Category Archives: Silliness

Rants, Silliness

Marsh Quality

Before emptying the spam folder, I’m in the habit of reviewing the subject lines just to make sure nothing important was trapped by mistake. Of course, it is necessary to be a little skeptical since spammers will generally try to peddle their wares by making the product sound like it’s the best thing since sliced bread.
Today I spotted this subject line:

Trusted Marsh Quality at Discount Prices

I’m not sure I understand how “Marsh Quality” could be considered a positive. Sure, it’s Trusted Marsh Quality, but I tend to think of marshes as soggy, mosquito breeding-grounds.
They did get part of it right though. If the best thing about your product is its “Marsh Quality,” you’d better be selling it at a discount price!

Silliness

Vocabulary Builder

I’ve created a new word recently. The word is “Disenclutter.” You can prove that it’s a word, because it shows up on Google. Granted, the only site it currently shows up on is my own, but that sort of nitpicking detail isn’t worth worrying about. Gene Weingarten used a similar technique when he coined the term “Googlenope” (a phrase which has no hits on Google). If it’s good enough for Gene, then by golly, it’s good enough for me. (Unfortunately, I don’t have the same audience size as Gene, so any and all help in expanding the usage of “Disenclutter” is most welcome.)
In order that the word might propagate with a minimum of confusion, it is necessary to understand the word’s origins
The root word is, of course, “clutter” which the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines as: “to fill or cover with scattered or disordered things that impede movement or reduce effectiveness.” The past tense form is “cluttered” which, quite accurately, describes the current state of my guest room and possibly one or two other areas of my house (e.g. the upstairs and the downstairs).
Likewise, the prefix dis- is defined as meaning “do the opposite of.” and “en-” means “cause to be.”
Therefore, the verb “Disenclutter” can be understood to mean “causing all the disordered things impeding movement in my house to impede movement in someone else’s house instead.”
Feel free to spread the word! 🙂
(Need any CD boxes? Any 3-ring binders?)

Mischief, Silliness

Critique of the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Experiment

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Gavroche’s recent discovery of the The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project conducted at Rice University in 1995 stirred some memories. I recall seeing this web site a few years ago, while looking for references to “Peep Jousting” and other “Peep Research“. On the one hand, I’m surprised the site is still around if it’s not been receiving any maintenance. On the other hand, it simply must at least as popular as the Peep sites, so I guess it’s not too surprising.
Giving the site a quick look, I noticed a possible flaw in the conclusions of the the Turing Test they administered. (Yes, they apparently administered a variation of the Turing Test to a Twinkie.) Given the length of the critique, I felt it would perhaps be better to comment here rather than on John’s site.
In their description of their testing methodology, the researchers note a procedural error.

When asked to assign himself and the Twinkie the designations A & B without telling us which was which, the human promptly replied “I’ll be A.” However, we decided to continue the test.

(Under normal circumstances, the researchers should have abandoned the test and attempted the experiment again with another set of subjects. Their willingness to overlook the error may be forgiven as they had already abandoned a previous attempt and the test was taking place at a relatively late hour during the final exams period. As an additional consideration, had they abandoned this test, the procedural flaw may not have been discovered and important data lost for all time.)
Note that according to the researchers, it was the human who replied to that instruction. Because both subjects were behind a sheet, it’s not clear how they determined the reply originated with the human, but we’ll have to assume they somehow knew this to be the case.
Next, examine the pattern of the responses:

Q (cg): What would you describe as the purpose of your existence?
Subject A: (no answer)
Subject B: To woo women.
Q (ts): Describe where the other subject is, relative to you.
Subject B: On a chair.
Subject A: (no answer)
Q (cg): Describe the last meal you ate.
Subject A: (no answer)
Subject B: These chicken chunks (after joking about eating subject A)
Q (ts): How do you feel about your mother?
Subject B: She gives me money, I like her.
Subject A: (no answer)

Subject B: (ostensibly the Twinkie) is the only one to respond! The same pattern occurs during the free association portion of the test, again, only the Twinkie responds.
After examining the test data, the researchers reported their conclusions:

After careful study of all responses, we determined that subject A was the Twinkie, and B was the human.

This conclusion however completely contradicts their earlier observations!
This leads me to some rather startling conclusions of my own.
If Subject A was indeed the Twinkie, then we have to face up to the reality that Twinkies are capable of speech. The ability to speak is a sign of intelligence. The fact that said speech took place in a manner which initially led the researchers to conclude they were speaking to a human means the Twinkie in fact passed the Turing test.
If Subject B was the Twinkie, then we have to face up to the reality that the Twinkie was intelligent enough to make the researchers believe they were conversing with a human. Again, this means that the Twinkie passed the Turing test.
Either way, the social, religious, moral and dietary implications are quite staggering. To be blunt, Eating Twinkies constitutes murder. Consider too that Twinkies do not occur in nature, coming instead from industrial bakeries. Apparently the Hostess company has been playing god all these years.
I would offer one closing thought: The ability to distinguish a human from a Twinkie should be at least as significant as the ability to hold a conversation when determining whether a subject is sentient.
Although it’s dangerous to draw generalities from a single data point, the conclusion of the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. project’s Turing test would seem to suggest that Rice University students don’t qualify as sentient life forms.

