Category: Culture

Have your sweets, and eat it two

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

When I have children this is going to be part of the daily dining ritual. This is an apparently famous little social experiment. The kids get two marshmallows if they can not eat the first one for a few minutes.

I reckon the game would be more fun if you didn’t let the kid have the first marshmallow after they waited. That would be a life lesson.

I also want to teach my children that red is blue – like one of my friends did to her little brother (I can’t remember the colours she used).

September 19, 2009

Pardon the interruption

This is the funniest Kanye joke yet…

Kanye and Genesis

Here’s another one… knock knock
Who’s there?
Interrupting Kanye
Interupting Ka…
Yo, doorman, I know you have to welcome me, and I’m going to let you finish, but Beyonce told the best knock knock joke of all time…

I made that one myself. Can you tell?

Speaking of which, I’m always on the look out for knock knock jokes – tell me your favourites in the comments.

September 18, 2009

Poe’s Law

I love satire. Of most colours. I like it when Christians satirise our own culture, and when non-Christians do it too. Satire is revealing. It is good for teaching. It makes me laugh.

LarkNews is one of my favourite satire sites, I know of a few people who have fallen for its satire in the past…

People reposting satire as real news is pretty funny – like when a couple of mainstream news outlets picked up an Onion piece that reported the moon landing was fake.

Poe’s Law didn’t make the Wikipedia list of eponymous laws I mentioned previously – but you can read it on this page – RationalWiki’s page.

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.

It’s one of those Internet subculture things particular to debates with atheists (along with the No True Scotsman Fallacy) that comes up all the time. It’s a shorthand thing that prevents any real discussion taking place springing from an extreme position. The problem is that sometimes extreme positions may be correct. This is my biggest problem with all the conversational threads I’ve read on the atheist blogs I follow. If it turns out that God exists (as I believe he does) they’re going to look like idiots. This is the problem with Occam’s Razor, and in fact any other eponymous law that becomes common parlance. There are times when there’ll be a complex explanation for something that is true while a more simple explanation with less steps may be wrong. There are times when it’s appropriate to reference Hitler in an argument (Godwin’s Law). There are times when someone will be claiming to be a Scotsman when they’re not (the No True Scotsman Fallacy).

Using these laws in conversations who don’t know about them makes you look like a prat. Especially if you end up quoting them and being wrong.

I’m going to posit my own eponymous law – and I’d like it to catch on. Campbell’s Law. It states:

“As the length of argument on the internet increases the probability of referencing an irrelevant eponymous law or incorrectly identifying a fallacy approaches one.”

I’ll posit a second law.

“Just because someone, somewhere, has described a common phenomena as a “law”, it does not necessarily render the practice a transgression.”

September 18, 2009

Five cool wikipedia articles

In the spirit of Ben’s listmania here are five cool Wikipedia articles – most of which have been pulled from this blog I discovered called Best of Wikipedia.

  1. Wrap Rage Wrap rage, also called package rage, is the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open hard-to-remove packagingWrap Rage Wrap rage, also called package rage, is the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open hard-to-remove packaging
  2. Erdős–Bacon Number A person’s Erdős–Bacon number is a concept which reflects the small world phenomenon in academia and entertainment. It is the sum of one’s Erdős number—which measures the “collaborative distance” in authoring mathematical papers between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one’s Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon. The lower the number, the closer a person is to Erdős and Bacon.
  3. Nocebo The adjective nocebo is used to label the harmful or unpleasant reactions that a subject manifested as a result of administering a placebo drug, where these responses had not been chemically generated, and were entirely due to the subject’s pessimistic belief and expectation that the inert drug would produce harmful, injurious, unpleasant, or undesirable consequences.
  4. The Turk The Turk was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854, it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was explained in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax. With a skilled operator, the Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for nearly 84 years, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.
  5. I found this one by myself when I was looking up this thing called “Poe’s Law” that I hear atheists mentioning all the time when talking about satire about Christian stuff… it’s a list of eponymous laws – from the Famous (like Murphy’s Law, to the obscure internet phenomena – like Godwin’s Law).

