brainsnorkel.com

Christmas can be a long day. Hopefully these two YouTube gems will help pass the time.

How to fold a T-shirt in 5 seconds:

Orange teeth:

Regrettably, I don’t have an iPhone. I do, however, have iPhone envy. I can tell, because I have dreams about accelerometers and iPhone apps I’d like. Also, I have nightmares about dropping my imaginary iPhone.

Given I don’t have the necessary equipment to develop an iPhone application, I hereby give you, The Internet, my idea for an iPhone application. My envy-inspired dreams have resulted in an idea for an App whose sole purpose is to add a little levity to those near-miss moments when you think you’ve accidentally destroyed your iPhone.

My imaginary app patiently waits for the accelerometer to report extreme acceleration events, such as when the phone has fallen to the ground. Shortly after the high-G event, the app plays an audio file that says “Well that was close!”

That’s it.

No additional logic is required for the case when the G force is so great the iPhone stops working. Those moments are best kept levity-free.

From the virtual Cecil B. DeMille’s of Bennelong.

Yes, we’re early. But we did let a month go by after Myer put out their decorations.

Apparently Disneyland aims to polarise its guests.

Or perhaps if you weren’t pissed off or ecstatic about the experience they don’t really care if you’d recommend them to others.

After reading about and enjoying the Firefox 3.0 about:robots “feature,” Mr 5’s $8 plastic gift for accompanying me to the markets today might have been a subliminally-suggested choice. We acquired a fashivhably coloured, double-luffing, go-ahead homage to a silly software release mascot.

For fans of robots, this model screams “Fire. Fire. Get down!” deafeningly and something else we can’t make out. Non! Stop! All the while swivelling its randomly illuminated plastic torso and waggling its arms up and down. He falls over due to being newly hatched from a Styrofoam incubator — and he’s obviously not yet accustomed to his roller skates.

“Could sound a beautiful music” (which we assume is a rough translation for “emits loud screaming and gunfire”) led to Dobo Arigato Mr Beat Magnum having a nasty run-in with J.

Mr 5 couldn’t hear his mother screaming at him to make the bad robot stop. He’s is missing an arm now (Mr Beat Magnum, not Mr 5), complete with dangling wires. This makes him look much cooler and we have a war story about the time he sacrificed an arm to save Mr 5 from harm.

Fafblog is stirring.

If I go back to using Bloglines from Reader and pretend Billmon is still around I’ll be blog-partying on teh Internets like it’s 2004.

…but almost that boring.

I Am A: True Neutral Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-12
Dexterity-15
Constitution-12
Intelligence-14
Wisdom-14
Charisma-15

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus

I wonder what D&D life would be like if I had agreed to assassinate the president in the survey? Oh wait. The back button is my friend.

Obviously I would be among the most odious of chaotic, sonofabitches…

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Lee-Harvey Oswald was true neutral before he shot JFK and neutral good after? Tell that to Jack Ruby.

I guess the survey is aware of who’s currently President of the US. Maybe it’s geo-located me and knows that my country doesn’t have a president. If I would assassinate some dictator who masquerades as president in Australia’s freedom-tolerating system of constitutional monarchy, then there is good in me!

Via Jeff Freeman

What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?

www.omfg.com should have much funnier content.

This game looks like an end-run around WoW’s strengths: storyline depth, spelling, grammar, good localization quality and intentional humour.

From the Elf Online newbie quest database:

Quest name: Meng San’s worries
Quest level: 6~99
Rewarded goods: Fatal Wrath Kerchief 7J?21001?
Procedure: 1.Go to Uncle Lin in Sunset Prairie to buy a bottle of Injure Curer for Iron Arm Meng San in West Carefree Village.
[...]
Quest name: Beat elf
Quest level: 1~99
Procedure: 1.Go to HaiLiGe in North Wulong Village after killed 10 Snot Elf in Tranquil Seacoast 1.

And having agreed to join up, this is displayed after the “congratulations!” message:

Play Elf Online, Earn Cash.
Rare Items for Your Choose.
Cashes Points Rare Pets.

And, err, the download instructions look pretty frightening for Vista users:

1.Client latest version 2.0.2.496, about 890 M;
2.You can use either BT or HTTP to download. BT is recommended;
3.If you use the Vista O/S, please don’t install the game in disk C;
4. If you can’t login the game after downloaded and installed the client, please download manual update patch.

Even now I feel strangely drawn to play.

h/t Broken Toys

Update: Caution… you can’t delete or cancel your account details so be sure to use a pseudonym and a disposable email address during registration. And I can’t figure out how to… err… get an ID for this free game. Impenetrable grammar has its downsides too…

Just reporting that I got to use this as a sentence today and nobody blinked.

You know you are a genius. The whole world needs to read your writing. There are so many words waiting inside you to get out that they tumble over each other and melt into your keyboard to decorate the screen. You don’t know why you bother writing because nobody seems to understand you — but write you must! You know that if only someone, anyone, would make it all the way to the end of your writing they would achieve enlightenment. Then you would have a soul-mate! A co-conspirator! A light in the darkness! A reason for writing more stuff! Oh boy, what a world it would be if only someone would read your words and think (just think!) about what you have to say. Maybe if you used MORE CAPS it would sink in?!?! And your previous writing? To recap is weakness, to revise is surrender, yet to refer to your previous work is divine. They must try harder to keep up! Don’t they understand the power of narrative? Fools! You’ve watched them before, reading your sentences, face turning blue as they search for a full-stop. You see them yearning for a comma. They panic as they hunt for the end of a paragraph. They flinch when you redefine a term. They can’t handle your intellect. They don’t deserve punctuation. Weaklings.

Tandem running in ants is a form of recruitment in which a single well-informed worker guides a naive nestmate to a goal [...references elided...]. The ant Temnothorax albipennis recently satisfied a strict set of predefined criteria for teaching in nonhuman animals [...references elided...]. These criteria do not include evaluation as a prerequisite for teaching [...references elided...]. However, some authors claim that true teaching is always evaluative, i.e., sensitive to the competence or quality of the pupil [...references elided...]. They then assume, on the premise that only humans are capable of making such necessarily complex cognitive evaluations, that teaching must be unique to humans. We conducted experiments to test whether evaluation occurs during tandem running, in which a knowledgeable ant physically guides a naive follower to a goal. In each experiment, we interrupted the tandem run by removing the tandem follower. The response of the leader was to stand still at the point where the tandem run was interrupted. We then measured how long the leader waited for the missing follower before giving up. Our results demonstrate T. albipennis performs three different kinds of evaluation. First, the longer the tandem has proceeded the longer the leader will wait for the follower to re-establish contact. Second, ant teachers modulate their giving-up time depending on the value of the goal. Finally, leaders have shorter giving-up times after unusually slow tandem runs.

From Current Biology. 

I wonder sometimes in the supermarket, while shopping with and losing children, if I’m just a giant ant.  Then I count my limbs and think “naah!” Ants wouldn’t sigh out loud like I do before trudging off to search for lost tandem followers.

(This post an excuse to experiment with Adobe Contribute)