What does the ‘B’ in Benoit B Mandelbrot stand for? Benoit B Mandelbrot.
Mathematician Mandelbrot coined the word fractal – a form of geometric repetition.
related { ‘Fractal Orgy’ Is the First Ever Raw Fractal To Be Banned }
We evaluated the impact of different presentation methods for evaluating how funny jokes are. We found that the same joke was perceived as significantly funnier when told by a robot than when presented only using text.
{ Dr. Hato | PDF }
Ongoing projects: Adding farting to the joking robots.
Every word in this sentence is a gross misspelling of the word “tomato.” –Doug Hofstadter
[…]
There is a well-known joke about Talmudic interpretation. A Jew is talking to his Rabbi.
Rabbi,” the man said, “Explain the Talmud to me.”
“Very well,” he said. “First, I will ask you a question. If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”
“The dirty one,” answers the man.
“No. They look at each other and the dirty man thinks he is clean and the clean man thinks he is dirty, therefore, the clean man washes himself.”
“Now, another question: If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”
The man smiles and says, “You just told me, Rabbi. The man who is clean washes himself because he thinks he is dirty.”
“No,” says the Rabbi. “If they each look at themselves, the clean man knows he doesn’t have to wash himself, so the dirty man washes himself. Now, one more question. If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”
”I don’t know, Rabbi. Depending on your point of view, it could be either one.”
Again the Rabbi says, “No. If two men climb up a chimney, how could one man remain clean? They both are dirty, and they both wash themselves.”
The confused man said, “Rabbi, you asked me the same question three times and you gave me three different answers. Is this some kind of a joke?”
”This is not a joke, my son. This is Talmud.”
art { Tim Hawkinson, Emoter, 2002 }
I purchased this product and sent it back immediately. The moment I took it out of the wrapping, I knew there was a problem, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Then I did put my finger on it. It felt a bit weird and when I started picking at it some of the paint flaked off. Cheap materials.
Anyhow, I may not be a member of the cognoscenti, but I have several Thomas “the Painter of Light” Kinkade paintings, so I know art. First of all, shouldn’t the lines be straight? It’s way too blurry and it hurts my eyes just to look at it. You know what also hurts my eyes? That little girls face. It looks like she has rosacea or something. And why is the girl so sad?!? Thomas Kinkade paintings are happy and joyful. This painting is just a bummer.
Save yourself a lot of disappointment and $1,448,500 and just get yourself a nice Kinkade lithograph. You’ll be glad that you did.
related { Amazon Enters Art World; Galleries Say They Aren’t Worried }
related { The utility of bad art }
Raising chickens in backyard coops is all the rage with nostalgia-loving hipsters but apparently the facial hair obsessed faux farmers often don’t realize that raising hens is loud, labor intensive work because animal shelters are now inundated with hundreds of unwanted urban fowl.
From California to New York, animal shelters are having a hard time coping with the hundreds of chickens being dropped off, sometimes dozens at a time, by bleary-eyed pet owners who might not have realized that chickens lay eggs for only two years but live for a decade or more. […]
The problem with urban farmed chickens starts at birth when hipsters purchase chicks from the same hatcheries that supply large commercial poultry producers. However, the commercial chickens are specifically bread to produce as many eggs as possible in the shortest amount of time.
The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
{ John Sifton/Warscapes | Continue reading | Thanks Aaron }
Which Came First: the Chicken or the Egg?
Alice Shirrell Kaswell, a staff member at the Annals of Improbable Research, definitively answered this question once and for all in 2003: The chicken, it turns out, came approximately 11 hours before the egg. Kaswell came to this finding by separately mailing a dozen eggs and one (1) live chicken via the U.S. Postal Service from Cambridge, Massachusetts to New York City. Both items, sent out on a Monday, arrived on Wednesday, but the chicken was delivered at 10:31 a.m., while the eggs didn’t arrive until 9:37 p.m.
photo { Kyoko Hamada }
A man pretending to be ‘Gangnam Style’ singer psy has crashed the Cannes Film Festival, working his way into a number of VIP parties. […] He was spotted at the Carlton Hotel VIP Room and Martinez Beach, and attended the “secret party” of “millionaire oil magnate and fashion designer” Goga Ashkenazi at Le Baron. He was also seen teaching fellow party goers how to do the dance for ‘Gangnam Style’.
art { Yves Klein, The Void (Empty Room), 1961 | Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957–2012 }
Last night, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted the 2013 Met Gala. This year’s theme was “Punk: From Chaos To Couture.” For many celebrities, this was the first time they had used the word “punk” in a sentence that wasn’t “Have my assistant get me Daft Punk tickets.”
[…]
“I skipped punk and went straight to couture. I never did punk.” —Andre Leon Talley, editor at large of Vogue/total fucking clown
“I did not [have a punk phase]. That’s why I think my version of punk for me is not probably the mohawk, typical punk that you’d sort of envision. A little bit more like ‘romantic punk.” —Kim Kardashian, notable reality TV shithead
“I don’t think I fully understood the theme.” —Kate Upton, human Viagra for Terry Richardson
After checking your bank account, remember to log out, close your web browser, and throw your computer into the ocean.
[…]
For those of you using a smartphone or tablet, the process for securely closing your banking session is very similar, except that you should find the nearest canyon and throw your device into that canyon. We then recommend simply scaling down the cliff face, locating the shattered remnants of your device, and spending the next few weeks traversing the country burying each individual piece in separate holes of varying depths several hundred miles apart.
{ The Onion | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
related { As digital data expands, anonymity may become a mathematical impossibility. }
The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny.
{ Christy Wampole/NY Times via | Gothamist | Continue reading }
As most of us over at io9 have come to understand, Kinja sucks tremendous balls, but not just any balls; the balls Kinja sucks are actually singularities, over the event horizon of which it has passed, so that it may achieve infinite sucking.
{ via Brad Feuerhelm }
