cellio | Entries tagged with humor

Overheard at last night's choir party:

Director: ...And I told (another choir's director) that we have five tenors now and quite a few basses too, and she was blown away. [Context: for whatever reason, SCA choirs and maybe amateur choirs in general have a lot of trouble getting enough tenors. Our choir has about 25 members and five tenors is considered very good.]

Transgender tenor: Some of our tenors used to be sopranos.¹ She could suggest...

Other choir member: In the Debatable Choir we make tenors!

¹ Two, in fact. There is also a woman in the bass section (who hasn't undergone physical changes thus far).

I heard a story the other day at minyan:

A rabbi has a long-time friend who's a gentile. One day the friend comes to him and says "Rabbi, we've been friends for decades and I've heard you talk about the talmud; will you teach me some?" The rabbi shakes his head and says "look, you aren't one of us, you haven't been trained in this, you won't think about it the way we do -- I'm sorry, but I can't teach you this". The friend persists, and the rabbi finally says "ok, tell you what -- I'll ask you a question, and if you can correctly answer it, we'll study some talmud together". The friend eagerly agrees.

The rabbi says: "Two men climbed down a chimney together. One of them was dirty and one was clean. Which one washed himself?" The friend responds "Oh that's easy. The one who was dirty washed himself."

The rabbi shakes his head. "No no, my friend. The one who was dirty looked at his friend who was clean and concluded that he was fine. The clean one looked at his dirty friend and rushed off to wash up."

"Oh please, give me another chance!" The friend pleads. "Ask me another question!"

"Ok," the rabbi says. "Two men climbed down a chimney together. One of them was dirty and one was clean. Which one washed himself?" The friend, having learned from the previous response, says "the clean one did, because he saw his dirty friend and assumed he was dirty".

The rabbi shakes his head. "No no. The dirty one looked in the mirror, saw he was dirty, and washed." "Wait," the friend objects, "you didn't say anything about a mirror!" The rabbi shrugs. "So it turned out there was a mirror."

"Let me try again," the friend begs. The rabbi sighs and asks again. "Two men climbed down a chimney together. One of them was dirty and one was clean. Which one washed himself?" The friend responds, "if there was a mirror or other reflective surface, the dirty man could see that he was dirty and he washed. Otherwise, each man looked at the other, so the clean man thought he was dirty because of what he saw and he washed."

The rabbi shakes his head once more. "How is it possible that two men come down the same chimney and one is dirty and the other is clean? Clearly this never happened!"

Some stuff has been accumulating in browser tabs. Some of it lost relevance because I waited too long (oops). Here's the rest.

This article explains the Intel problem that's going to slow your computer down soon. I don't know much about how kernels work and I understood it. I do have some computer-science background, though, so if somebody who doesn't wants to let me know if this is accessible or incoherent, please do. In terms of effects of the bug, you're going to get an OS update soon and then things will be slower because the real fix is to replace hardware, but you probably want to take the update anyway.

This infographic gives some current advice to avoid being spear-phished. It has one tip that was new to me but makes a lot of sense: if you have any doubt about an attachment but are going to open it anyway, drop it into Google Drive and open it in your browser. If it's malicious it'll attack Google's servers instead of your computer, and they have better defenses.

Sandra and Woo: what the public hears vs. what a software developer hears.

This account of one hospital's triage process for major incidents blew me away. I shared the link with someone I know in the medical profession and he said "oh, Sunrise -- they have their (stuff) together" -- they have a reputation, it appears. Link courtesy of metahacker and hakamadare.

I was one of the subject-matter experts interviewed for this study on Stack Overflow's documentation project. Horyun was an intern and was great to work with.

From siderea, the two worlds, or rubber-duck programming and modes of thinking.

The phatic and the anti-inductive doesn't summarize well, but I found it interesting. Also, I learned some new words. "Phatic" means talking for the sake of talking -- so small-talk, but not just that. Social lubricant fits in here too.

Rands on listening for managers.

From the same source as the "phatic" post, a story about zombies made me laugh a lot.

From Twitter:
Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender says "Do you all want something to drink?"
The first logician says "I don't know."
The second logician says "I don't know."
The third logician says "Yes."

