Letters Remain

Category: humour

  • Creating Indexed Users

    When it was live, I used to look forward to the next instalment of Creating Passionate Users; a blog on doing business in the IT sector where the writers were “all passionate about the brain and meta-cognition”. The entries were comical and the accompanying graphs were simple, elegant, and really were worth a thousand words.…

  • Parental Conversations

    Mc Sweeney’s Conversations My Parents Must Have Had While Planning to Raise a Child made me laugh… DAD: When I teach her to ride a bike, I will tell her that my hand is on the seat, but then I will take it away just as she is getting the hang of it. MOM: That…

  • The $1m Test-Tube Chicken (Meat)

    The X Prize Foundation is a non-profit institute that awards rather large prizes to non-governmental organisations who achieve a number of milestones, classed as beneficial to mankind. The most famous of these was the Ansari X Prize awarded to the first NGO to send a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice in two weeks –…

  • Jonathan Franzen on Shanghai

    The novelist Jonathan Franzen is skilled at describing the rich and colourful dreams we have about our futures, whilst still managing to portray the bleak reality of life for society at large (I loved The Corrections). Shanghai seems like a great place for this style to really shine, as a recent audio story in The…

  • British Standard for Tea Brewing

    Conforming to standards is an important part of many jobs, and tea brewing is no exception. In 1980 the British Standards Group produced a document, Method for Preparation of a Liquor of Tea, setting out, once and for all, the British Standard method for the brewing of tea. I’m sure its raison d’être was in…

  • Ze Frank’s ‘The Show’

    I first came across Ze Frank in August 2006 when I watched his TED Talk, What’s so funny about the Web? Since then I hear of Ze sporadically, but have never really looked into any of his work. Well, that was until this morning when I came across The Show. produced monday through friday for…

  • Books That Make You Dumb

    BooksThatMakeYouDumb is a little ‘statistical’ graph on how average SAT scores correlate with what books people read. Accepting it’s unscientificness Virgil (the creator) lists the most notable things about the data: Harry Potter is the most popular book. The Bible is the second most popular book. At least among college students, Harry Potter is, like…

  • Bash’s IRC Quotes

    Back in the day I used to spend a fair amount of time in various IRC channels. If you did too, you’ll feel a pang of nostalgia reading the great quotes at Bash.org. <Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam <bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls…

  • Pavlov’s Musical Dog

    Back in early December 2007, I submitted one of my favourite Psychology jokes to Mind Hacks. The comic strip I sent in was duly posted along with some other interesting links: Ivan Pavlov and Brian Wilson – together at last! This rather unlikely combination seemed to spark a bit of interest, so here is a…

  • Screenwipe with Bill O’Reilly and Adam Curtis

    I’ve just finished watching S4E3 of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe with its hilarious commentary on modern news reporting… I didn’t realise how completely insane Bill O’Reilly is! Part two of the episode also shows a short film created by the exceptional Adam Curtis – creator of such incredible documentaries as The Century of the Self and…