Avatar

Don't get me wrong, I thought Avatar was kinda fun, and had some nice 3D effects. The storyline, however, was a bit predictable - this is probably why:


_{Clicky clicky}

Here Be Dragons

Whilst fiddling with some knobs I recently came across this gem in Firefox, that shows whenever you visit "about:config":



I'm also a fan of:



It's the little things...

:)

Stats

When not focusing on the important and shocking fact that it's snowing outside, the news has recently been harping on about someone failing to blow up a plane. Hysteria has resulted and people are actually cancelling flights over this - despite it being 20 times more likely you'll be struck by lightning, than be a victim of a terrorist plane-bombing (per flight).

Another comparison drawn by that link (go on, click, there's a really pretty picture) is that there's one attack per 11.5 billion miles - which is the same distance as two round trips to Neptune. Which pretty much rules out any hope of gaining public confidence up for interstellar space travel. If you didn't like that joke, you'll hate this one:

"The odds of being on a plane with a bomb on it are 1/10,000,000. The odds of being on a plane with two bombs on it are 1/1,000,000,000. So I always take a bomb on a plane with me"

Yes, You Are On Google Street View

In lieu of having time to write up anything about my adventures, have some hookers:

_{Clicky to enlarge}

Wii Prayer

A family shouldn't have to wait until Sunday to worship the Lord...especially if they have a Nintendo Wii, complete with special Cross controllers and a Kneeler (all the fun of kneeling and genuflecting...in your own home!).

Yes, seriously, someone's making a game of this. Well, I think so anyway - if it's a spoof/hoax then it's being pretty thoroughly carried out.



If the minigames are good enough, I'll almost certainly be buying a copy of this. After all, WarioWare barely has any storyline at all and that's still one of the most popular Wii games..

Ina: AssItalia

Somewhat unfortunately, I appear to have a fantastically* handsome rear end. This makes it very difficult to walk backwards for any extended period of time before I am stopped by a well meaning stranger and have to spend five minutes bashfully accepting their compliments.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more acute than in Italy. On a recent short visit to Bologna and Ravenna, the locals were particularly impressed. In particular, the Ryanair attendants were so thrilled they made me wait around for nearly an extra hour just so they could call up some more friends to stop and stare.

This started off fairly innocently; someone would walk past animatedly chattering in Italian about (I presume) my posterior. We'd go into bars and the waiters would immediately comment on this (again, I presume - my Italian is a little flaky).

However, things started to get a bit creepy when the artists and architects got involved. What started off as harmless stained glass graffiti:



Soon turned into the defacement of historic cultural buildings:



Whilst I'm naturally flattered, this is a bit worrying and I'm not sure I'll be showing my face (or rear end) in Bologna again anytime soon. It was, however, nice to win the annual 'Ass of Italy' award - a moment I'll treasure and have on my CV for many many years to come:



More Italy pics/stories later :)
Xx

--

* Understand that here I refer to both definitions of fantastic; 'great' and 'surprising'.

Common Sense

I've not blogged much about my new job - partly because I'm fantastically busy all the time and partly because when I'm not working I'd rather not think about work; fun though it often is.

One thing that's really impressed me at Thomson Reuters is their sensible working attitude. I haven't seen much of people prioritising their tasks based on what will make them look good; endless internal meetings that have little point; and clock-watching managers that care more about the office dress code than the quality of work:



Take, for example, this line from a recent email around our flexible working policy:

"We will focus on output and on what needs to be achieved; inputs such as where work gets done, and the hours worked, are not as important."

Perfect! Although, perhaps not so applicable in all cultures, as a German colleague pointed out:

"Send such an email in the German companies I've previously worked and you're fired before you can count to 3.

Anyhow, back to work...
Xx

Time Machine

I don't quite remember where I found this image, but it's utterly fantastic. I'm definitely going to do a copycat job sometime this week - I'll post up the results :)


_{Click to enlarge. Right click -> Save As then view locally if you're having issues zooming.}

Bacon Theft

..had to share this one:



Xx

Edit: Image fixed.

No blacks at Microsoft Poland

Over on a certain less than savoury message board someone recently posted up this interesting observation. Take a close look at the Microsoft USA/World and then the Microsoft Poland pages for business productivity.

Notice anything?

For those of you reading this in the future, when Microsoft realise they've been rumbled and hastily pull the images, I put together this animation. Enjoy.



Note, you may say this is simply the USA branch of Microsoft over-reacting to some Affirmatve Action law. Whilst it's possible that's true, take a look at the hand of the magically changing man. Looks pretty dark to me.

