Some Friday Humour

Given that it is a Friday and some sort of ridiculous construction is taking place just below my window which makes concentrating on work rather difficult, I thought I would post something lighthearted.  Here are three videos of Henri, a cat undergoing an existential crisis.  I think the videos get progressively better (both in film quality and content), but it is nevertheless worth watching them in order to see the development of poor Henri's nihilism.

Conservapedia Does It Again

It seems like it has simply been too long on this site since I last poked fun at Conservapedia, so here is the latest bit of their crazy that is making the rounds on the internet: how general relativity is liberal nonsense. My friend Mitch has an excellent take-down over at Skeptic North (with screen shots in case Conservapedia fails to load for you... it has been giving me trouble all morning). I don't have a whole lot to add, since Mitch nicely highlighted the the main chunks of hilarity, but I just thought it worth repeating: reality does not have a liberal bias no matter how many times Conservapedia might (inadvertently) make that claim.

The Crazy Check

Political advertisements are by their nature awkward, particularly for candidates that don't have the budget for a slick promotional team. If you are running for office, though, the one thing you should always ensure is that your ad doesn't make you look flat out insane.


(via Deus Ex Malcontent)

Dirty Chemistry Humour

Similar to my post this morning, here is something that I forgot to put up when it first came to my attention a few days ago. Behold what is probably the most amazing image from an article abstract in years:


When I first saw this, I assumed it was a joke, but it appears to be from a legitimate article. So, to Sergio H. Toma, Miriam Uemi, Sofia Nikolaou, Daniela M. Tomazela, Marcos N. Eberlin, and Henrique E. Toma, I say well done.

Science Outreach - You're Doing it Right

I'm sure most of my readers will have already seen this (considering I found it from my perusals of PZ Myer's blog Pharyngula), but I still couldn't resist posting it. As my girlfriend remarked, "I love a good boy band singing about science."

A Disconcerting Development

For some reason, the default dictionary for the spell-check available in both Open Office and Microsoft Word does not recognize 'neuroscience' as a word. I normally just ignore my spell-checker when it highlights words that I know to be actual words (like my name), but tonight, for the first time, while spell-checking a document I glanced at the suggested words box before I hit 'ignore'. To my horror, the first suggested word as a replacement for 'neuroscience' is 'pseudoscience'. Who knew that Open Office's spell-checking program knew how to insult me so effectively?

Picking on Mr. Crusher

I have mentioned the short Star Trek: The Next Generation videos that are available on youtube as new stories cobbled together by clever editing before, and whenever one that I think was particularly well done comes along I point it out. Well, since that time many more have been released, and another one has struck my fancy. I thought the random pieces of storyline were knit together rather well, and it succeeded without even having to resort to awkward sexual tension between the crew members.

I suppose sometimes that Canadian politics actually can be interesting

I just don't think this was the sort of interesting the government was going for...

Sage Advice

I'm pretty exhausted today. I was up late last night with the pre-conference dinner, and then I slept poorly with a stomach ache (I assume I ate too much protein and possibly drank too much beer and wine). As a result, I missed what was reputed to be a very good talk this morning by Dr. Leonid Bunimovich. I did see a great talk by Dr. Klaus Pawelzik (which I will try to have a review of in the near future) and part of a talk by Dr. Elisha Moses (unfortunately, my narcolepsy was rearing its ugly head for that talk and I missed a lot of the middle...). Tonight at the conference dinner, however, I got a chance to hear Bunimovich speak again (which is nice, because he is a great speaker). Rather than a scientific talk, however, he was giving a birthday speech for the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization director, Dr. Theo Geisel. As part of his speech, he offered the following advice:

Life is much better after sixty, as you gain a much better perspective on life. You see, when you are a young man in your twenties walking down the street on a lovely day and you see a beautiful girl walking toward you, you enjoy the sight of the beautiful girl. However, when you are a man of sixty walking down the street on a lovely day and you see a beautiful girl and her mother walking toward you, you enjoy the sight of the girl and her mother.

Going on a trip

I'm going to Munich this weekend, so I won't get a chance to work on refining my thoughts from the last post or put up the answers to the most recent puzzle (which no one has sent me solutions for yet... get those in soon!) until Monday. Since I seem to have been overly hitting the philosophy and public policy theme recently, I thought I would lighten the mood with a funny video from youtube. I've pointed out the Star Trek: The Next Generation video edits before, and since then quite a few more have been released. I thought the 21st one was particularly well done, so I've embedded it here. Enjoy!

Blatant Bribery

This article has so many amazing lines, it is hard to pick specific ones to comment on...
Men, beer, and the church.

