Archive for the 'People Are Dumb' CategoryPage 2 of 14

Bullet the Blue Sky

Published
by
Jake
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in BiblioThingy, Curiosities, People Are Dumb, Televisio and World Gone Mad
. 0 Comments

Or… Y’know… A bulleted list of junk from the internets:

That is all.

Trsly

Published
by
Jake
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blog Meta, People Are Dumb and The Intarweb
. 2 Comments

Andre points to Trsly.com, which may be a lot of fun. At the very least it should give me a place to put quick links to all the *boggle* I find on the intarwebs but choose not to post here.

I’ll need to see about hacking it into my WordPress theme, but in the mean time you can subscribe to my quotes with that wild feed reading technology. (Or not. The user-level feed link is actually busted at the moment, which sucks balls.)

Hit ‘Em Again

Published
by
Jake
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in BiblioThingy, Cinerama, Colorado Living, Curiosities, Folx, Getting Fit, People Are Dumb, Televisio, TuneStuff and World Gone Mad
. 2 Comments

Here’s to having MLK Day off from work!

Going for my walk/run today in 15 degree (F) temps wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting. Until my calf started cramping. That had nothing to do with the cold, though. It was ready to go from the activity earlier in the weekend.

Junk I’ve run across:

Hey, how are ya?

Published
by
Jake
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Folx, Monkey Revolution, Obsessions, People Are Dumb, TechnoLust, Televisio and World Gone Mad
. 0 Comments

Some random crap:

My mommy got me a 40″ Sony LCD HDTV for Xmas. I was planning to get something in the 46″ range later in 2008, but 40″ turns out to be plenty big (plus, it’s free, yo!). That mother of mine is pretty cool. Even if she does have a thundering herd of Great Danes at her house (including this one and this one, who will make you cry).

—

Did you hear the Lakota have decided to secede from the US? I figure this is roughly equivalent to them going on strike. They’re grabbing some attention and might get some sort fo concession from the US government, but in the end it will amount to nothing. Though, Brozo and I think it’d be fun if they started tolling traffic on I-90 and formed an army. How long do you think it would take for them to be labeled “terrorists” if they did that?

—

Did you hear that monkeys are as good at mental mathematics as college kids?

“We had them do math on the fly,” Cantlon said.

The task was to mentally add two sets of dots that were briefly flashed on a computer screen. The teams were asked to pick the correct answer from two choices on a different screen.

The humans were not allowed to count or verbalize as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible. Both monkeys and humans typically answered within 1 second.

And both groups fared about the same.

Great. Just great.

—

Maybe they can help economists decide whether there’s going to be a recession or not.

“A lot of the underlying resilience of the U.S. economy seems a bit unappreciated,” says Citigroup economist Steven Wieting. “It’s not clear that this is so large a burden that we can’t muddle through this.”

That’s the best this guy could come up with? Muddle through?

Bah! I’ll show you “clubby”.

Published
by
Jake
5 months, 1 week ago
in People Are Dumb and TechnoLust
. 1 Comment

I hate the Apple Store. I have from the beginning. I guess some people like it (or did like it), but I’m not one of them.

I like to be able to actually buy things in stores without having to enlist a fulltime escort. Nothing frustrated me more than needing a new iPod, walking into the store, seeing a table loaded with iPods packaged for Christmas joy… BEHIND a friggin’ rope. I stood there frozen, staring at my just out of my reach goal, thinking “How… Do… I… Buy… One…?” until I got frustrated enough to walk out and buy the iPod online from home.

Conversely, I was fine with the expectation of having to talk to someone when I wanted to buy my iMac. That’s a big purchase with options involved. I’m fine talking to someone about that. I shouldn’t need to talk to someone to buy an iPod, though. At least not until my credit card is out.

Lexicographic Smackdown

Published
by
Jake
6 months, 1 week ago
in Albainn Gu Brath, BiblioThingy and People Are Dumb
. 0 Comments

Having spend a number of years in/around Boston, I can testify that it becomes increasingly believable that the Irish may have invented the world.

Perhaps this tendency isn’t only a Beantown phenomenon, as illustrated by this NYTimes article about tracing a large portion of the modern slang dictionary to the Irish Gaelic tongue. The book, for which the article is basically an advertisement, is actually called How the Irish Invented Slang.

Like I said, though, it’s kind of easy to fall for these types of hypotheses (for whatever reason). Luckily, the intarwebs are full of differing opinions on just about any subject you could imagine. In this case, the counterpoint is solid:

In January 2005, I challenged Cassidy to present all of his evidence. I told him that I’m the descendant of three strains of Irish, four strains of empiricist, and the son of a bluster-catcher, and I said he was going to have to do better than trot out the same-old “they’re all against me!� argument of every perpetual motion inventor.

To date, what he’s provided as evidence is flimsy and fouled by scholarly incompetence.

Just fair warning, if you’re at all like me and tend to fall for the various romantic myths of the various Celtic peoples. Besides, everyone knows the Scots invented everything! ;^)

Here’s tae us
Wha’s like us
Damn few,
And they’re a’ deid
Mair’s the pity!

—

Track o’ the Post: Erin Go Bragh from Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth. (Dick Gaughan, it’s worth noting, is a Scot and something of an internet geek. Nice!)