Showing posts with label funny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label funny. Show all posts

Monday, December 02, 2019

Woodpeckers can ring and run too

Our Ring Pro video doorbell recently caught this red-headed ding-dong ditcher visiting our front door:


We answered this ring, but we weren't around about an hour later when it returned!


After checking with our neighbors, we found that gila woodpeckers have apparently been terrorizing some other doorbells and surveillance cameras in the area as well. It is pretty adorable... until you have to replace the device.

In this case, hopefully being startled twice by the Ring's chime is enough to encourage it to move on!

Friday, April 16, 2010

Is an SPSS monster like a SAS bunny rabbit?

A friend of mine had a Google Talk status of "Now I'm the SPSS monster" today. Lately, I have picked up the contagious habit of making fun of people who use gooey (GUI) SPSS, and so I responded by e-mail, "Is an SPSS monster like a SAS bunny rabbit?" She responded, "Could be. Or an R-invader." I couldn't resist letting this snowball turn into the avalanche it really could be, and so...
Kick S. Way to JMP on that one and even Z-score. Such a rejoinder makes me want to click away to one of the Minitabs of my browser. Phew, all of this stat talk makes me want to regress back into MATLAB; even if I am still centrally limited there, at least I can feel normal again.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to be mean. If I was, I hope you won't log this transformation and hold it against me later. I'm certain I can transcend and function better in the future; a higher power law need not intervene. Hopefully this hypothesis is correct and you will see some significant change. That should help you restore your confidence.

On a different note, I saw some Monte Carlo tulips at the zoo last weekend; it seems risky to have planted those at this time of the season, but hopefully they will Excel. If they do die, I'm afraid this story will have a heavy tail indeed.

By the way, yesterday for graduate appreciation day, Jessie got a coupon for $1 coffee at the expensive campus Starbucks. With the discount, prices are about normal. I guess there is no such thing as a scale free lunch. Shoot, I'm afraid my coffee has gone cold and is starting to taste a little bit like Poisson.

Well, enough of this. I'm sure if you remove the outlier that is e-mail thread, you'll find that the remaining e-mails are far less skewed and better fit the distribution you have come to expect.

I hope all of your days are better than average! --
Ted
There are parts of that that I'm not that excited about, but overall I'm pretty proud of myself.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Literal Total Eclipse of the Heart

RT: @notspam1: Give it time, but literal version of Total Eclipse of the Heart is great: http://tinyurl.com/nacjd8

UPDATE: A good follow-up is the literal version of "Anything for Love"...

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Our 2008 solstice photoset on Flickr

Check out our Solstice 2008 photoset on Flickr. There are a lot of nice shots of Fritz:
Isn't Fritz cute?
Including a video or two, like this one:
That's one cute dog.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

"Six dollar footlong" just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way...

I was leaving The Mall at Tuttle Crossing the other day, and something at the food court caught my eye...
Tuttle Mall Subway
Don't see it? Let's zoom in a bit...
Six dollar footlong
WTF? Is that a "6" over top of the five-fingered hand that usually is holding a "5"?

It seems like they forgot to put up the right hand that's flipping you the sixth finger...

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

"Don't Be Upset" by Jeffrey and Jack Lewis

Great lyrics and a fun little song...
i took my darling out to the aquarium
sea creatures stared at us and we stared back at them
my baby freaked when she peeked at that 8-legged blob with a beak
she was too scared to speak
i said don't be upset it's only an octopus
don't bother it and i'm sure it won't bother us
please don't be upset my darling, please don't get upset
my baby came riding to meet me one time
on the crowed last car of the downtown-bound 9
she was brave but she caved
when the train was delayed
it was just the last straw in her hard busy day
i said don't get upset 'cuz it's not a catastrophe
nothing will happen and soon you'll be back with me
please don't be upset my darling , please don't be upset
my gal's got a headhache, her ankle is hurting too
boots she bought gave her a rash & her winsdom tooth
is coming in and it's damp out and she's having cramps and she's so mad at me cuz i didn't shave
i said don't be upset i know you're feeling sensitive
i'll try to be kinder and be more attentive
please don't be upset my darling please don't get upset
darling i said, i'm gonna be 27 soon
i've only got rejection letters and a sense of impending doom
i think it's too late for me
all the comic companies hate me
and i try but it's always the same
i guess my art is just lame and it's strange but still somehow i'm
always not suiting their needs at this time
and she said ........don't be upset,
you know that you're wonderful
just keep on trying ...(actually what she really said was)
all you ever wanna talk about is your self and your comic books and your album and your tour
and everytime i see your friends they just ask me where you are again and it hurts
it makes me feel like dirt
i'm just gonna write where you are on my shirt
and i said don't be upset, don't be in a bad mood
let's just go to a show and hang out and feel good
come on please don't be upset my darling, please don't be upset, i'll do anything baby, just don't be upset

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Haverin on LiveJournal

From xkcd/77:

Because it drives me nuts...

From xkcd/394:

On a serious note, "kB" is "kilobyte" and "kb" is "kilobit." An uppercase "K" is "Kelvin," and so it should never be paired with either "B" or "b". For most modern machines, a "B"yte is 8 "b"its, but there is NO GOOD REASON to assume this case. The meaning of "kilo" is context-dependent, though it's computationally convenient to use 1024 rather than the standard 1000 (because computers address things in base-2).