Share any favourites of yours in the comments…

September 18, 2009

Books, old and new

I like books. I like old books. I like book titles. You can judge a book by its cover. Normally.

Kottke linked to this great little discussion thread featuring old books retitled for today’s market.

It started off with these – and got more fun in the comments:

“Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Then: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany

Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

Then: The Prince
Now: The Prince (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey)”

September 18, 2009

Meaty graphic on relative prosperity

Good posts really good infographics – like this one about the average consumption of meat in the ten biggest meat eating countries (Australia doesn’t make the grade but New Zealand does), and the ten smallest meat eating countries.

The premise is that as countries develop they eat more meat.

September 16, 2009

Irresistable Resistance

I picked up a copy of Muse’s new album – The Resistance – on Saturday morning. Well, when I say “picked up”, I mean downloaded on iTunes. I’m starting to adjust to the intangibility of online music purchases. Slowly. The vernacular will probably catch up one day too… but enough about me.

I’ve listened to the album a bunch of times now – and I’ve enjoyed it. I want to sit down one day and listen to the entire Muse catalogue from Showbiz to now – I think they’ve undergone a pretty interesting development while still maintaining the same fundamentals that make them popular.

I still think Absolution is their best album, then probably Origin of Symmetry – but I’ve listened to those significantly more than the latest two.

What I really like about Muse is that they seem to really enjoy being in a band. They have fun. They lead fans on treasure hunts around the world and turn their concerts into massive stage shows. This album smacks of that with the hat tip to Queen in the ultimately silly and over the top United States of Eurasia. They simultaneously take themselves pretty seriously, and Matt Bellamy is a serious musician. The three symphony pieces at the end are musically exciting, but the lyrics across the album are not quite as profound as you expect they think they are. But from a band who gave us, in Showbiz, in the song Muscle Museum, the rhyming couplet:

“I have played in every toilet. But you still want to spoil it”

I’ve never really expected all that much from them lyrically.

I like it though. It’s catchy. And it’s undeniably Muse.

September 16, 2009

Godwin’s Law Nazis

Gerard Henderson typically annoys me. He’s from the Right Wing think tank the “Sydney Institute”. I don’t like him because despite agreeing with a lot of what he says, I think he sounds smug when he’s saying it.

His ivory tower takedown of Kyle Sandilands and his Megan Fox-esque grip on history and the significance of Hitler’s total evilness was right on the money.

He points the finger of blame at needless comparisons to the Nazi overlord made by politicians. It really does lower the level of political conversation.

If some opinion leaders use ”Nazi” or ”fascist” or ”communist” to denigrate political opponents, is it any wonder some demonstrators in the US and shock jocks in Australia will follow their lead?

Hyperbole has become a way of getting noticed in the never-ending news cycle. Exaggerated comments about the applicability of totalitarianism to contemporary democracies get a run because so little is known about the suffering of the victims of Hitler and Stalin.

Sadly it appears on the SMH website alongside a story featuring insidious current affairs style journalism snooping at its worst.

Hitler’s 39 remaining relatives have been tracked down. Somehow being related to the guy responsible for significant atrocities is reason enough to be named and shamed. Some of his family had been living under fake names – and these guttersnipe reporters have named them for the world to see. No doubt the people involved are incredibly thankful that these private eyes took the time to pick up discarded cigarette butts and McDonalds wrappers.

“Analysing forgotten cigarette butts in a small village in lower Austria, a used paper serviette in a New York fast food restaurant and the seals of letters sent over 30 years ago from northern France, Marc Vermeeren and Jean-Paul Mulders said they had traced all known living relatives of the Fuehrer for the first time.”

“…”The American relatives have agreed not to have children to extinguish the saga of Hitler and stop living in fear, but have promised to publish a book before they die,” said Mulders.”

Not having children seems a high price to pay for having an infamous great-great-uncle.

It occurs to me that I write about Hitler quite frequently. Or more specifically, I paradoxically write a lot about how writing or talking about Hitler is bad.