A friend shared this with me earlier today and I literally laughed out loud:

(Source)

The second-last column is about a famous Zulu leader. The last one is about walled cities under fire.

"Shaka, when the walls fell" is a key phrase in a rather unusual episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, named "Darmok". The famous universal translator doesn't work when the Enterprise encounters these particular aliens, because their language doesn't work at the word level. They speak in what the crew calls metaphor. I've seen discussions of this over the years ("could that really work?" "improbable, because..."). The post about the Jeopardy episode links to this Atlantic article about the episode that argues that we're looking at it all wrong. I found it an interesting read.

Also, Atlantic does in-depth articles about episodes of SF shows? Who knew?

(I don't have a Trek icon. Here, have one from one of my favorite shows instead.)

I have some things collecting in tabs, so here's a hodge-podge:

First, border-crossing. You've probably heard by now that border control in the US has gotten aggressive, including demanding passwords for encrypted devices and then taking them out of view for an extended time. You don't have to give up your password, but if you don't, they can confiscate your device for weeks or months for "review". The rights you have against unreasonable search and seizure in the US are not the same as those you have at the border. While they can't deny entry to US citizens, they can to others.
It's important to know what you don't know. David Director Friedman has an interesting idea about applying economics to teaching -- specifically, grading exams.
A lot of the Rands article The New Manager Death-Spiral sounds very familiar.
We all know one of the Internet rules: don't read the comments. The parts of the net I frequent tend to be better than, say, a random sample of YouTube, which is due to a mix of conscientious participants and comment moderation. A while back I came across a comment-moderation policy described as "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite": they require a comment to be at least two of true, necessary, and kind.
I'm not sure that philosophy applies to windshield notes, but they sure are funny.
How do we know Humpty Dumpty is an egg? The rhyme doesn't say so. Huh, I never thought about that.
Speaking of things I hadn't thought about, have you ever noticed the similarities between fantasy-adventurer settings and westerns?

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1070924.html

One machine-learning technique is to pit evolving neural networks against each other in cage matches and then learn from the results. This is called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

At yesterday's Purim festivities somebody described the following cutting-edge research, and I remembered just enough keywords to be able to find the paper later:

Stopping GAN Violence: Generative Unadversarial Networks
Samuel Albanie, Sébastien Ehrhardt, João F. Henriques

While the costs of human violence have attracted a great deal of attention from the research community, the effects of the network-on-network (NoN) violence popularised by Generative Adversarial Networks have yet to be addressed. In this work, we quantify the financial, social, spiritual, cultural, grammatical and dermatological impact of this aggression and address the issue by proposing a more peaceful approach which we term Generative Unadversarial Networks (GUNs). Under this framework, we simultaneously train two models: a generator G that does its best to capture whichever data distribution it feels it can manage, and a motivator M that helps G to achieve its dream. Fighting is strictly verboten and both models evolve by learning to respect their differences. The framework is both theoretically and electrically grounded in game theory, and can be viewed as a winner-shares-all two-player game in which both players work as a team to achieve the best score. Experiments show that by working in harmony, the proposed model is able to claim both the moral and log-likelihood high ground. Our work builds on a rich history of carefully argued position-papers, published as anonymous YouTube comments, which prove that the optimal solution to NoN violence is more GUNs.

I haven't read the full paper yet, but on a quick skim it does not disappoint. More info.

I'm delighted to see that the paper was submitted to SIGBOVIK 2017. I had no idea that Dr. Bovik had his own SIG.

ETA: Not only was that paper submitted to SIGBOVIK, but SIGBOVIK is a real thing. How did I not know about this gem from my alma mater? (Sadly, this year's conference starts at 5PM on a Friday, which would be challenging. Maybe I'll have better luck next year.)

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1069008.html

It's the season of Purim Torah on Mi Yodeya. Here are some of my favorites:

From this year:

My answer to a question asking what Birkat Amazon is and what giving thanks after a meal has to do with amazon.com
What are we supposed to do about losing an hour of Purim this year? (I answered that one too)
Why do we shake four heretics on Sukkot? (on Sukkot we shake the "four species", different plants; the word for "species" resembles the word for heretics)
Can one go back in time to complete a minyan?

