The Know Your Meme Team recruited Weird Al to explain the Autotune trend taking the world wide web by storm.
Category: Culture
Look at meme – Autotune
Cutting a pizza – it’s easy as pi
A bunch of mathematicians (no doubt uni students) have attempted to solve the dilemma of distributing pizza slices evenly to people who have made equal contributions to the pizza buying cause. This article explains.
The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?
It’s complex. Apparently. If you have two diners, and the pizza is cut an even number of times, the trick is to take alternate pieces.
It has been known since the 1960s that when N is even and greater than 2, an answer to the first question is for Gray and White to choose alternate slices about the point P of concurrency.
The conclusion – from the paper that’ll cost you $20 to buy – was this:
It was conjectured by Stan Wagon and others, that for N=3,7,11,15,…, whoever gets the center gets the most pizza, while for N=5,9,13,17,…, whoever gets the center gets the least. We prove this Pizza Conjecture by first showing its equivalence to a (pretty wild) trigonometric inequality. This inequality is proved with the aid of a theorem that counts lattice paths. Our main theorem is sufficiently general that, as a bonus, results concerning the equiangular slicing of other dishes are obtained.
One can only assume all this would be easier with one of these plates.
Good coverage: Sometimes cover songs are better than the original
I’m a sucker for badly sung covers of popular songs. I remember discovering Grum Lee’s now defunct website of purposefully bad acoustic covers sung with a French accent and thinking it was terrific. The site is dead – but Grum lives on, immortalised in YouTube…
Here he is singing a Dandy Warhols number.
The reason I post this is because I just watched this video Dave Miers posted today of a kid on a ukelele murdering the lyrics to that annoying Jason Mraz song.
High steaks art
Steak Filter v0 – init from AKA MEDIA SYSTEM on Vimeo.
I am plugging composite video into a big steak, which is then cooked. The video signal going through the steak is the image of the steak cooking. Gradually, the steak loses moisture and signal can no longer pass.
Symphony and Motorola
Vodafone put together this cool little mobile phone orchestra.
It does remind me of that scene in Black Books where Bernard takes a wooden mallet to a mobile phone.
Chess block sing
Lego stop motion videos are one of my favourite things. And I’ve got a soft spot for hip-hop. The Wu Tang Clan have never been my cup of tea – but this Lego version of their Chess Boxing video is pretty cool.
Chocolate fudge coated candied bacon = awesome
Bacon beer was cool. Bacon Jam sounded pretty great. But this one has to take the cake. Candied bacon by itself sounds like a taste sensation. Coat it with fudge and it’s just decadence.
Here’s how to make it.
Football Hero
Tim posted this a while back. I’ve been meaning to use it as a YouTube Tuesday video ever since. It’s brilliant. Check it.
Recanting some more
Mumford and Sons caused me to recant my long held position on folk music – and it turns out they’ve undone another little piece of music snobbery.
Despite the liberal application of the “f” word in their current single – which probably turns off heaps of Christian listeners – it appears that the guys in the band are in fact Christians. And since their songs spend a fair bit of time dealing with Christian stuff I could begrudgingly define their music as Christian music. And we all know how I feel about that.
I looked it up online because I was pretty convinced based on some of the lyrics that the album Sigh No More is at the very least a musical documentation of someone’s dalliance with God, and Christian belief.
I’m intrigued by some of the lyrics from this album. Clearly they’re about a man struggling between the flesh and the spiritual. Here’s a post with a bit of an analysis of the lyrics, and here’s one from someone who couldn’t take all the Jesus talk…
Here are some of their lyrics.
Dust Bowl Dance
there will come a time when I will look in your eye
You will pray to the god that you’ve always denied
I’ll go out back and I’ll get my gun
I’ll say you haven’t met me, I am the only son.White Blank pages
Can you lie next to her
And give her your heart, your heart
As well as your body
And can you lie next to her
And confess your love, your love
As well as your folly
And can you kneel before the king
And say I’m clean, I’m cleanAwake My Soul
In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, you invest your lifeAwake my soul, awake my soul
Awake my soul
You were made to meet your makerRoll Away Your Stone
You told me that I would find a hole
Within the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal
And all the while my character it steals
And here are some songs for your listening pleasure.
YouTube Tuesday: You may now update your status
Here’s an interesting way to begin married life.
Something there seems a little bit amiss. But you know, things aren’t real until they’re on Facebook.
The world’s saddest group blog
Online therapy sessions are pretty sad. First there was My Life is Average – it’s kind of group therapy.
Now… there’s “My Life is Twilight“… for the truly sad and lonely.
So im 25 yrs old I have been a twilight fan since 2 months before the 1st movie came out I read the boks and loved them, Ive allwayz loved the whole vampire thing so Twilight was just my thing, so in august I got the cullen crest on my right arm Ilove it and now I feel im a cullen…
Deconstructing Disney
When I passed horrible and scathing judgment on the Little Mermaid the other day people leapt to the poor thing’s defence.
But here’s another analysis of Disney princesses – and it’s not pretty. The fairytale existence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
And here’s an analysis of the men in the stories…
They deserve each other really.
The rules of Shotgun
Here are the official rules of Shotgun. In case you were wondering.
Though I think there should be an exception that comes into play when someone actually has a shotgun in hand. They should get the seat. This is not included in the rules.
Here is one rule I didn’t know about…
The Balk
This rule is applied when you have called Shotgun and are waiting for the doors to be unlocked. If you lift the handle while the doors are being unlocked and therefore cause the Shotgun door to remain locked, then you are “voided” for that ride. At this time Shotgun is available for all of the other passengers to call.