Xx

Edit: Someone's beaten me to the next step of my idea: http://microlove.ytmnd.com

The Midget Manifesto

Do midgets have night vision?



Above we see four perfectly reasonable and apparently common searches regarding midgets. Google's 'intelligent' prompts aren't always quite so useful though, as highlighted in this thought provoking and witty article oversized image dumped on a shockingly bad webpage.

That aside, it's extremely hard to find a concrete answer on the Internet to the original question. Wikipedia doesn't explicitly say one way or another, and I can't find anything in the Lego Bible about it either.

The Orwellian (Swiftian? Swiftish? Swift? Quite fast really?) Midget Manifesto states that night vision (along with subservience and non-intelligence) are desirable traits for midgets, but until someone explains to me the point of the gladiatorial midgets described in that dystopia, I can't take the manifesto seriously.

I feel this post should resolve with a dramatic and fun-filled climax. Oh well.

Xx

Making XKCD Slightly Worse

For some time, one of my favourite collections of comic strips has been Garfield minus Garfield - a brutally harsh and beautifully depressing cacophony of loneliness and angst.



In a similar vein, from the XKCD fora, comes the joyous Making XKCD Slightly Worse. I can't do any better than their introduction:

"It's time to find that little piece of magic that makes xkcd so special, and kill it."

Here's two I've lazily plucked from the first page of that thread (there's 99 pages, and many, many gems - click around for an hour or so then put it on your bookmarks for later):





And, here's my first effort, amalgamated from comics 208, 419 and 620:


_{Clicky to enlarge}

Your Erdős-Bacon Number

Your Erdős-Bacon number is the sum of your Erdős number and your Bacon number. With an opener like that, I'm sure I've got your attention - now to elaborate.

I've been looking into social network topology for a paper I'm writing (more on that later) - if that doesn't mean anything to you, try and recall the time you saw '6 degrees of separation' in some junk mail; the wildly unsubstantiated and poorly researched idea that everyone in the world is separated by just 6 links.

This has been a topic of some quite interesting research by a number of fairly important chaps you haven't heard of, and it seems a few of them either a) snapped or b) had a sense of humour. I'm banking on a).


_{Paul Erdos - he could easily have been in films with a face like that}

Post snapping (or Schnapps) some mathematicians came up with the concept of an Erdős number - this is your academic degree of separation from influential mathematician Paul Erdős. Your Erdős score is 1 if you've co-authored a paper with Paul, 2 if you've co-authored a paper with someone who's co-authored a paper with Paul...and so on.

A later take on this was a Bacon number - your degree of separation from actor Kevin Bacon. If you've starred in a movie with Kevin, score 1. If you've starred in a movie with someone who's starred in a move with Kevin, score 2...and so on.


_{My favourite bacon related picture on the Internet}

Your Erdős-Bacon number is the sum of these.

Unbelievably, there are a whole range of people who actually have an Erdős-Bacon score. There's a messy list of them here - some people have Erdős-Bacon numbers as low as 4 or 5.

I think this goes to prove two points:

1. Some of your favourite actors may be closet mathematicians and..
2. The mathematicians that didn't make it into Hollywood have way too much time on their hands.

Also, consider this post a standing offer from me to buy drinks for the evening for anyone who can prove they have an Erdős-Bacon number.

Mainstream Memes

Since Christopher Columbus discovered Twitter in mid-2008, it's become pretty choked up with users who don't even know where the flux-capacitor in their PC case **I'm reliably informed this is actually called a CPU** is to be found.

It's not all bad though, it hasn't taken too long for people to realise that the 'trending topics' section of Twitter - originally intended to give an overview of the most important and heady up-to-the-minute current affairs - would be far better used for tiny tiny memes.

#geekmusic was a great one a week or so ago, as was #budgetbond (and its spinoffs). You've then got the slightly smuttier trends - #3turnoffwords, #3wordsaftersex et al., which are mostly unfunny - but it is very amusing to see how many people can't even follow the single simple rule of 'three words'.

There's also been some great efforts on Amazon reviews recently. The three wolves t-shirt is fairly infamous around the web now; but someone's just linked me to something which might actually top it: 20 inch box canvas of Paul Ross.



Here's a couple of choice quotes from among the 200 (nearly all amusing) reviews:

"If you only buy one 20 inch canvas print of Paul Ross this year, this is the one to get."