And some from past years:

Perl programming in the Torah
Surviving the zombie apocalypse
Using the Force on Shabbat
Rejecting others' friend requests on Facebook
And one I had a lot of fun answering, Why don't Jews accept Our Lord and Savior?

There are a lot more where those came from, and the season continues for about the next two weeks.

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1068113.html

The month of Adar began a few days ago, which means that silliest of holidays, Purim, is coming up soon. And that means that Purim Torah -- discourse of a, shall we say, not entirely serious nature -- is in season on Mi Yodeya. Here are some of my favorites from this season so far -- recommended, and most of the ones I've selected should be broadly accessible. (Feel free to leave comments here if you need help interpreting anything.)

Why don't Jews accept Our Lord and Savior? The question (which skirts the "can Purim Torah be too heretical?" line really closely) lays out some textual "proofs". I had fun answering this.

What does Judaism think of math? Quite a variety of answers here.

What is the text of kiddush for Purim night? I've heard a couple really silly and (within my limits of comprehension) hilarious texts for Purim kiddush, the prayer of sanctifying a special day. The one (so far) posted here looks like it's pretty funny, but I can only comprehend part of it. (If anybody reading this is inclined to provide a translation, please consider adding it there. If you're not comfortable with that, though, please feel free to post here...)

Why didn't Esther follow Mordechai's instructions? This answer is fun, and check out the link in the answerer's first comment.

Is the torah in the public domain? Wikipedia says that only works published before 1923 are automatically public domain. The torah was written in 2448, so that's safe...

Two items seen in rapid succession today:

Here's why you're not hiring the best and brightest: (Jeff Atwood) talks about making telecommuting work so that you really can hire the best employees, as opposed to the best employees willing to live in a particular location. I once applied for a telecommuting position at a company that seems to get it as far as that's concerned, and a lot of the stuff they do is reflected in this article.
What do programmers care about? (20-minute video): Joel Spolsky (Stack Exchange, Fog Creek) talks to recruiters about how to recruit programmers. If you've read Joel On Software you already know a lot of what he has to say here, but I still found it interesting to watch.

Can you help? Somebody asked a question recently on Writers about guidelines and heuristics for when to use screen shots in technical documentation. The question isn't looking for opinions or what you, personally, do but, rather, formal guidelines along the lines of what GNOME does for its documentation. So far it's only attracting opinion answers. I, too, have opinions and practices that I follow, but I can't source them either and I'd like to see the question get a good answer.

Speaking of Writers, I wrote a little something about writing good API reference documentation (like Javadoc), based on advice I've given informally over and over again -- finally wrote some of it down in a public place. Feedback welcome.

I recently saw an article with interesting-seeming observations and analysis of Modern Orthodox Judaism. I'm not all that tuned into the MO community and can't evaluate its credibility from inside, but I found it an interesting read. If any of y'all would care to tell me where on the spectrum from "yup" to "WTF?!" this is from your perspective, I'd be interested.

Finally, a little something for those who use the text editor vim (which I gather is related to vi?):

As part of a system upgrade at my shell provider, I'm now using Alpine to read mail instead of Pine. Pine showed me plain old dates/times in the list of messages, but Alpine tries to be clever and I haven't yet figured out how to turn it off. So instead of a date it'll say "Yesterday", or "Monday", etc. Very annoying, but it did produce a laugh:

I was unprepared for Alpine's treatment of the message I just got from somebody more than halfway around the world: "Tomorrow". Yes, tomorrow's mail today! Sadly, tomorrow's mail, so far, has not reported usable lottery numbers.

For those who remember this XKCD:

With the following mouse-over text:

The next day: "What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!" "Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1s and Is." "That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her."

I saw this in the parking garage at work today:

88BB8BB

In the last two weeks we lost both

merle_ and

pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(

And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.

I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.

Links:

Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)

Best court sanctions... ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term "Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be dull...

This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.

Feast of the ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this. From shewhomust.

siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about libraries, mandatory internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold? The ones who can least cope, it seems.

I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?

Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.

I've been accumulating browser tabs for a while, so here's a "misc" dump. (Aside: this new LJ "choose your icon by browsing pictures, and by the way we won't put them in alphabetical order or anything nice like that" interface really stinks. Grr.)

siderea posted The Music Theory Song: Intervals (YouTube). For anyone who's trying to work on ear training to hear intervals, and for those of you who already grok that, this video's for you. Really.

