This headline is on page A11 of this morning’s Boston Globe:
Homeland Security makes plans to protect border from violence
It’s just crazy enough to work!
Author: Ben
On a Stick With a Brick?
I imagine this is what reCAPTCHA images would look like on Scrubs:
Scrubs reCAPTCHA?
Classified: Awesome
Our help desk got a question this morning that began:
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
It ended with an Army Major’s signature.
This leads me to wonder what should happen if we ever get a CLASSIFIED question from the Army at our help desk.
Unreachable
From my own code:
if ($ok) { // ... snip ... return; } else { // ... snip ... exit; }// ... snip ... 50 lines of unreachable (and buggy) code
That can’t be good…
Juno
You must watch Juno. This independent movie stars Ellen Page and features Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, and Allison Janney (for starters), and tells the story of a girl who gets pregnant.
I expected to see either “an emotional roller coaster” or “a heartwarming tale of a young girl’s battle to overcome family adversity and raise a child alone.” This movie is neither. It’s a charming story, in fact. A girl in a loving family finds herself pregnant, and works through the situation. She’s funny, her family at no point threatens to kick her out if she doesn’t get her act together, and the film never takes itself too seriously. It’s the best of what independent cinema can do.
Bleeker: So what do you think we should do?
Juno: I thought I might, you know, nip it in the bud before it gets worse. Because I heard in health class that pregnancy often results in an infant.
Bleeker: Yeah, typically. That’s what happens when our moms and teachers get pregnant.
Plus, I discovered just after watching it that it’s mentioned in an episode of The Big Bang Theory, where Rajesh Koothrappali is featured in the same magazine article as “Ellen Page, star of the charming independent film Juno.”
Snakes on My Plane
On my way onto my Northwest Airlines flight to Phoenix on Friday, I passed a row of small, screaming children, who were having a heated argument with their parents about (I hope) which toys they were allowed to have while the plane sat at the gate. All I heard as I walked by was:
Kid #1: I want to see the snake!
Kid #2: It’s not a snake! It’s not a snake! It’s not a snake!
Somebody get those monkey-fighting snakes off this Monday-to-Friday plane!
(That, for the record, would be Samuel L. Jackson’s line from Snakes on a Plane as aired on television, according to the Internet Movie Database.)
What a Crock
In marketing classes as an undergraduate, I studied how strong branding can sometimes worsen sales. Certainly one expects to avoid distrusted brands. Windows Vista has to masquerade as Mojave to even get people to look at it, and ValuJet had to rebrand itself as AirTran after a fatal crash in 1996.
More interesting are trusted brands that still apply poorly to new products. In class, the first example was the hypothetical “Campbell’s tomato sauce.” Campbell’s is a respected name in soup, but that makes it too easy to imagine their tomato soup, which wouldn’t go well on pasta. Hence, the Campbell Soup Company uses the name Prego to sell sauces.
Country Crock needs to study this concept in detail. They sent me a coupon for their “new to me” line of Side Dishes, such as the essential Four Cheese Pasta. I’ll buy just about any multi-cheese invention, but unfortunately for Country Crock they’ve packaged the meal in exactly the same format as their famous “spread” (i.e., butter substitue). Looking at it, I can’t stop picturing myself eating an entire tub of butter with a spoon, and I get a lot less hungry.
(I’m making myself try it anyway in my next Peapod order to give them a fair chance, but they’re starting off with some heavy negative marks in the “appetizing” category.)
Depending On Your Prices, I May Want to Shop There
I’m shopping for new eyeglasses (or perhaps just new lenses), and Cambridge EyeDoctors got my attention with the advertisement “$89 complete eyeglass package.” I naturally went straight to their website to look for locations. There, I found the single best line ever written in the entire history of marketing.
Depending on your lifestyle, personal preference, and vision needs, you may want or need an additional pair of glasses. One pair should be used to provide vision correction while performing your primary activities. A second pair can be used to compliment or provide vision correction for other activities in which you participate.
Depending on your humor preferences, you may want to read a punchline after that quote. The punchline could be constructed by assembling words in an order you’d find favorable.
I Am Extremely
Years ago, Google helpfully added a “search suggestions” box that recommends possible search terms as you start typing your query. Type “Tina” and it recommends “Tina Fey.” This is even integrated into Firefox now, so you can get the same suggestions when typing in the browser’s own search box.
This is old news, of course. What’s new (at least to me) is the particular suggestions you get if you start to enter “I am extremely”
I am Extremely... Scared?
The first few make sense (at least for the Internet)
i am extremely tired 9,070,000 results i am extremely depressed 4,730,000 results i am extremely lonely 291,000 results i am extremely jealous 324,000 results i am extremely shy 3,650,000 results
It’s the last one that’s surprising:
i am extremely terrified of chinese people 303,000 results
That’s surprisingly specific… and surprisingly popular.
Second Base, Mr. Feynman?
Wow! I found an instance where Feynman turned out to be wrong about something!
The Textbook League (no, I did not just make that name up) republished the part of Feynman’s book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman describing his participation in the State [California] Curriculum Commission’s efforts to choose new textbooks.
The commission did some phenomenally idiotic things, up to and including rating one textbook that was “printed” with entirely blank pages. (They rated it favorably.) Of course, you already knew that, since you have already read Feynman’s books.
As I reread it online, this excerpt in particular stood out:
They would talk about different bases of numbers — five, six, and so on — to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten — something to entertain his mind. But what they turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: “Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five.” Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it’s entertaining; if you can’t do it, forget it. There’s no point to it.
When this happened in 1964, there was probably no point at all. Today, however, every software developer has had (at least once) to convert base 10 into base 16 or base 2. Those like me found the exercise frustrating at first. If only there’d been some sort of practice for this in the mathematics textbooks of my childhood!
(I’m mostly joking — surely! — but I do find interesting how that analysis might be completely different today.)