Silliness

Tax Day

The following reminder is a public service.
Today is Tax Day here in the US. You only get to procrastinate on filing for an extension on your federal tax return until midnight. (You can procrastinate on filing the actual tax return until midnight August 15.)

Silliness

Stamp Out Postage

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If you haven’t heard already, the price of stamps is going up another penny on May 12. That means this would be a perfect time to run out and buy a bunch of “Forever” stamps. Partly so you can defer the price increase, partly so you don’t have to mess around with adding a bunch of additional 1 cent stamps. If you’re feeling particularly thrifty, you could go and buy enough forever stamps to last you for the next several price increases (though you might first want to take a guess at your likely stamp usage and figure out if you might be better off putting the money into a CD instead).
On Saturday I discovered that Costco (aka Price Club) is currently selling forever stamps for less than what the Post Office charges. Costco’s price for 100 stamps is $40.75, which means you’re saving a quarter. Not enough of a savings to make it worthwhile trying to resell them yourself. Also not enough of a savings for it to make sense for you to ask me to buy them on your behalf.
Of course, I do realize that certain of you (and by “certain of you” I mean, at the very least, Marauder) don’t see that as a problem; because I’m such a nice guy, you’re pretty doggone certain that I’ll pay the postage to mail you the stamps. What’s more, a certain percentage of you (and by “a certain percentage”, I mean, at a minimum, that portion of my readership which consists of the aforementioned Marauder) figure you don’t even need to worry about the postage for mailing me a check because I’m such a nice guy, I’m planning to send you the stamps at my own expense and wouldn’t dream of asking you to pay for them.
Certain of you (and by now you should recognize the pattern) are dreaming. I am a terrific guy. But I’m not that nice. You can make your own doggone trip to the post office.

Mischief, Silliness

Happy Holidays!

I think April Fools Day is my favorite holiday. Granted, it’s not a day that you get off from work (unless it happens to fall on your day off), but it is a day when people tend to take things a little less seriously.
For the past several years, my personal celebration of April Fools Day has involved some minor edits to the web site for the Shore Leave convention. For example, this year, Shore Leave is announcing the appointment of a new Web Maven, Ms. Sai Cadowlic.
I’d originally planned that particular modification for last year. April 1 fell on a Sunday that year and would have corresponded with the STAT club’s monthly meeting and given me a chance to see reactions on the day of the hack. Sadly, I instead spent that weekend at my aunt’s funeral and just wasn’t really in the mood to play the prank.
The original plan was to change the colors and add the background image of a certain hotel’s carpets. Giving the update another year to ferment allowed me to come up with the text announcing Sai and add the in-joke about her background as an interior designer for the hotel industry. (Said joke is a minor dig at what some consider to be the world’s ugliest hotel update.)
It’s not as clever as the time I announced Shore Leave was moving onto the Battlestar Galactica, but I doubt anyone’s going to be expecting such a broad palette of colors.
So what surprised me about it? It’s hard to make a web page look that bad.

Fandom, Silliness

Old Signature Block

Going through some old emails (in this case, March 25, 1997) I found this bit of ASCII art. I’m not sure whether it’s something I once used in my own signature, or something that someone else was using. Either way, I’m certainly not the one who originated the artwork. Regardless, it’s a pretty good graphic considering the medium. (This will probably be unrecognizable on a mobile device.)

                  ___
     ___....-----'---`-----....___
=========================================
      ___`---..._______...---'___
     (___)      _|_|_|_      (___)
       \\____.-'_.---._`-.____//
         ~~~~`.__`---'__.'~~~~
                 `~~~'

Hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt.
(Uh oh! They left Troi in command!)

Pointless Posts, Silliness

Literary Meme

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You should blame Marauder for this.

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 23.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal…along with these instructions.

To access any of the framework’s features, you need to know which namespace contains the types that expose the facilities you’re after.

(Who the heck keeps great literature – or even a comic book – near the computer?)

Assorted Ramblings, Rants, Silliness

Checkpoint

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During the course of any lengthy journey, it’s important to stop from time to time and find out where you are on the map. This allows you to check your progress and take corrective measures before you wind up hopelessly lost. Poor map-checking is how it once took me six hours (and a side trip to Delaware) to get to Ocean City while the rest of my group made the same trip in half the time.
I thought I had learned from that mistake, but evidently not. Today I took a few moments to find myself on the map and discovered that something has gone horribly wrong!
It’s been more than 2 1/2 years since I started Dividing by Zero. With so many internet success stories out there (Facebook sold for how many hundred million?), it seems reasonable that by now I should have one of the five most popular sites on the web, several million in the bank, a Porsche in the driveway, and a steady date with Jennifer Aniston.
That was the plan anyhow. Instead, my site is still largely unknown, though I do have the number one search result for chirping smoke detector; I only have enough money in the bank to cover my mortgage payment; and the car in the driveway is a Honda.
Still, I do have to admit, my situation could be a lot worse. The smoke detector thing is cool in its own way, I do have a car, and I can make my mortgage payment. And although I’ve never met Jennifer Aniston, at least I’m not getting drunken phone calls from Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.