I Get Email (Scams)

The thing about email scams is they tend to be really bad. The major problems that usually crop up are atrocious spelling and grammar, and internal inconsistencies. If you are taking the time to design and send a scam, I would think it would make sense to put just a little bit of editing effort into the matter. Of course, even if the spelling and grammar are entirely correct and the content is actually consistent with itself, you still have to hope the recipients are gullible enough to relinquish whatever information you are trying to steal from them. The reason I bring this up is because I got a scam email yesterday that actually made me chuckle. While the spelling and grammar were surprisingly good for a scam email (some minor punctuation errors like a missing space here and some random capitalization, but compared to the usual spam crap it was fairly good), they still fell into the inconsistency trap by telling me that I have 24 hours to respond before my account is deleted, and later that I have two weeks to 'update' my account before it is deleted. What made me laugh, though, was the sent-from and reply-to email addresses (you might have to click on the picture to see it large enough to read).

Leaving out the fact that there is no reason password, date of birth, occupation, and country information should be required for verifying the use of an email account, why would Google's Gmail team use a Yahoo email address?

Wordplay

Yesterday was a great day which I forgot to announce. Why, might you ask? After all, I still have an exam coming up, so most of the day was spent studying. However, it was the fourth of May, and therefore it was Star Wars Day. Why is the fourth of May Star Wars Day, you might ask? Because on May the fourth you can say, "Happy Star Wars Day, May the fourth be with you!"

Happy belated Star Wars Day.

Oh, that pesky liberal bias of reality...

I was taking a brief break from my project report writing to watch an episode of the Daily Show online. When it pointed out some of the inevitable idiocy of the Fox News Channel, I thought I'd have a look at what Wikipedia, that fetid pit of "liberal" online scholarship, and Conservapedia, the love-able, hug-able, hate-filled alternative to an unbiased look at reality, had to say about it. My astute readers may recall that I have written previous tirades against Conservapedia as well as just laughed at its stupidity, so, with full disclosure, when I set out to compare the representation of Fox News between the two sites I fully expected to find something like this.

Wikipedia opens with a rather plain description of the corporation itself (how it fits into the overall corporate structure of the world and its present viewership), followed by a brief overview of the channel's history, and finally ending its introduction with a rather tame note:

Critics and some observers of the channel say that Fox News Channel promotes conservative political positions. Fox News Channel publicly denies any bias in the channel's reporting.

Of course, over at Conservapedia there is no letting mundane and boring facts get in the way of the ideological crazy, so their article leaps straight in with the opener:

The Fox News Channel is not as conservative as it pretends to be...

Like many things written at Conservapedia, that statement makes so little sense it is laughable. Fox News, after all, officially claims to be "Fair and Balanced", which precludes them from pretending to hold any sort of ideological bend. Of course, Fox News isn't much better journalistically than Conservapedia, so their claim of "Fair and Balanced" doesn't hold much water in my books either.

Some more evidence that machine vision is hard

Nearly a year ago, I made a post talking about the woefully difficult task of visual processing, and it is a theme I have continued to discuss in my series on top-down visual processing, particularly the third (and most recent) instalment. Well, now it is time to take a sojourn out of the ivory tower of academic discussion (a phrase which I, of course, use ironically) and giggle at some real-life examples of failed automated vision tasks involving iPhoto's facial recognition software. The examples have all been submitted to a Flickr group where they can be perused at one's leisure.

I think this one is my favourite:

I was not expecting that...

I'm busy fighting the suicidal urges of my robots, so in the meantime, here is an incredibly odd video I rather enjoyed:



I mean, who saw that coming? And I thought having wild turkeys wake me up by pecking at their reflection in our basement door a few summers ago was a fun story to tell... but it doesn't hold a candle to this.

"Kids say the darndest things"

Monday morning I had my first Brain Day experience in which a friend of mine from my neuroscience lab course last semester and I went into a classroom of children in grades 3 and 4 and taught them about the brain (primarily with the intent on brain and spinal cord injury prevention, although we had a lot of extra 'just because it is interesting' material in there too). It was an interesting experience. While I will wait until after my second Brain Day presentation to write about the events themselves, there was one cute anecdote I wanted to share now while I procrastinate studying for my pair of midterms this evening.