September 15, 2009

YouTube Tuesday: Kanye do this?

The second PR lesson we can learn from celebrities is courtesy of Kanye’s now infamous crashing of the stage at the MTV Awards. Stupid thing to do really.

The silver lining came from Beyonce – who Kanye was advocating for – when she showed how to act with grace, and class, and brought Taylor Swift back on stage.

And now, Kanye has gone “viral” with spoofs already happening.

September 15, 2009

Fox Trot

There are lots of PR lessons we can learn from celebrities today. Firstly. Megan Fox has lived up to her name, biting the hand that feeds her. Or at least the hand that raised her from obscurity.

Director Michael Bay cast Fox in Transformers, and the starlet had some rather unkind words to say about him in a magazine.

In her interview with a British magazine, Fox had said of Bay:

“He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation.

“He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is.

“He has no social skills at all.”

Ouch. That isn’t very nice. Some of the crew responded with a letter via Michael Bay’s blog – which he contributes to, but clearly doesn’t run, because he pulled it a couple of days later and posted his apology.

I subscribe to Michael Bay’s blog with google reader – so it’s not completely lost to you. And the SMH has a story on the letter today. Here’s an excerpt.

He granted her the starring role in Transformers, a franchise that forever changed her life; she became one of the most googled and oogled women on earth.

… Wait a minute, two of us worked with Angelina – second thought – she’s no Angelina.

…We know this quite intimately because we’ve had the tedious experience of working with the dumb-as-a-rock Megan Fox on both Transformers movies. We’ve spent a total of 12 months on set making these two movies.

We are in different departments; we can’t give our names because sadly doing so in Hollywood could lead to being banished from future Paramount work.

We actually don’t think she knows who Hitler is by the way. But we wondered how she doesn’t realize what a disgusting, fully uneducated comment this was?

Hopefully Michael will have Megatron squish her character in the first ten minutes of Transformers 3. We can tell you that will make the crew happy! …

Nice. Firstly, let me say, Godwin’s law needs to be more widely broadcast – comparing anybody – particularly a movie director – to Hitler is just plain silly.

Secondly, if you’re working in a close knit industry like Hollywood – or a regional area, or a city, or the Christian community – don’t bag out people who you’ve worked with. It’ll no doubt hurt you more than it hurts them.

September 15, 2009

Print preview

The Internet is big. Remember those posts about what it would look like if you printed wikipedia – or just the featured articles.

Here are some infographics about what it would look like, and take, to print the whole shebang. Probably including my blog. It’s like, totally on the Internet man…

There are a couple more of those here.

September 15, 2009

Ring ring

Bluetooth headsets make people look like idiots. Talking to thin air makes a man look crazy. Talking to your hand is only marginally better…

But that’s what these little ring things are going to do…

It’s just a concept at this stage…

“The color rings are an accessory for cell phones that are inspired in the gestural language of the use of the phone. It is conceived as an extension of the hand, which makes their use a more natural one, and more comfortable and more attractive as well. The rings are thought to be either an electronic component, or a fashion accessory. They were designed to be worn in the thumb and pinkie fingers, and work as a microphone and headset, respectively. These, interconnected wirelessly with the phone, allow responding calls only by separating the fingers and speaking, using distance sensors between rings to activate the call.”

Via the design blog.

September 13, 2009

Punch drunk

A photographer in the US has produced a series of photos of boxers before and after their fights.

It’s pretty cool, check these out…

Via Kottke.

September 12, 2009

Marvellous Disney

Disney bought Marvel a couple of weeks ago. You may or may not be aware of this.

It prompted a series of Marvel/Disney mash-ups (like these, these and these) as fans of both came to terms with the new stablemates…

Here are some of my favourites…

September 12, 2009

Songbirds

This is pretty awesome.

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Why is it awesome?

“Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn’t the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating. I sent the music to the photographer, Paulo Pinto, who I Googled on the internet. He told his editor, who told a reporter and the story ended up as an interview in the very same newspaper.”

Found here, from here (in Spanish).

September 11, 2009