Regruntled.com

Don’t try this at home. Read about it at Wikipedia.

Here’s another something derived from the Garfield comic strip.  Garkov is a Garfield strip with the dialogue generated more or less randomly using a Markov chain.  The idea is that large quantities of real dialogue are loaded into a database and used to calculate the probabilities of one word following another.  Then the new dialogue is generated one word at a time using these probabilities.  The result is text that seems coherent on a small scale (”pork chops” makes sense) but not on a large scale.

== See also: ==

Garfield minus Garfield

Garfield minus Garfield 2

Random text fragments

The BBC reports that “Martian soil could support life”.

“It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard - you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well.”

There are a number of problems with this.

First, Mars doesn’t have soil.  Mars has dirt.  If you don’t know the difference, ask a gardener.

Second, you don’t need soil to grow plants.  You don’t even need dirt.  You can grow plants hydroponically on any number of substrates.

Third, there’s no news here.  We have rocks from the Moon.  We even have a few Mars rocks from Antarctica.  Rocks are rocks.  It’s not like we thought Mars might be made out of red cheese.

The morning paper had another of those full-page ads.  You know, the ones that look like newspaper articles but have “advertisement” in tiny print somewhere on the page.  According to the Cool Surge website:

The Cool Surge eco-friendly air cooler is a work of engineering genius from the China coast so advanced that no windows, vents or freon are required. It is as easy to use as a baby’s vaporizer and even includes the four hour extra cooling power of the glacier ice blocks. It uses the same electricity as a 60 watt light bulb, yet it blasts out ice cooled air. The hi-efficiency motor cools the air around the unit up to ten degrees so you’ll instantly feel cool and refreshed. The 3 cooling levels and auto shut off function put all the comfort controls right at your finger tips. It’s so impressive that it even comes with a full year Money Back Guarantee.

A 60-watt ventless air conditioner?  Yeah, right.  It’s a fan that blows air over “glacier ice blocks” which you have to freeze in your freezer.  The freezer uses all the electricity, not the fan.  And since the whole system (fan + refrigerator) is ventless, it makes your house WARMER, not cooler.  That is, the fan blows cool air in your face, while your refrigerator makes the kitchen warmer.  On average, the house gets warmer.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that 21% of atheists believe in God.  According to the Washington Post:

A belief in God or a higher spirit is pervasive. Even Americans who describe themselves as atheist or agnostic have a robust sense of a higher power: Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit, and more than half of those who call themselves agnostic expressed a similar conviction.

What’s really going on here?  Pew is interviewing people who aren’t very smart.  These are people who don’t understand the questions but answer anyway, or who label themselves without understanding what the labels mean.  People who aren’t qualified to have opinions on whether it’s raining, much less the Big Questions. 

Remember, their votes count just as much as yours..

Obama’s decision to renege on his promise to accept public financing seems to have triggered a number of editorials.  US News & World Report calls him a “serial flip-flopper” and notes:

Change we can believe in? No, change we can count on, because as soon as he takes a position, we can count on the fact he’s going to change it in front of the next audience.

It’s official.  Obama is just another weaselly politician.  He may be the most talented weaselly politician in a generation, but you still can’t believe anything he says.

Jim Denevan makes big art.  Big, ephemeral art.  Above is supposedly the largest sand drawing ever made, in a dry lake bed in Nevada.  Three miles across and 100 miles of lines.

Speaking of big art, it seems to me that crop circles are also big art.  Maybe the artists are aliens, maybe they’re college pranksters, maybe they’re math bears, but they are artists, and we should judge the crop circles as art.

== See also: ==

• Crop circle math

I’d say “don’t try this at home”, but that’s exactly what someone did.

A study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology concludes that bumper stickers are a predictor for road rage.  The abstract:

Aggressive driving has received substantial media coverage during the past decade. We report 3 studies testing a territorial explanation of aggressive driving. Altman (1975) described attachment to, personalization of, and defense of primary territories (e.g., home) as being greater than for public territories (e.g., sunbathing spot on a beach). Aggressive driving may occur when social norms for defending a primary territory (i.e., one’s automobile) become confused with less aggressive norms for defending a public territory (i.e., the road). Both number of territory markers (e.g., bumper stickers, decals) and attachment to the vehicle were significant predictors of aggressive driving. Mere presence of a territory marker predicts increased use of the vehicle to express anger and decreased use of adaptive/constructive expressions.

Shankar Vedantam at the Washington Post has a good discussion.

That’s the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other “territorial markers” not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage — by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

 

It does not seem to matter whether the messages on the stickers are about peace and love — “Visualize World Peace,” “My Kid Is an Honor Student” — or angry and in your face — “Don’t Mess With Texas,” “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student.”

I wonder if something similar applies to T shirts with messages vs. plain T shirts.