When I was living in Pennsylvania, my German teacher in grade 8 had an amazing collection of ties. As far as anyone could tell, he wore a tie every day and did not ever repeat a tie over the course of the school year. After such an impressive display of tie wearing, sporting a tie and teaching young children now go together in my head. To that end, I informed my presentation partner that I intended to wear a tie for our presentation (I have one my mom bought me a few years ago that is covered in mathematics equations and simple diagrams), so she decided she had better dress up a little too. To that end, I showed up in a dress shirt and tie, and she showed up in nice clothes and high heels. As we neared recess, I was talking to the class about the auditory system when one of the little girls in the class raised her hand and called my partner over. Instead of asking a question about the brain, however, she informed my partner that she and I must be married, since I was wearing a tie and she was wearing high heels.

While I presume my partner explained the difference between a married couple and academic peers (or something to that effect), I enjoy the story because I find it interesting how often young children make these seemingly bizarre leaps in logic. What is even more interesting is quite often, if asked, the children can give quite a coherent, if misguided, outline of the logical steps they took to reach the given conclusion. I never got the chance to ask this little girl how she arrived at the conclusion that tie and high heels meant marriage, so I remain curious.

Naughty humour with the cranial nerves

Warning: This post has some racy humour in it. Reader beware.

Wednesday I have my first (and hopefully only) university bellringer exam. This is a daunting examination technique popular in medicine and anatomy in which students are sent into a room around which multiple stations have been set up. Each station has a bit of tissue (either preserved or fresh) or some sort of medical image (an fMRI slide or some other such image) that has been marked in some way (a toothpick sticking out of the tissue or an arrow sticker on the slide) and then the student is asked to either simply name the structure or answer some sort of clinical question about the structure (for example, a blood clot in what artery would lead to loss of function in this structure?). One of the things which I have to learn for this exam is my old nemesis - the cranial nerves. For some reason, remembering the names and locations of those twelve stupid nerve fibres coming out of the brainstem eludes my memory more than any other part of neuroanatomy. I am clearly not the only person who has this problem, as there are dozens of mnemonic devices designed to help people remember the cranial nerves. These range from the rather tame, "On old Olympus' towering top a finely vested German vaults and hops" to the decidedly disturbing, "Oh, oh, oh, to touch and feel virgin girls' vaginas and hymen". Of course, while the latter mnemonic might be more memorable simply due to its shocking lewdity, it does run its own special risks as one girl in my neuroanatomy class related in our last lab. You see, the cranial nerve corresponding to the word vagina is the tenth cranial nerve called the vagus nerve. It thus shares the first three letters with its mnemonic counterpart, dramatically increasing one's risk when writing quickly on a test of starting with the 'vag' part and doing a mental flip to finish off the answer with an 'ina' rather than an 'us'. While the girl relating this story realised her mistake and rectified it, the moral of the story is clear. Filthy humour may be a wonderful memory aid, but you use it at your own risk.

Note: For the record, the cranial nerves are:
I. Olfactory
II. Optic
III. Occulomotor
IV. Trochlear
V. Trigeminal
VI. Abducens
VII. Facial
VIII. Vestibulocochlear
IX. Glossopharyngeal
X. Vagus
XI. Accessory
XII. Hypoglossal

A quick shot of humour at the expense of Conservapedia

As some of you may recall, I have previously discussed that rancid cesspool of blinkered insanity known as Conservapedia, so I thought it might be interesting to point out this enjoyable post in which the following quotation from the article on Earth's moon is brought to light:

Atheistic theories of the origin of the Moon, widely taught for decades despite lacking the falsifiability requirement of science (see Philosophy of science), have been proven false.

While Joshua Zelinsky discusses that quotation in more detail in his post, I just enjoy marvelling at the beautifully inane lack of logic.

A Stupid Cold

I apologize for the lack of substantive posts lately. I have been working on the third part of my series on top-down visual processing and planned to post it yesterday, but instead I was in bed most of the day feeling sorry for myself with a headache and sore throat. More unfortunate (for me at least) than its interference with blog posting is the fact that being sick right now also interferes with the fact that our college formal is tonight (which is an awkward thing to attend while sick) and I have two midterms next week which I really need to study for (something made difficult by a throbbing head). Therefore, I just wanted to point out that things might be a bit slow around here until after this coming Wednesday (then again, my well-honed procrastination skills might kick in and produce a flurry of posts). One thing that I thought I would link to in the interim is a collection of Star Trek: The Next Generation edited videos my girlfriend told me about this morning. Apparently some of her friends from school showed them to her the other day (being in a physics specialist tends to have all sorts of geeky benefits) and so she relayed their existence to me. They are pretty weird and somewhat inappropriate, but whoever put them together has rather remarkable video editing skills and the occasional moment of comedic gold. Anyway, enough of my rambling, here is a link to the first one. It is rather uneventful, the second one is disturbing, but by the sixth one there have been some clever bits. As they go on the editing improves, and by far my favourite is the most recent fifteenth episode.