From dive into mark:
First, the poem itself (there are many versions, this is just one):
< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , system haltedIn English, this reads:
waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash
bang splat equal at dollar under-score
percent splat waka waka tilda number four
ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash
vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma crash
A programmer’s poem Read More »
From Ananova:
A man who lives with 900 gnomes says there is no room in his life for a wife.
Ron Broomfield is so obsessed with gnomes he even dresses up as one twice a week.
His fascination has so far cost him £20,000.
The 67-year-old shares his home in the Lincolnshire market town of Alford with the gnomes.
‘I’m not married any more but, to be frank, there’s no room for a woman. Gnomes have become my life,’ he said.
Obsessed by gnomes Read More »
From Tom Van Vleck:
In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Borges describes “a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,” the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:
1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.
From IBM:
A teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it. A few science fiction writers consider teleporters that preserve the original, and the plot gets complicated when the original and teleported versions of the same person meet; but the more common kind of teleporter destroys the original, functioning as a super transportation device, not as a perfect replicator of souls and bodies.
Practical considerations of teleportation Read More »
From the Maybe-it’s-not-a-good-idea-to-keep-flesh-eating-lizards-as-pets dep’t.:
Several flesh-eating pet lizards were found feasting on the corpse of their owner in his apartment, police said.
Police were called to Ronald Huff’s apartment in Newark, Delaware, on Wednesday after a relative became worried because Huff failed to show up for work, investigators said.
Officers found Huff’s body on the floor, with his pet Nile monitor lizards feeding on his flesh. The state medical examiner is investigating the cause of death. … [CNN]
Why I stick with shih-tzus Read More »
If fiction can be regarded as a culture’s subconscious, then it’s clear that we are a nation obsessed with the very rich. From avaricious caricatures like The Simpsons’ Montgomery Burns to literary character studies like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, our culture — both high and low — is littered with images of billionaires and tycoons.
Rank Name $Net Worth
1. Santa Claus $∞
2. Richie Rich $24.7 billion
3. Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks $10 billion
4. Scrooge McDuck $8.2 billion
5. Thurston Howell III $8 billion
6. Willie Wonka $8 billion
7. Bruce Wayne $6.3 billion
8. Lex Luthor $4.7 billion
9. J.R. Ewing $2.8 billion
10. Auric Goldfinger $1.2 billion
11. C. Montgomery Burns $1 billion
12. Charles Foster Kane $1 billion
13. Cruella De Vil $875 millon
14. Gordon Gekko $650 millon
15. Jay Gatsby $600 millon” [Forbes]
The Forbes Fictional Fifteen Read More »
Scotland’s worst poet, William Topaz McGonagall: From “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time. …
Or here’s a few lines from “Glasgow”:
And as for the statue of Sir Walter Scott that stands in George Square,
It is a handsome statue — few with it can compare,
And most elegant to be seen,
And close beside it stands the statue of Her Majesty the Queen. …
Read more at a site dedicated to William McGonagall, or just search Google. [William McGonagall]
Another awful poet Read More »
Another image that enters my mind unbidden:
My brother and I are spending the night at Grandma & Grandpa Scott’s house. We’re pretty young … I might be 8 and my brother 6 or 7. It’s the mid-70s. At our grandparents, we go to bed pretty early … say by 10 p.m. This night, Gus and I know that the original King Kong is on TV, and we are determined to see it. We stay awake talking in bed (we’re in the guest bed together), and then we quietly sneak into the family room and turn on the TV, ever so quietly, and watch a 40-year-old (only 40 years!?) black & white movie, listening carefully for the footsteps of our grandparents. I don’t think we were caught.
Movies in the night Read More »
An image of my father that enter my mind at odd times:
I’m in high school in the early 80s, it’s the dead of winter and early in the morning, so it’s still dark out, and very cold. My Dad always got up at 6 a.m. and was at his gas station by 6:30. I’m sleeping on the couch in the front room of his small house, and it’s a school morning … my mother must have been out of town. At 7:15, I’m awoken by the sound of my father coming in the front door to wake me up and take me to school. I look up bleary-eyed from the couch to see his face in the small window at the top of his front door, never locked. When I remember this event, I think of my father’s love for me, often hard for him to express, but obvious to me here.
Early winter morning with my father Read More »
I rather like this, even if it’s probably not true:
The story goes that Captain Jack Hayes and his men, the fabled Texas Rangers, were surrounded and vastly outnumbered during one of the many skirmishes of the Mexican War. He made the following prayer, certainly one of the most colorful ever made before battle: “Oh Lord, we are about to join battle with vastly superior numbers of the enemy, and, Heavenly Father, we would like for you to be on our side and help us; but if you can’t do it, for Christ’s sake don’t go over to the enemy, but just lie low and keep dark, and you’ll see one of the damndest fights you ever saw in all your born days. Amen.”
