Recently, the post What’s the most intellectual joke you know? (Reddit) got a lot of play and a tremendous number of suggestions. I dug through what were rated the top 500 replies and extracted and collated my favorites.

Computer Science

• There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

• The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”

  The programmer comes home with 12 loaves... [More]

I’ve recently discovered (via Kottke.org) a deceptively simple game called GeoGuessr, which works as follows:

1. The game shows a random location using Google Streetview
2. The player has to click as close as possible to the location on the inset map
3. The game rates your guess based on distance from the actual location and comes up with a score (6500 points seems to be the maximum)
4. Repeat 5 times
5. Tally up the score

Depending on how you play, you may or may not care about the score. Kottke at the... [More]

The last week’s worth of Daily Shows and Colbert Reports had some very good moments, so I thought I’d summarize and link to the stuff I found interesting. To start off, the show November 28, 2012 – Frank Oz (The Colbert Report) included a really strong “The Word” segment, shown and transcribed by yours truly below.

The Word – Sisters are doing it to themselves (The Colbert Report)

In this clip above, Stephen addresses a column by Fox News staff columnist Suzanne Venker—a so-called journalist to whom I would ordinarily not pay any attention but Stephen did such a sterling job... [More]

Here’s an interview of Diane Keaton by Stephen Colbert. It’s hard to describe, but it’s very entertaining[1], in a very nonsensical and silly and non-goal-oriented way. Just pure improv; it’s hard to imagine that they rehearsed it.

Diane Keaton Interview by Stephen Colbert in 30.04.2012 (Colbert Nation)

The post Filosofia monosillabica by Mark Liberman (Language Log) included the image reproduced to the left.

Taking some artistic license, this translates roughly to:

Who can, will not
Who wills[1], cannot
Who knows, does not
Who does, knows not
And so the world
goes badly

Guy patien[t]ly waits for elevator and gets on said elevator (YouTube)

But still … can that possibly be real?

Who gets so pissed at an elevator that

will
not
show
up
GOD
DAMMIT

—Why is the world against me? On this too, God?—

that he just rams the doors until he DEFEATS THE STUPID ELEVATOR.

Just this one time, he’s won.

THERE.
THAT WILL SHOW THEM.

Who’s
B
o
o
o
o
s
s
.

7 more of the world’s most brilliantly pointless street flyers (happy Place). Some are pretty original; some are kinda mean; some are kinda lame.

I laughed at these:

Have you seen this bird? Because they are everywhere.

I finished this Garfield puzzle

Reward for Eddie

The detail is too good not to be true:

“Black manx, white markings on belly. no tail. Six years old. Red collar w/tags. Overweight. Mews all day / night demanding attention. Won’t stay off countertops. Eats directly from unattended plates, knocks glasses/bottles/vases onto floor. Various expensive ailments. Doesn’t do tricks or anything... [More]”

The comedy/cabaret troupe Fascinating Aida riffed on cheap flights—specifically those that you can get in Ireland (I’m looking at you, Ryanair). The video below is pretty funny (and includes subtitles for the Irish-accent–impaired).

Cheap Flights with subtitles by bolikoki (YouTube)

SPOILER ALERT:The best line was right at the end (but it’s really much better in song): “And as we heard his announcement, our hearts gave a terrible thump…if you haven’t prepaid to use the steps, you’ll have to feckin’ jump!”

How did I not know that John Oliver had his own show on Comedy Central? It’s apparently a show where he does stand-up comedy of his own—at which he is flat-out brilliant—and includes bits from some other very talented people. He had a special last year as well, called Terrifying Times (Comedy Central) (the link takes you to clips from that show).

Below is a video in which he tells the story of a man who rushes to catch a subway train. Oliver is a natural-born storyteller; it’s definitely worth the four... [More]

Lewis Black delivered what can only be considered a triumph of dark comedy in the following clip, in which he stumps for Donald Trump in 2012. You have to hang on through the whole video for his justification, which is transcribed below.

Back In Black – Trump 2012 by Lewis Black (The Daily Show)

“That’s what he’s best at: putting a bow on a turd, marking up the price and selling it so hard, you want it, even though you know it’s just a turd with a bow on it! America…is that turd. It’s time to let Donald Trump come in, put some gold leaf on the... [More]”

The essay interpreting Eric Cantor’s blatant religious censorship as an art statement is brilliant.

