Tidbits

Some company, such as Apple, should troll people by initially only releasing a limited number of their newest hit product in a small town in the middle of nowhere (maybe picking several towns in different countries). They’d announce that they were doing this, but not in which towns; the chosen merchant would also be forbidden from announcing this online, so people would have to go physically to the store to find out. The end result: a massive treasure hunt with people searching for the new phones (or whatever) in small towns all over the world.

An ancient prophecy says that if zombo.com ever ceases to exist, the world will end.

Awesome-if-impractical idea: According to Wikipedia, the Milky Way galaxy has 200-400 billion stars. Thus in principle, each time that a child was born anywhere on Earth, we could give their name to a single star. When they were old enough, they could marvel the sky at night, knowing that somewhere in the galaxy was a star that was theirs. (original idea by aloril @ IRCNet)

Google found an interesting-sounding PDF titled “Rapid Containment Operation Protocol during outbreak of AI”, but it soon turned out that it was about the Avian Influenza, not Artificial Intelligence. :-(

The limit for when you are no longer considered “underage” varies by country, but is commonly around 18 years of age. Let’s round that to 20. Now then, “middle age” is generally thought to be around 40. So when is “overage”? If this is an arithmetic progression it would be around 60, or if this is a geometric progression it would be around 80. I think 80 feels more intuitive. Of course, it could obey some other kind of rule entirely. Thoughts?

Also, what are the folks who are neither underaged nor middle-aged? Of course you could use a term like “young adult” or whatever, but that’s not elegant – if you’re using mathematical terms in the first place, you might as well be consistent and use them everywhere. Let’s take a page from sociology’s book, with their “upper middle class” and everything – so we’d have lower underage (<10), underage (10-20), upper underage (20-30), lower middle age (30-40), middle age (40-50), upper middle age (50-60), lower overage (60-80), overage (80-100), and upper overage (100>). That’d certainly be a considerable improvement in consistency over the current terminology, don’t you think?

(PS. This is a joke. No offense is intended towards people of any age.)

Sturgeon’s law: 90% of everything is crap.
Political sturgeon’s law: 90% of all the arguments offered in the support of any given ideology or movement are crap.
The fish-shooting corollary: 99% of all the arguments made against any ideology or movement attack the crappy 90% of arguments, never bothering to engage with the quality ones.
The ignorance corollary: You have never even heard the good reasons for supporting most of the ideologies or movements you’ve rejected as obviously wrong.

Adults say the expectation of getting a new toy is better than the actual thing. This seems more true to me now, but as a kid I knew it wasn’t true: true, some toys were boring when you got them, but some would give just hours and hours of endless fun, far more and longer than the expectation of getting it. To what extent does “the expectation is better” simply mean “I don’t know how to have fun anymore”?

It’s really hard for me to get engrossed in a computer game the way I used to get, back as a kid. Of course, one could just say that it’s because they simply don’t make the likes of X-Com, Civilization II or Final Fantasy VI / VII anymore or that I’m not finding them, but it seems considerably more likely that video game entertainment simply doesn’t hook me the way it used to when it was all new.

On the other hand, even though I’ve *occasionally* thought I was getting this same effect from books, every now and then I stumble on a book that has me absolutely hooked.

There’s was a guest lecture at my university, titled “should academics be worried about information obesity”, that I couldn’t listen to because I had too much stuff to read.

For a moment, I felt guilty about the fact that my alarm clock also wakes up my stuffed animals, who might prefer to keep sleeping.

“Introduction to the Secrets of” would be a cooler title for textbooks than “Introduction to”.

“Introduction to the Secrets of Philosophy”. “Introduction to the Secrets of Cognitive Psychology.” “Introduction to the Secrets of Linear Algebra.”

If I’d become a researcher in developmental psychology, I could tell everyone that my job involved human experiments on children.

Think how cool it’d be if stars had blood-red tentacles many light years long, reaching out to other stars, grabbing passing space ships.

If I were a university professor and Evil, I could require my students to format all their assignments with Comic Sans.

A stereotype is a preconception of a group of people. Thus a monotype is a preconception of a particular person.

Most of the time, “I don’t have the time for it” means “I don’t want it enough”. And that’s fine, but you should recognize the difference.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” also works the other way around. “First you rule, then you need to put up a fight, then you become a laughingstock, then you fade into obscurity and are forgotten.”

Nobody expects the Spunnish Inquisition!