Humor

The funniest thing I have read lately. Ben Elton's new Britcom 'The Wright Way' has been panned by critics.  It is about a health and safety team in the fictitious borough of Baselricky. One review I read, by The Guardian's Charlie Brooker, makes mock of 'The Wright Way' and then goes on to wax lyrical about 'elf n'safety' in general.  It is a very good read: I literally laughed out loud. One of the major criticisms of The Wright Way, apart from the title and scripting and performances and set design and soundtrack and ambience and positioning of each individual pixel making up the…

The well-known moral dilemma about sacrificing a few to save many has now been answered by extraction of empirical data from conceivable parallel worlds via obvious-operators instantiated in neural networks that were tuned by evolutionary algorithms into weak quantum measurement of counterfactuals. The scientists came up with an intriguing variation of the traditional setup: There are three gondolas suspended from cables over an abyss, all attached to one main beam which will break soon if not at least one gondola’s cable is cut. The gondolas are prepared as follows: Gondola A) Asians,…

The Authentic Biography OF H2O as told exclusively to this author Thanks to its marvellous memory, water tells some tales of its adventures down through the ages. It was somewhere between 20 and 40 billion years ago that I was born.  I'm sorry that I can't be more precise but my memory isn't what it used to be.  I can remember flying through space at a colossal speed.  I had to travel under my own steam because there was no way I could buy a ticket to ride. There was no money in those days because of something called inflation.  I wasn't worried about falling because…

Is Google On The Level? I have often complained about the way that Google search behaves.  For instance, try looking up the capacitance of a lead-acid battery.  Good luck with that - Google positively insists that you ought to want to search for capacity. Despite all of the quirks of the Google brand, I always thought that Google was, as a freemason might put it: on the level.  Until today, when I performed this Google search for a canvas awning.

This is another of my poems for children of all ages. It is very fortunate for me that the grammar police have never been issued with tazers.....Paddles At The Beachside The rains is gonethe sand are dryThe sun is shonethe bird is fly. The wavies flowjust like heart beatI think we goand paddle our feet. Image courtesy: Trevor Edwards (Lucky Trev) Sheppey Pictures And Postcards.

With the popularity of dark matter and dark energy as blanket terms for 'this is weird and we don't understand it but we are studying it, ain't science awesome?' in physics, it was only a matter of time before it caught on elsewhere. So we have dark lightning and the life sciences made sure they caught the wave, migrating non-coding DNA (factual = booooring) from the colloquially misunderstood blanket term 'junk DNA' to the cooler and edgier 21st century 'Dark Genome'. Dark Genome as a term is not new in 2013. I've seen it floating around since 2010 or so (and biologists probably a lot longer…

What is the optimum stroke angle for a duck’s foot when paddling?  Although a duck may already intuitively know the answer, the question has now been clarified for us humans as part of a recent research project undertaken at the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in the US. Research Scientist and Post Doctoral Scholar Dr. Daegyoum Kim performed the study along with professor Morteza Gharib. The team employed a range of experimental setups with mechanical flappers, clappers and paddlers in tanks of fluid which was seeded with silver-coated glass microspheres and…

The Windows® NTFS disk filing system was first introduced in 1993, but despite its undoubted sophistication, not everyone is convinced that it is perfectly tuned for all possible eventualities. Prompting Dr. Fanglu Guo and Dr. Tzi-cker Chiueh from Symantec Research. Laboratories, Culver City, USA to develop their DAFT disk operating system. A comprehensive description of DAFT [Disk geometry-Aware File system Traversal] (a novel algorithmic suite designed to improve the read efficiency of bulk file accesses) is published in the eccentrically titled  ‘Modeling, Analysis&Simulation…

Would one normally expect a health-professional’s stethoscope to hang more predominantly to their left, or their right? And if there is a bias, what conclusions may be drawn? In 2007, professor Emmanuel Stylianos Antonarakis MBBCh performed a cross-sectional questionnaire survey with 186 medical doctors of all grades from the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff. The prevalent stethoscope-hang side (if there was one) was noted and correlated with handedness, footedness, eyedness, earedness, hand clasping, arm folding, and leg crossing of the subjects. The survey not only showed that : “…

Typical Male ? Just for fun: What else might Nicholas Cage be saying?  There's plenty of scope here for your ideas.