“This defunding threat isn’t some cheap exercise in mindless censorship; it’s an anti-paradigmatic revolutionary work of conceptual art-banning. And, while its point of departure may be Senator Jesse Helms’s admittedly ground-breaking defunding of the National Endowment of the Arts over André Serrano’s Piss Christ, it’s not a derivative “Oooh, I’m a Christian, I’m so offended” because, as the... [More]”

In the category of font-geek humor, the perennial whipping boy of the font stable fights back in the essay, I’m Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher (McSweeney's Internet Tendency).

“Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.

“[…]

“While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen... [More]”

Sporcle has a lot of fun quizzes, but my favorite is Countries of the World. After you start the game, you have 15 minutes to type in the English names of all of the internationally recognized states in the world. Not only do you have to actually know them and be able to recall them just by looking at the political boundaries on the map, you have to type pretty quickly to get them all.

A while back, I (well, the wife and I) used this game to try to learn all of the countries. We did pretty... [More]

First up in a wonderful report from John Oliver, covering the recent Republican retreat in Hawaii. The angle is that the Republicans made a lot of hey about Obama being from Hawaii and continuing to vacation there, claiming it made him out-of-touch with the American people (it being taken for granted that Obama is to blame for his place of birth). Hawaii is, in general, one of the more expensive places to live in America, so the claim is not wholly without worth. However, watching the... [More]

A recent collection of photos called Eid al-Adha and the Hajj, 2009 (Big Picture Blog) included the following photo:

Saudi special forces display some of their skills and equipment during a ceremony as they prepare for the influx people to participate in the Hajj, in Arafat 15 kms outside of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009. (AP Photo/Issa Mohammad)

These Saudi soldiers’ uniforms looked awfully familiar. A little work with Google Images and I came up with the following image of actions figures from the mid-80's.

GI Joe Cobra Guards

The Saudi special forces’ uniforms are clearly based on those of the forces of Cobra in the G.I. Joe cartoon universe. I wonder how subconscious this was?

So, there’s this show on the Discovery Channel called Dirty Jobs starring a fella named Mike Rowe. He’s got an all-American blue-collar image and he’s popular enough with the geek crowd to have attracted the attention of Reddit, which invited him to answer some questions. The final question in this video involves his obvious appeal for the ladies: “Is there any chance you’ll stop having sex with my wife in her dreams?”

His answer is absolute comedy gold, from the writing to the timing to the... [More]

Biden is at it again[1]:

Gaffe-Prone Biden Embarrasses Nation Yet Again By Sneezing During Meeting (The Onion)

The consensus on Biden and his constant slip-ups is summed up by one analyst thusly:

“It’s a stupid, stupid error from a half-human, spit-spewing gaffe machine. […] It’s our fault for voting Obama into office alongside a half-retarded adult baby.”

In colloquial Swiss-German, the English word “easy” has been incorporated in some of its senses: as a synonym for “simple” and as a synonym for “relax”, as in a shortening of “take it easy” or a replacement for “no problem”.

For example (and I’m taking liberties with the Swiss-German spelling here because there are, at best, unwritten rules for that), you can say:

“Das isch doch easy! (But that’s easy!)”

and you can also say:

“Kasch es nid mache? Easy, ich mach es.(You can’t do it? No... [More]”

Here’s a story originally published back in the Seventies and carefully passed from hand to hand to newsgroup to newsgroup and now from blog to blog: How to Build an H-Bomb. There’s a lot of pseudo-realistic–sounding scientific babble about various chemical compounds and elements, but the home-liquefaction process guide takes the cake:

“First transform the gas into a liquid by subjecting it to pressure. You can use a bicycle pump for this. Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a... [More]”

Heavy Metal Band Names by Doogie Horner (Comics vs. Audience) (pictured below; click for larger version) offers a well-thought-out taxonomy of many heavy metal band names, with five main categories—Deadly Things, Death, Religion, Animals and Badass Misspellings—branching into over a dozen sub-categories, among them “Pleas for Help”, “Umlauts”, “Medieval” and so on. All in all, not a bad job at all.[1]

Heavy Metal Band Name Taxonomy

Extracted from a PowerPoint show that made the rounds via email a while ago; there were more, but some were clearly photoshopped[1] or just dumb.

