This is hard to do:
Now there are some unanswered questions. Can he scale it? Does it have to be on a vertical surface? Can he find the center? Can he draw a square with the same area?
This doesn’t apply to me, of course, since I get to frolic on the streets of New York and visit Seed and MoMA.
(via Minnesota Stories)
Hank Fox, who assures me that he is ALL MAN (just look at that beard), told me to take this test…and I seem to have a woman’s brain.
It’s my result from my BBC sex test. I think I confused them, though: I did well on all the spatial reasoning tests and kind of bombed on the empathy stuff (male!), but I also kicked ass on the “spot the difference” test and the ability to recognize emotions from just eyes (female and off the scale!). Being able to spit out 16 and 17 synonyms for a word also makes me more ladylike, I guess.
(When you look at the actual raw scores and the averages, though, my main impression is that men and women aren’t that much different from one another, given the likely amount of variation.)
The madmen of the WAAGNFNP have gone too far—now they’ve put out a warrant for my arrest (scroll down through the comments). Chris Clarke wasn’t enough to slake their bloodlust, I guess, so now they’ve just picked out a random, innocent target.
Watch out, or you’ll be next.
If you had a crummy Christmas morning (I didn’t, so I’m just linking these as a public service), here are a few outlets.
Silly Humans finds an Evil Santa Generator — create your own nasty, scabrous, ugly Santa Claus, suitable for framing.
If you really want to know why Santa gave you such a crappy Christmas, read about the legend of El Caganer, and you will understand.
My Santa was a sweet, jolly fellow who got me a stack of books, a pound of smoked salmon, and the first season of Deadwood on DVD, so I’m going to enjoy a profane, cynical, bloody Western after I get the Christmas feast cooking slowly in the oven.
I am horrified. The J Train tries to ruin Christmas Eve with this…abomination. Don’t watch it if you value your eyes, ears, sense of equilibrium, and sanity. It’s Celine Dion doing AC/DC.
And here I’ve been using Cthulhu as a signifier for incomprehensibly monstrous alien horrors. There’s a new standard.
Better sit down for this one. Santa Claus is dead.
Children watched in horror as a Santa Claus collapsed and died as he handed out presents at a Christmas party on Sunday.
Maybe we should sic Edward Tufte on ’em—Feministing found some amazing posters that purport to explain everything with the power of overwrought metaphor and cluttered, confusing cartoons. It just draws your eye in with the awesomeness of its arbitrariness.
So contraception is the source of single-parent families and infanticide? The stalk of divorce leads to the flower of abortion? The leaves of adultery and pre-marital sex use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make the sugar of sexual chaos that is stored in the root of coitus interruptus? Watch out, kids, if you blow on the puffball of euthansia, you’ll spread the seeds of a thousand new sex weeds! Now go in the house and wash the lust and hedonism off your hands.
It just doesn’t make sense.
I realized, though, that anybody can slap random labels on a random diagram to send meaningless messages out. Even me. So here you go, a fun and informative diagram that will help you understand all kinds of curious relationships in the world around you.
Please, use this information wisely and be sure to let it guide your life…to a brighter, healthier future, rich with the well-earned fruits of ying tong iddle I po.
We know that spammers cobble up chunks of text by skimming various sources, such as religious tracts, but a reader has discovered that they also pull random text from newspapers. My name has appeared in spam!
That’s from a Star Tribune article that quoted me—now I’m wondering what the spammer was trying to sell under my name.
Sometimes one does get a little tired of powerpoint presentations, but the subject matter can help overcome the tedium: here’s one on The Evolution of Vampires, Homo sapiens whedonum. It’s an interesting exercise in free-running BS, but still, there’s some surprisingly accurate general information about the principles of evolution embedded in all the silliness.
(via Jonathan Arnold)