As I said, probably apocryphal, but a great story nonetheless.
The spirit of the real Texas Rangers Read More »
Following is a dream from my buddy Ben’s blog, in May 2002. Ben’s dreams are great. Most people’s dreams are boring as hell, at least when they’re retelling them to you, but I always enjoy Ben’s. In fact, I still have an email he sent me 5 years ago describing a dream he had involving floating and Bach’s music. Enjoy.
Dream 5/1/02
I dreamt last night of going to an alternative theatrical presentation of the works of Mark Twain, down at what started out to be Marshall, Missouri and ended up being Drury College, in Springfield. Jans and I did help stack sand bags for a fire station in Marshall, which became an impromptu fly fishing workshop. The college had the most amazing printed flyers, generated by their print shop. I went back to see the print shop, and the director of the library, who was in charge of the print shop, thought I was trying to hire away his prize employee. I saw the speech beforehand, but missed the performance itself. People talked about how amazing it was – the performance was ongoing, and focused on character sketches of various Mark Twain creations in everyday settings, so one could simply walk in and catch snapshots of it without losing the narrative flow.
Coinciding was an animation festival, which included cartoon and live-based animation, with special effects. Howard, of Kaldi’s coffee, had an entry about a man trying to fend of a giant mosquito that was keeping him up at night. One of the entries was a live action puppet show, with an interaction between a large, golden painted, crudely made beetle and a quarter that kept up a barrage of insults and challenges, underneath a glass dome, . To hear it, you had to stand right next to it, which I let the rest of the crowd know when they were trying to figure out why they couldn’t hear since I was the only one nearby.
From The New York Times:
Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.
On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
Incompetent people don’t know it Read More »
From BrainChannels:
Mr. Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee) is chiefly renowned as the architect of the notion of flow in creativity; people enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction. Mr. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
One of my favorite ideas: flow Read More »
From Nat Friedman:
For twelve months in 1998 and 1999, I went through this phase of trying to “diversify my interests,” and signed up to take piano lessons. My teacher’s name was Peter, this rigid Eastern European math major who instructed piano to idiots like me on the side. In our first lesson, I was showing off that I knew a few notes of Fur Elise, when he abruptly interrupted, shouting: “What? Beethoven? Do not try to express what you cannot understand!”
The strictest of teachers Read More »
From Twin Galaxies
For the first time in video game playing history, a perfect score was achieved on the legendary arcade game, Pac-Man.
On July 3, 1999 at 4:45 P.M., taking nearly six hours to accomplish the feat — on one quarter — Billy Mitchell, 33, a Fort Lauderdale hot sauce manufacturer visiting the famous Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, NH, scored 3,333,360 points — the maximum possible points allowed by the game. The results will go into next year’s edition of the Twin Galaxies’ Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records — which is the official record book for the world of video game and pinball playing. …
To get a perfect game on Pac-Man, the player has to eat every dot, every energizer, every blue man and every fruit up to and including board 256 — where the game ends with a split screen. This must be accomplished on the first man, too.
When I was a freshman in high school in Marshall, I played Pac-Man constantly. I actually won a contest for Saline County Pac-Man champ, and my prize was an Atari 2600. My all-time high score was 1,187,000, played in the Wal-Mart lobby over the course of two hours.
Perfect Score Achieved on Pac-Man Read More »
George Bernard Shaw supposedly asked a woman if she would sleep with him for a million pounds. Her demure response was “Certainly.” But when he asked her if she would sleep with him for 10 pounds, her response was “Sir, what do you think I am?”, to which Shaw retorted “Madam, we’ve already determined what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
Great story about Shaw Read More »
So I’m listening to Car Talk on NPR, hosted by Tom and Ray, AKA Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, and this woman calls in, and she says this:
Well hello, Click and Clack,
My name’s Mary Mack,
And I’m from Portland, Oregon.
And I thought, my God, but that scans really well. Try it — her meter really flows well. Very impressive.
She’s a poet and don’t know it Read More »
Today’s word: aposiopesis: ap.o.si.o.pe.sis n., pl. -ses [Lat. <Gk. aposiopesis <aposiopan, to become silent: apo- (intensive) + siopan, to be silent <siope, silence] A sudden breaking off of a thought in the middle of a sentence, as though the speaker were unwilling or unable to continue.
Word of the day: aposiopesis Read More »