"Don't buy this picture. It looks fine on the website, but the one they send you is upside-down. My wife hasn't stopped crying for a week."

And finally, this masterpiece:

"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name' sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;
Thy 20 inch print by MirrorPrintStore, it comfortest me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou annointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I well dwell in the House of the Lord with a lovely picture of Paul Ross forever"

Edit: Thanks to anonymousse for this priceless one too.

Merch

A lot of people say to me, "Ina, I'd love to get a lot of merchandise with approximations of your image on it..." (the real image would cause the lesser objects it was placed on to implode) "...but I can only find an image of you facing forwards. I'd feel foolish wearing a t-shirt with just a picture of your front on the front of it; can you do anything about this?"

To these people I can now offer the following:

_{The left-hand picture belongs on the front of your shirt, the other on the back of your shirt. Similar approaches may be taken for mugs, house-painting and underwear. The images are not licensed for mousemats. Please consult an expert before attempting to transfer the images to stained glass. By reading this paragraph you commit to paying £2 in royalties for each commercial sale featuring these images.}

Now, before you go and get this printed onto a t-shirt (a mere £5 at Vistaprint at the moment; and I can get it cheaper if I bulk order elsewhere) - there's an important point to note. Merely blowing up this small image will lead to something which looks quite boring and fuzzy. Instead, I recommend you scale it up using no interpolation at all in your favourite image editor. Alternatively, just ask me and I'll send some I made earlier (with stickyback plastic).

Enjoy. Can you guess what you're all getting for Christmas?
Xx

Happy Mothers' Day

Mums are awesome, especially mine. Also, putting the apostrophe in the right place in Mothers' Day is awesome too. Ever feel like burning down card shops that are stuffed with poor grammar? I do...but enough about arson.

Mr T. - Treat Your Mother Right


Possibly the worst song on YouTube. Utterly addictive though and video is to die for. Skip to the last minute if the middle's getting boring.

Now, I'm off to call my mum :)

Xx

Extreme Sheepherding

This one starts a bit slow, and then goes on to such epic degrees of win I nearly cried. Seriously, you've not lived until you've seen people playing Pong with flocks of sheep:



Enjoy :)
Xx

The Bible - illustrated

What? Simply because an entire label on my blog has been devoted to blasphemy, you immediately assume this is going to be some disgraceful and offensive link or set of pictures? Shame on you.

No, this is an ever expanding set of stories from the Bible, illustrated by an evangelical minister who wants to share the Word of the Lord with as many people as he can.

Through Lego.

You'd think I would have mentioned this in one of my previous seven posts about Lego - but apparently not.

Now, before I continue with the predictable hyperlink and some sample pictures, I feel compelled to post this following Not Safe For Work (NSFW) notice for those of you wasting your employer's time reading these ramblings. I believe it's a standard disclaimer at the front of all Bibles - let me know if not..

_{To be honest, this disclaimer was the only reason I started this post..}

The Hyperlink:

The Brick Testament


The Sample Images:

1. Epic battle scene. Literally, epic. And I'm sure it's not at all blasphemous to depict God as a bit of Lego.


_{And Yahweh struck down all of Israel before Abijah and Judah...}

2. You'll find some bits of the Bible you didn't know about too, like the following (which explains why Christians always look so uncomfortable on the tube):


_{'Whenever a woman has her menstrual period, she will remain in a state of menstrual pollution for seven days. Anyone who touches her will be unclean until evening.'}

3. I had other cheap jokes, and I was dying to end on a sex scene, but I couldn't resist putting in this one. It's given me so many ideas for a LoTR Lego photoshoot. Anyone got a spare year? It'll be an Internet phenomenon (the following is Sauron vs Gandalf in my head):


_{Moses then reported to Yahweh what the people had said.}

Musical Stock Exchange

Ever wanted to take the spikes on a serious financial graph and make them the basis of a whimsical tune? Me neither. Enjoy:



Thanks to Will for the tip-off here.

Tic-Tac Makes it up to Football Fans

Many people on the Internet (and presumably in the so-called 'real world') seemed rather annoyed when ITV decided to broadcast a Tic-Tac advert rather than the thrilling last 20 seconds of the Liverpool vs Everton FA Cup game. There were calls for ITV to be banned from showing football, angry Facebook groups and even the odd 'flashmob' against ITV.

I wasn't, however, aware that anyone was blaming Tic-Tac. But, just in case (and also because marketing folks need salaries to keep the economy going), they made a video by way of apology:



Brilliant ;)