Humor

A recent study undertaken by the Institute of Polar Science has backed plans by Gala Casino to create the first ever Ice Casino. Led by Professor Ross Bight, a renowned figure in the fields of both human and animal behaviour in the Arctic, the research has found that players become more composed and focussed whilst being subjected to a colder temperature.  It is believed that by forcing the mind to concentrate in these conditions, the brain goes into a more survival mentality and a person will use their instinct much more productively, in comparison to a warmer environment where they…

LAUGHTER IS CLOSELY RELATED TO FEAR, RESEARCHERS FIND HONG KONG, March 2, 2015 The surest way to make someone laugh is to attack them, researchers said this week. Humor is rooted in fear, and laughter is a type of screaming. The widespread belief that surprise is the basic unit of joke delivery is wrong, according to entertainment researchers at the School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Unpredictability is a common but OPTIONAL element of the process of making people laugh out loud, while the creation of emotional tension is far more significant. “People create laughter by…

Oh, yes.  I absolutely adore meeting with the media, it's my chance to give something back, don't you know, to give aspiring young journalists a paw up, as it were.  It's the least I can do. I understand, dear.  Of course you feel that way.  I'm sure I would too, if I were in your shoes.  Sorry! I can't resist these little jokes. Yes, I think we should.  What would you like to ask me? An excellent question!   There were so many options, I was absolutely paralyzed with indecision at first.   But simple pragmatism helped eliminate the obviously…

After a year in which further details of national intelligence agencies' shadowy surveillance networks were laid bare, a fresh leak of documents reveals the obsessive surveillance that extends as far north as Lapland. Santa’s Arctic Workshop (SAW) has deployed a multinational panopticon surveillance program, according to leaked documents being called “the Snowman Files”. According to these documents, the Arctic workshop runs a behavioral monitoring project, part of a previously wider undisclosed program called “Operation Naughty or Nice”, which allows chief executive, Santa Claus, and a group…

Good Needlwork magazine shows you how to get better bosoms. Image: Dave Whatt By Jo Brewis, University of Leicester When my good friend and long-term collaborator Sam Warren was given a pile of women’s magazines from the 1930s by her grandmother Jane Frampton, we found among them 11 Christmas issues of Good Needlework, Model Housekeeping, The Needlewoman and Stitchcraft. We’re both preoccupied with popular culture but we’re also avid consumers of all sorts of total nonsense. And so the idea of comparing these issues to more contemporary versions emerged. Because none of these magazines…

Here is a flower we all (in the northern hemisphere at least) associate with Christmastime, Euphorbia pulcherrima, commonly known as the Poinsettia (or Weihnachtsstern = Christmas Star in Germany).  Euphorbias often have highly caustic sap, and some of the succulent species in Africa are quite inedible to humans, although baboons seem to cope with them quite nicely.  So as an amateur botanist I have always been slightly wary of this plant.  However, it seems I may have been worrying too much.  As Wikipedia relates: In the United States and perhaps elsewhere, there is a…

Cambridge University Press website mislabels and Astronomy text as an Astrology text. I was looking for open access open source freely downloadable and good textbooks to use in my future Astronomy classes.  The City Colleges require a very good text, but the supply of it to students in a timely manner hasn't been reliable as of late.  Over half of students in the City Colleges did not get books they ordered until the midterm.   So I saw a page about books printed by Cambridge and the Open University.  Links on that website were broken so I went to search for them and…

Play the video below to see how to solve the puzzle I posted last week: The object actually appears as it is pictured. It is not an optical illusion. The image was not created using an “in camera” special effect (no special lighting, no filters other than the built-in infrared filter, no mirrors, or any other “in camera” special effect technique). The image has not been modified with digital photography editing software. The object was not taped, or glued, or otherwise fastened together. The object was created using a single piece of ordinary twenty pound bond computer printer paper and a…

The object actually appears as it is pictured. It is not an optical illusion. The image was not created using an “in camera” special effect (no special lighting, no filters other than the built-in infrared filter, no mirrors, or any other “in camera” special effect technique). The image has not been modified with digital photography editing software. The object was not taped, or glued, or otherwise fastened together. The object was created using a single piece of ordinary twenty pound bond computer printer paper and a pair of scissors. Are you able to solve the puzzle of how it was made?

Programmers may not be the guys with the best sense of humor around, but I found it quite entertaining to read a web page with a collection of source code comments arising a smile. The one I liked the most is the following - not even a comment, but the way the guy called the object he instantiates: I am sorry if you do not get it - let me try to explain. A program may "throw an exception" if something goes wrong - say it finds itself in the need of dividing by zero, or taking the square root of a negative number, or accessing a non-existing memory address. The language has a command that "…