Improvisation

Improvised HardhatImprovised JackImprovised Scaffold Leveling

Ladders

Power Tools and Swimming PoolsLadder Extension

Trust

Painting the Last SpotAn Exercise in Trust

As reported in the article For Bush’s staff, upbeat talking points on his tenure (LA Times):

“A two-page memo that has been sent to Cabinet members and other high-ranking officials offers a guide for discussing Bush’s eight-year tenure during their public speeches. […] The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success.”

A lovely take on this bit of (unsurprising) news is in Recent Giggle-Me-GYWOs by David Rees in December 2008 (MNFTIU), linked below:

Memo About Bush's Unalloyed Success

“Where are all the other pages?”

Indeed.

The eyeballing game is an interesting game that challenges you to “eyeball” distances and angles for fabulous prizes, fortune and fame. You have as much time as you like to perform each of the following tasks three times:

• Make a parallelogram by dragging one corner to the correct position.
• Identify the midpoint of a line
• Bisect an angle
• Find the center of a triangle
• Find the center of a circle
• Make a right angle out of two line segments
• Find the point of convergence for three line segments

... [More]

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report aren’t the only games in town anymore. The Onion, which started as an actual physical newspaper before migrating online, has a lot of audio and video content available, as well. The video content is incredibly well-produced and is designed to inspire the same “wait a second…is this real?” feeling as some of its better news articles do.

They have a few recurring themes, covering sports, political news and even a morning show. Here are a few of the better... [More]

Sarah Silverman is back with a slightly-less-profane video offering than her last outing, this time stumping for Obama. On a site called The Great Schlep, she lays out her angle: with Florida playing such an important role in previous elections, jewish Obama supporters should “schlep” to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama.

The great schlep officially takes place over Columbus Day weekend. Talking points are available in PDF form from the web site.

SNL: Hillary Clinton & Sarah Palin Make an Announcement (NBC.com)

This segment was inevitable the first time someone noted that Sarah Palin wears “Tina Fey” glasses. Clinton & Palin come together to address sexism in the media; hilarity ensues.

SNL: Couric interviews Palin, Part 4 (NBC.com)

Katie Couric, not known for her hardball interviews or journalistic acumen or sophisticated questions, interviewed Sarah Palin this week; disaster ensued. No matter how hard Couric tried to toss Palin softballs, she bobbled... [More]

Take the FM 100 Hue Test (XRite); make sure you have about five minutes or so. Decent light conditions and an LCD help. If you have a CRT, you should probably run some color calibration if it’s been 10 years since you last did one ;-).

When you’re ready to go, you get a grid like the one shown below.

The Color Test

If you’re wicked awesome and have eyes like Superman, you’ll be taken to the following screen after moving the little tiles and pressing “Score Test”.

You Have Perfect Color Vision!

Booyah!

The Daily Show did an extremely silly tribute to fallen British soldiers recently, with Jon Oliver reading a list of heroes and Jon Stewart caught completely unawares[1]:

Britain's Fallen Soldiers by John Oliver & John Stewart (Daily Show)

The list of names is extremely silly and transcribed below[2]:

• Algernon Bottomside
• Percival P. Pocketnubbin
• Wing Commander Battle Morningwood
• Remington Snatch
• Cecil Hardboner
• Lt. Cl. Buntington Cornhole
• Jeffrey Incestershire
• Cpt. Oroffis Schwartz
• Lead Seaman Huffington Knobgobbler
• Alastair Vaginafoot (Allie to his many friends)... [More]

Top 5 Amazing Kinetic Sculpture Videos (Wired) reported on a Theo Jansen, an amazing Dutch sculptor. However, some of their video links aren’t working anymore, so here are some fresher ones below.

Theo Jansen − Animaris Rhinoceros (YouTube) This sculpture weighs two tons and is made of steel and cloth—but a strong wind can push it along, articulating its huge legs in elegant slow-motion.

Kinetic Horse Sculpture (YouTube) This is a kinetic origami, powered by a central motor with a single offset axle moving its four legs. The carefully folded joints coupled with the single... [More]

There are a lot of versions of this, but this one is pretty neutral and to-the-point.