Category: humour
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Get Your Own Eponymous Law
Always wanted to achieve intellectual immortality? Now it’s possible thanks to Samuel Arbesmanâa postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical Schoolâwho shows us how to get a theorem, formula or law named after yourself, in a few easy steps. Of course, before you go out and begin to grace the world with your newly minted eponymous idea,…
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A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humour
Browsing through the Wikipedia entry for mathematical jokes, I noticed a reference to the intriguingly titled Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor (pdf) that appeared in Notices of the American Mathematical Society back in 2004. Many English-language mathematical jokes are based on word play involving standard mathematical concepts and terminology. In fact, many of the jokes…
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A Thanksgiving/Christmas Prayer (for Atheists)
A prayer for atheists before Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner: Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this. Amen.
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Remarketing the Bible
Some modernised versions of the Bible for a contemporary audience: The Jesus Loves Porn Stars Bible, The Manga Bible, The Bible in Cockney, The (Lego) Brick Testament, and the all-star Bible podcast (featuring Forest Whitaker, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Samuel L Jackson, no less). The person behind this remarketing of holy writings is Dag Soederberg, a…
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The Nerd Handbook and Caring for Your Introvert
Rands In Repose’s Nerd Handbook is an essay on understanding geeks; from our insatiable appetite for knowledge to our hard-to-decipher social interaction ‘skills’. The Handbook is at times painfully precise. The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the…
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The Counter-Intuitive Comparison of All Things
The Big Chart, created by The Counter-Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America (CICINA), attempts to find the single best thing in the world using a tournament-style bracketing system to compare 16,384 things in 8 categories (ideas, art, people, fuels, words, other animals, places and other things). Is the Bilbao Guggenheim better than McDonald’s French fries?…
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The Undead: Walkers or Runners?
I’ve heard on good authority that Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set is a rather excellent mini-series. It’s also controversial, sparking an argument on whether or not zombies can run. Simon Pegg is of the belief that they can’t, as he elucidates in his latest article for The Guardian: More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of…
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British, American, and German Senses of Humour
The reason why Britons believe that the Germans have no sense of humour is a language problem, not a humour problem. One example: The German phenomenon of compound words also serves to confound the English sense of humour. In English there are many words that have double or even triple meanings, and whole sitcom plot…
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Esoteric Programming Languages
A few interesting esoteric programming languages: Shakespeare Chef Brainfuck Whitespace LOLCODE As you may be able to guess, LOLCODE is my favourite. Here’s ‘Hello World’: HAI CAN HAS STDIO? VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!” KTHXBYE
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Beard Chart
As David said; the beard chart is an important resource. One that seems to be absent: ‘The Jesus’, as modelled in The Big Lebowski. via Link Banana