internet memes of the 2000s

Any contributions to this list?

http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2009/11/the-10-best-internet-memes-of-the-decade.html?p=2

Not quite the series finale...

Deepak, Lisa, and I were talking about Dollhouse, and this is just for them, but it turns out that the most recent doubleheader was not the series finale, but instead season two is gonna have a full 13 episode run, ending on January 22. Just thought I'd let the two of you know.

Eggs!

Double post today, yay! For some reason my mom just said the word "eggs" 5 times in one minute and it reminded me of this song. I can't remember if I've made any of y'all watch/listen to this. The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players is a husband/wife/daughter team that finds old photos at garage sales and what have you, then makes up songs to play in front of a slideshow of the pictures. Enjoy!

You Tube - Trachtenburg Family Slideshow - Eggs

bands with body names

Hey everyone! I follow the NPR blog Monitor Mix which is written by Carrie Brownstein (she used to be in Sleater-Kinney and now she does the Thunderant comedy troupe with Fred Armisen). It's good stuff. She recently solicited readers for all of the bands they could think of whose names refer to body parts, and now there's a contest to draw a body made from those names. Some of these are pretty cool looking:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monitormix/2009/12/vote_for_your_favorite_build_a.html

I voted for the "Monster Mix" one, FWIW.

A charizard for all you graders..........

see more Epic Fails

I know....

that you all religiously follow xkcd, but I thought that the last 5 or 10 have been especially good. Did anyone ever play Ski Free?

Injustice, thy name is Deepak

So apparently, power monger Deepak has decreed from his high tower that he should be an Obama level tyrant and be the only administrator. Let's tear him down and tea bag him until he submits to the Will of the people and let's us be an administrators.

Morning Songs

Hey guys,

I was wondering what (if any) songs do you guys use to kind of get you awake or pumped up in the morning.

I prefer the song Move On Up by Curtis Mayfield which you've probably heard in a movie or TV show at some point.

Ba-boom in Colbert Report

Check out around 2 minutes in http://www.hulu.com/watch/113552/the-colbert-report-mon-dec-7-2009.

This is probably of no interest to most of you, but three kids from the math camp I used to go to just took first place in the Siemens Competition in Science, Math, and Technology! This might actually interest some of y'all because there paper was on graph theory, called "Relating Missing and Decycling Edges in Directed Graphs."

Proof that nobody will ever know how computers work

dbal and lespig probably remember this.

The other day we're at a computer science seminar, and the speaker is from MIT, talking about graph algorithm type stuff.

His laptop stops working halfway through the talk. It won't show the next slide.

Uh oh, a simple problem with a computer! Its not doing what we want it to do. A group of top notch, world class, cutting edge computer scientists are sitting in a circle around a laptop which is temporarily malfunctioning.

Their best idea to fix it? Recompile the Latex.

The equivalent of kicking your TV. Screw with it until it works. Turn it off, and then turn it back on. Start over and hope it works next time. Fiddle with it.

These are the things we do with electronics, and if they work, we never look back to wonder what was actually wrong.

Recompiling the Latex worked, and of course the talk went immediately forward. No time to actually figure out what was wrong. We needed to hear about theoretical algorithms and how they were asymptotically better than other ones.

But what are you going to do? Its better than actually trying to understand circuits, fuck that.

Split Brain. Not Split Brian.

Split-brain is a lay term to describe the result when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. The surgical operation to produce this condition is called corpus callosotomy and is usually used as a last resort to treat intractable epilepsy. Initially, partial callosotomies are performed; if this operation does not succeed, a complete callosotomy is performed to mitigate the risk of accidental physical injury by reducing the severity and violence of epileptic seizures. Prior to callosotomies, epilepsy is treated through pharmaceutical means.

A patient with a split brain, when shown an image in his or her left visual field (that is, the left half of what both eyes see), will be unable to vocally name what he or she has seen. This is because the speech-control center is in the left side of the brain in most people, and the image from the left visual field is sent only to the right side of the brain (those with the speech control center in the right side will experience similar symptoms when an image is presented in the right visual field). Since communication between the two sides of the brain is inhibited, the patient cannot name what the right side of the brain is seeing. The person can, however, pick up and show recognition of an object (one within the left overall visual field) with their left hand, since that hand is controlled by the right side of the brain.

The same effect occurs for visual pairs and reasoning. For example, a patient with split brain is shown a picture of a chicken and a snowy field in separate visual fields and asked to choose from a list of words the best association with the pictures. The patient would choose a chicken foot to associate with the chicken and a shovel to associate with the snow; however, when asked to reason why the patient chose the shovel, the response would relate to the chicken.