12 letters that didn't make the (English) alphabet. I forget where this link came from.

thnidu over on Dreamwidth posted a link to "Earth as Art", which looks to be a nifty photo collection. The link isn't currently working for me, so I'm linking his entry instead of there for now.

More beautiful photography, from a locked post. Warning: gravity alert -- it wouldn't be hard to get sucked in.

Some time back I noticed that one of the regulars in the Mi Yodeya weekly parsha chat drew a lot on Abarbanel and that it sounded interesting. I asked him if he knew of an English translation and at the time he didn't, but more recently someone else who remembered my question pointed me at this adaptation (not translation). This sounds like something I should check out. (And it's kind of cool that, months later, somebody remembered my asking and followed up.)

When atheism is good: a chassidic story, linked by thnidu on DW again.

From XKCD: an exploration of wise men, stars, and paths. What would the trip look like, depending on what star you were following when? I can't confirm the math, but I found it an interesting read. (I don't know why he has the journey starting in Jerusalem, though.)

A map of every grocery store ever. Interestingly, my regular "big shopping trip" store (as opposed to the "grab a few things on the way home from work" store) recently remodelled and deviated from the norms. Now I can't find anything without effort.

And a funny cartoon from gnomi:( Read more... )

We did Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, sister, and niece, as usual. (My nephew is currently away at law school.) Someday my parents will decide that this is too much fuss and that's what they have children for, but apparently not yet. My niece brought her boyfriend, who I enjoyed talking with. I overheard my mother say to my father "that's the most I've heard Monica talk in ages" and, well, it's because there was more to talk about. Old family tropes only get you so far, and my mother and sister, at least, share basically no interests with me and Dani.

I've decided that Felix and Oscar aren't the right names for the cats; the initial behaviors that prompted them haven't continued. I'm currently leaning toward Orlando and Giovanni, which pass the random-friends-and-relatives test and the neighborhood test (would I be embarrassed calling an escapee?). A pair of perfectly-nice Italian names will suit, and if you happen to know that I'm a fan of Renaissance music, you might correctly detect a further inspiration for those names in particular. :-) (Orlando is the brown one, who's also the lovey guy who sleeps in my lap purring loudly.)

We had a couple of people over for board-gaming this weekend. History of the World plays differently with four players than with six. We also played San Juan (a "light" version of Puerto Rico), Automobile (only our second time playing), and Pandemic. I suspect we haven't really "gotten" Automobile yet; our scores were pretty close and nobody did anything really unusual. (Well, only one player took out loans, but other than that we seemed to be playing similar strategies.)

Some links:

HTTP Status Cats: the HTTP return codes illustrated. I've seen 408 (timed out) around, but many of these were new to me. Also, I didn't know about some of those status codes (402 I'm looking at you).

Are Twinkies really immortal? Snopes weighs in.

This recipe for schadenfreude pie looks delightfully yummy. Alas, I saw it the day after the annual baronial pie competition. Maybe next year... Hat-tip to

siderea.

Remember Henri, the angst-filled French cat? He's back.

(Previous videos here and here.)

Going to the eye-doctor and having my pupils dilated seems to cause the day to become bright and sunny. But this is Pittsburgh, where sunny days are relatively uncommon. Does this mean that most people in Pittsburgh never have their eyes checked this way, or are we all mysteriously choosing the same few days for this?

I posted the preceding on the "great unanswered questions" page on our wiki at work. In keeping with the name, I've received no answers.

Why does Windows 8 hide the control to shut down the computer? The discussion in the (currently-)top-voted answer makes a good deal of sense. And I actually didn't know that it's now considered safe to just turn a running computer off; decades of "don't do that" have trained me not to.

Back in July 530nm330hz posted a review of a new book of lessons from the talmud, specifically tractrate B'rachot (blessings). Based on that review I recently bought the book and I'm quite enjoying it so far. It's organized by talmudic page, so I first jumped to the entries on particular pages that I know and love -- how does God pray, different themes of concluding blessings, the tussle over leadership where they deposed Rabban Gamliel (I previously wrote about that one), and one or two others. Now I'll go back and read the rest. I hope this book is the first in a series.

