I saw some charity’s ad the other day (I’m still struggling with the idea of charities doing advertising — something just doesn’t seem right with that, even though intellectually I know that it is a very sensible thing). “If you could improve a life, would you?”

I have a big issue with the fact that the question has a tautological premise (since everyone can improve lives, that’s precisely the premise of the majority of charities out there) which gives me no insight into why I should give into this particular charity. The best proof for this is, well, that I forgot which charity this was an ad for…

How about a counter-ad. “If you could ask a meaningless question, would you?”

Surprising Origins of Things (part IV)

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

The current iteration of the U.S. Flag has been designed by a high school student

This Flight is Very Full

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

This is one of my pet peeves. What, exactly, is the difference between a full flight and a very full flight? Perhaps the latter is filled with fat passengers?

Fake Shutter Sound

Monday, May 10th, 2010

It’s absolutely ridiculous, when a small square device like an iPhone makes this over-the-top sound that comes from some 80s-era Soviet camera. I know, for some reason it’s reassuring to people to hear a shutter sound when they take a picture, but since we have departed from the idea of a camera sufficiently already (Gedankenexperiment: how many of the parts found in a camera from two decades ago can be found in an iPhone?), we may just as well drop that ridiculous one.

Webcomic, xkcd-style

Thursday, February 18th, 2010
My own take at the xkcd style

My own take at the xkcd style