Month: September 2003

Rage Against the Sausage

By AMH

I’ve got the Emmy’s on in the background while I’m cooking dinner (wooo – the Daily Show just won its second Emmy of the night!), and Dennis Miller did a bit on the “year in review” which was mostly predictable, but his sports highlight from the year was the Milwaukee sausage getting clobbered by a Pirate! Wheeee! That video clip never gets old. I haven’t watched the Emmy’s in years, though – I’d no idea they were so goofy. It’s like a ton of minute-long comedy bits, with hyper-rushed 30 second award presentations. It also seems wrong that the Academy … Continue reading Rage Against the Sausage

Herding Cats and Dealing Drugs

By AMH

Even up north, it’s a windy, rainy, stay-inside day. If you’re warm and with power, have some nice mindless fun trying out the new cat herding game Cats over at Orisinal. [via PCJM] I also finally tried out the much cited Virtual Drug Dealer, which is the type of game therapists should use to diagnosis your personality. Are you the type who buys a little of everything? Or blows it all on one unit of DesignerZ when the price dips low and hopes to make a fortune on a one-time deal? Frankly, if it weren’t for the fact that Use … Continue reading Herding Cats and Dealing Drugs

September Holidays

By AMH

Lots of special holidays looming! Tomorrow on the 19th, of course, we get the first Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrr! Wear your eye patch and cutlass to work, or just go see Pirates of the Caribbean again. Then entertain your more serious side, and celebrate the start of Banned Books Week starting on Saturday. Then close off the weekend with The International Day of Peace on Sunday.

Language Puzzles

By AMH

I loved rebuses as a kid. There are hundreds of them at Rozie’s puzzle site, along with some other games and puzzles. The off-site Enigma Puzzle is a fun implementation of a one-level letter substitution code where you use letter swaps to resolve in on a decoding.

Science Shows, Old and New

By AMH

I grew up with 3-2-1 Contact, remembered mostly to me as “that show with The Bloodhound Gang”, because everyone knew that was why you tuned in. (And, by the way, I am quite sadenned that searching for the actual show title by Googling “Bloodhound Gang” results in pages of links to a band which appears to be best known for a song called “Hooray for Boobies”, because the internet shouldn’t tarnish all my childhood memories.) After 3-2-1 Contact went off the air (and stopped publishing their very cool magazine…), I found Square One, which I watched way passed the intended … Continue reading Science Shows, Old and New

6-Degrees Online

By AMH

The recreation of Milgram’s “6-degrees of separation” study on the internet which I linked to a ways back has now been completed, and the results are consistent though not identical to the snail-mail results. Messages were still able to find their way though in about six steps (the researchers attribute the huge drop-out rate to disinclination rather than inability to find a suitable person to forward to). Despite the small percentage of messages that got through, the absolute number was many times larger than in Milgram’s study (384 vs. 13 successful messages), and they were able to investigate his theory … Continue reading 6-Degrees Online

Greek Reality

By AMH

I have no comment on this entry from Everything Once, My Big Fat Greek Blinding, except to say that it has nothing to do with the movie its title spoofs off of, but is rather a hilarious contemplation of the reality of Greek mythology. Trust me – just go read it.

Class of 2007 Mindset List

By AMH

It’s moved on from overdone to a yearly academic tradition: the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2007 is out. There are always a couple of items on the list which surprise me and illuminate small changes that I never noticed happening. This year, those items include: 8. An automatic is a weapon, not a transmission. 12. Gas has always been unleaded. 32. They have always had a pin number. 33. Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America.

Not Pittsburg

By AMH

How did I miss this! I noticed a link to this list of Most Misspelled Cities in America (based on web search data), but nobody told me number 1 is Pittsburgh! I mean, I momentarily thought it might make the top ten, but it’s just not that hard to spell. Of course, as the article points out, in the late 1800’s the U.S. Board on Geographic Names standardized location spellings after over a century of people naming their towns whatever they wanted, willy-nilly. They ruled that all *-burghs would drop their final “h”, except for Pittsburgh, which got an exemption. … Continue reading Not Pittsburg

Close Mars

By AMH

I had vaguely heard that Mars was closer to Earth than it had been for millenia, but I hadn’t really paid much attention to that fact before I was outside a couple of weeks ago and was positively freaked out by the red object in the sky near the moon. I’ve never before been able to notice the red color that people claim they can see in Mars (it’s always looked white to me…) so it was the first time I’d ever noticed a star or planet actually having a color, and I found it eerie. Since then, I’ve been … Continue reading Close Mars