I forget where I came across this special "de-motivator" image, but why should I keep all the fun to myself? (Image behind cut.) ( Read more... )

Courtesy of

shalmestere:

From Fantasy in Miniature: Check, Please, on playing a certain game with Death.

From Meirav Beale on G+: an epic tale of technology and grandparents. Excerpt: Some in the kingdom thought the cause of the darkness must be the Router. Little was known of the Router, legend told it had been installed behind the recliner long ago by a shadowy organization known as Comcast. Others in the kingdom believed it was brought by a distant cousin many feasts ago. Concluding the trouble must lie deep within the microchips, the people of 276 Fernadale Street did despair and resign themselves to defeat.

From Lilie Dubh on G+: The 5 stupidest habits you develop growing up poor. Thoughtful and well worth the read. (Language is not 100% work-safe.)

From Language Log: What would Jesús do?

Lost your cell phone and don't have another phone to call from handy? Nyan Cat can help. (This came via G+ but I've lost track of who posted it.)

From Law and the Multiverse: Legal responsibility for insane robots.

Bill Walsh writes about an episode of the Amazing Race in which teams were required to use a manual typewriter to type a supplied passage. The passage contained the number "1". Sadly, Bill notes, the token old people had already been eliminated. Apparently hilarity ensued. (I presume there were no remaining middle-aged people either. I assume that most people of my generation would have known what to do.)

And the title of Bill's post? "LOL 101". :-)

Thanksgiving food: it's not too late! Thanks to

shalmestere for pointing out this Thanksgiving dinner flowchart.

A great rant on web-service protocols (that is, SOAP versus REST) from a former coworker: the S stands for simple.

Law and the Multiverse on Once Upon a Time: is Rumpelstiltskin's contract valid?

Found via Google+; let's hope this works without a G+ login since the post was public:

Somebody commented: add "check Snopes before forwarding that crap for the 10,000th time". Yup.

It's summer. High heat and humidity are normal for summer. I get that. But I still hold that, for Pittsburgh, temperatures in the 90s and heat indices in the 100s until 10PM and by 10AM are abnormal. Just sayin'. I sure hope I can catch a ride to Shabbat services tonight; there's nothing to do about the walk home, but it'd be nice to not arrive soaked in sweat. Especially since I'm leading.

Buying subcutaneous fluids from the vet is expensive, except that they had a price-match policy so it wasn't. But they restricted that policy, so I asked for a prescription. I was going to fill it online but it'd be easier not to, so today I talked with someone at CVS who determined that yes in fact they could order these (by the case -- which is fine). So today I dropped off the prescription and met the full force of the paperwork engine. After supplying the cat's birth date, drug allergies, insurance information, primary care physician, and a few other things, we were ready to go. I wonder if Giant Eagle, where I had the Prednizone filled (but they don't do fluids), just punted on this info, filled in N/A, or what.

I got a postcard notice of a class-action suit this week. They know their typical audience: "how much can I get?" and "how do I get my money?" were in bold; "what is the suit about?" took rather more digging. I've gotten money from a few class-action suits over the years (and I'll send this one in too), but I always do so with some degree of ambivalence, not knowing which ones are real (and people should be compensated) and which are "it's easier to settle than prove plaintiffs are on crack" -- and in the latter case, how I feel about benefiting from ill-gotten gains given that the defendants are going to pay the money out anyway. But I also admit that thus far I haven't been motivated enough to actually research any of these cases... the moral high ground is way over there, not here where I'm standing, it would appear.

Links:

The comic on this Language Log post made me laugh. Three negatives in six words indeed!

In the spirit of the song, kinda: Weird Al, Stop forwarding that crap to me (video).

Google+ circles you can use. Social networking: new media, same old problems.

I interrupt preparations for the class I'm teaching next week at the music and dance collegium (gosh, I hope I have this calibrated right...) to pass along some random short bits.

Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to treat an entire TV series as one unit in the streaming queue, instead of one season at a time like before. However, in doing so you have taken away the ability to rate individual seasons of shows, which is valuable data. It also makes me wonder, when you recommend things to me based on my ratings, if you are giving all ratings the same weight -- 200 hours of a long-running TV show should maybe count differently than a two-hour movie. Just sayin'.