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Journal Reviewer Review

A recent paper of mine was rejected from Journal of Theoretical Biology. For fun, lets compare and contrast and selection from the reviewer comments ("MS" = "manuscript"):

From Reviewer #1:
Overall I really liked the work presented in this MS - by generalising the traditional models of the ecological economics underpinning solitary foraging behaviour the authors offer a very interesting (& in retrospect) intuitively appealing justification for accepting that the concorde fallacy may not always be fallacious.

From Reviewer #2:
This result seems to be of significance in biology, psychology, economics, and business, and I think that the paper is deserving of publication in JTB. The paper is also very well written, and the mathematical presentation is clear and precise.

Those two were pretty nice, and suggest that I should resubmit the paper with a couple tiny revisions and I'll be off and running. Great! Wait... What's this?

From Reviewer #3:
I regret to say I have no idea what this paper is about. The mathematical lingo is completely unfamiliar to me (after about 50 years of teaching and research in maths)...(details omitted)...(I recently had a grad student who wrote in this vein. When I asked him to explain in ordinary math, he gave up.) I didn't read any further. My advice is reject.

HUH?!

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Beware of Aronoff?

I walk by this "Caution: Floor Wet" sign every day. I think it's funny because it's in Dreese Labs, which is very far away from Aronoff Laboratory.
Caution: Aronoff

It's as if the ECE's are being warned about the EEOB people.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Correction: TeXnicians (and TeXackers) over TeXperts

I thought this correction to a Brown university TeX tutorial was really cute.
I like you page on TeX, but had to comment that TeX is properly pronounce like the Tech in Technology (Knuth "The TeXbook" page 1) and thus the proper name for a TeX hacker is a TeXnichian not a TeXpert as you stated on your page (http://www.cfm.brown.edu/tutorials/tex.html) in fact the first exercise in the TeXbook is "After you have mastered the material in this book will you be: A TeXpert or a TeXnichian?" to which the correct answer is "A TeXnician (underpaid); sometimes also called a TeXacker." (Knuth, the TeXbook)

Please change this grievous error.

Thanks,

Christopher A Craig (ccraig@cc.gatech.edu)

Thursday, July 05, 2007

These are my alli pants

I know I'm not the first one to point this out...

Some background information: alli is the first FDA approved diet pill. It works by blocking the absorption of fat. From their webpage:

myalli.com - what are treatment effects?
You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work

I shit you not.

There are some other good ones too.
You may not usually get gassy, but it's a possibility when you take alli. The bathroom is really the best place to go when that happens

Yummy! Time to get thin.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Response to "NPR Wedding Music"

A response to NPR Wedding Music, sent to me via e-mail, reposted anonymously here:
I was in town yesterday shipping a package and saw that my mom and my sister were at the UPS store at the same time. I walk up to my mom's car only to find her crying. Turns out she has been reading the "Martha Stewart Book of Weddings." She said she was fine reading the chapter on wedding cakes (she likes cake), but once she got to the one about wedding songs, she lost it (in a good way)....

Friday, April 27, 2007

The first-ever word between any two people is a lie.

From a Men's Health newsletter today.

The following text is below a picture of a woman in a showy shirt looking toward the camera. Ten yards behind her are three men taking a look at the...um...back of her shirt.
Once in a while, it helps to look at life from the other side.

Which is why we recommend that you watch The Oprah Winfrey Show today.

You heard us right. Dave Zinczenko, the editor-in-chief of Men's Health, appears with Oprah on today's show. The topic: Helping women over 35 find single men.

The Men's Health staff prepared a special "MetroGrades" ranking to show women where they might find a guy.
Why does this matter to you? First, this information is conversational gold when you're out this weekend. And if you live in one of the top cities, be on the lookout for women with newfound enthusiasm for meeting guys.

Doesn't matter what city you're in, women love to talk about relationships. And lots of them will watch Oprah today.

Tell them you watched, too. They'll love that. The rest is up to you.

It's so conniving!

And yet it's so male.

Ladies, the lies don't stop until many many months. Keep that in mind. Eventually, he may tell you about the lies, but he'll describe them in such a way that you'll think he's cute. After all, if you've still got him, then you've probably won, so it's probably OK to call him cute... But just think about all of the awful things he was thinking before you won.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

They Call Me the Quantifier...

A colleague saw this and thought of me... I thought it was pretty funny. :)


Note: I feel there are exactly two layers to the humor in that comic.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Putting ass in public schools

This was taken from a "word list" posted in the public school that I give science help to as part of my fellowship.


It's really nice that the "ass" list is the one with the heart shape. Happy Valentine's Day!

Friday, January 12, 2007

How iMet my Neighbor on iTunes

The audio for this story is hilarious. Discovering "Anna's music" pop up in iTunes leads to strange stalker-like behavior (that probably isn't proper for a married man) that eventually leads to an awkward meeting that goes as poorly as you might imagine. Hilarious.

"How iMet my Neighbor on iTunes" by David Kestenbaum

The on-line version includes a web extra introducing Last.fm and Pandora, two services about which everyone should know (and love).