These photos by Doug Welch are stunning. Link from thnidu.

How Pixar fosters collective creativity was an interesting read on fostering a good workplace. Link from nancylebov.

Speaking of the workplace, I enjoyed reading how to run your career like a gentlewoman and several other articles I found there by following links. Link from _subdivisions_.

Rube Goldberg meets J.S. Bach, from several people. Probably fake, but it amused me anyway. (This is a three-minute Japanese commercial. Do commercials that long run on TV, or would this have been theatrical, or what?)

Speaking of ads, in advance of our SCA group's election for a new baron and baroness today, the current baron sent around a pointer to this video about an upcoming British referendum on voting systems. Well-done! (Of course, I agree with both the system and the species they advocate. :-) ) I wish we had preference ballots in the US.

A while back a coworker pointed me to how to make a hamentashen Sierpinski triangle. Ok ok, some of my browser tabs have established roots; Purim was a while ago. But it's still funny, and I may have to make that next year.

Speaking of geeky Jewish food, a fellow congregant pointed me to The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. which looks like fun. I've certainly found myself in that kind of conversation at times (e.g. is unicorn kosher? well, is it a goat (medieval) or a horse (Disney)?). Some of you have too, I know. :-)

dr_zrfq passed on this article about a dispute between a church and a bar. Nothing special about that, you say? In this case the church members prayed to block it, the bar was struck by lightning, the bar owner sued, and the church denied responsibility. I love the judge's comment on the case: “I don't know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

47 seconds of cuteness: elk calf playing in water, from shalmestere.

I don't remember where I found the link to these t-shirts, but there are some cute ones there.

I was surprised and a little weirded out, the other night, when I typed "parme" into Google and it offered to auto-complete to "parmesan crusted tilapia recipe". That was in fact what I was searching for, though I was going to just say "fish", but I hadn't realized Google's mind-reading was that good. :-) I didn't remember to follow up at first opportunity from a different IP address, though, so I don't know if profiling was involved.

(My question, still not satisfyingly answered as this recipe didn't do it so well, was: how do you get the cheese to stay on the fish? I was speculating about egg, as you often do for breading, but this recipe called for olive oil. I ended up with fish and cheese in proximity to each other, which was tasty but not what I was going for.)

Larry Osterman passed along this video showing upgrades from Windows 1.0 through to Windows 7 with all intermediate steps (except Windows ME, which doesn't play the upgrade game well, it appears). It was amusing to see what did and didn't survive upgrade (Doom almost hit 100%!), and amazing that it actually worked.

Bohemian Rhapsody on ukelele (video), from siderea. I didn't think I could imagine it, and I was right. Nifty!

Cool bedroom, and not just for kids! Link from talvinamarich.

The internet is for cats. Cats in sinks. Be careful; this is like TV Tropes on four legs. Don't say I didn't warn you.

And finishing up with another one from siderea: this funny ad for milk (involves cats).

Google Art Project appears to be collecting high-quality images from art museums around the world. I haven't explored much yet but it looks like it'll be nifty.

I thought this picture from APotD of the moon and Venus over Switzerland was a painting rather than a photo when I first saw it. Pretty!

I've often wondered what "X% chance of rain" really means -- anywhere in the geographic area during that time period, or something more specific? I found this answer informative.

The comic in a recent Language Log post made me laugh out loud.

Speaking of language, so did this 101-word story (link from

arib). Go, read!

This elaborate prank on a phone company with terrible customer service is making the rounds. As

nancylebov put it, some people deserve live muzak. (Hey, the Firefox spelling checker knows "muzak". But not "Facebook".)

Who knew Facebook was so complicated? -- a flow chart for one "what comment to post" decision tree.

Reminder: the Jewish Life and Learning project over at Area 51 is still looking for people interested in participating in a beta.

Monica

choral part-balancing

talmudic humor

link round-up

embedded geek

link round-up

purim science?

Purim torah!

be happy; it's Adar

link roundup

Doc Brown to the white courtesy phone, please

license plate

random bits

link round-up

misc updates

Henri returns

short takes

we cannot escape ourselves

link round-up

laugh of the day

a few links

so true!

random bits

short takes

short takes

link round-up

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