Category Archives: Sideband

August 8, 2011

Sideband #31: Morning Person

It’s Moanday, and there wasn’t enough sleep time during the weekend, so this is a good time for a little poem I picked up along the way.

It sums up my feelings on the matter of morning quite precisely.

I Am Not a Morning Person!

-anonymous

Woke early one morning,

The earth lay cool and still,

When suddenly a tiny bird,

Perched on my window sill.

It sang a song so lovely,

So carefree and so gay,

That slowly all my troubles,

Began to slip away.

It sang of far off places,

Of laughter and of fun,

It seemed his very song,

Brought out the morning sun.

I pulled back the covers,

… crept slowly out of bed,

And gently shut the window,

And crushed his fucking head.

I am not a morning person

Nuf sed!

⇐ Last Band Next Band ⇒

Leave a comment | tags: birds, dead birds, funny poetry, humor, morning, morning person, poetry | posted in Sideband, Writing

August 7, 2011

Over on an MLB blog (but it could have been anywhere) someone used the common abbreviation “ppl” for “people,” and it invoked in my head the voice of my high school English teacher ranting about spelling things out.

Mr. Wilson also did not care for the i.e. and e.g. abbreviations of the Latin id est and exempli gratia, respectively. He preferred the less pretentious that is and for example.

And let’s face it, many people misuse i.e. when they actually do mean for example.

4 Comments | tags: aeiou, eg, et al, et alibi, et alii, et cetera, etc, FLA, humor, ie, lonely, ppl, TLA, vowels | posted in Sideband, Writing

August 5, 2011

Sideband #29: The Danger of Bread

By Wyrd Smythe

Here’s another little favorite from my collection.

It’s a satire designed to illustrate the rather large difference between correlation and causation. But unlike the dihydrogen monoxide hoax, you’ll probably have a hard time getting many signatures on a petition to ban bread!

Still, it’s funny and it seems to make sense… because it deals strictly with facts. Again: correlation is not (necessarily) causation. Sometimes it’s not even close.

4 Comments | tags: bad statistics, bread, correlation vs causation, humor | posted in Sideband

August 5, 2011

Sideband #28: 2 ^ 64, ‘K!

By Wyrd Smythe

I’d planned to do this later, probably for Sideband #64, but in honor of my parents 64th wedding anniversary (2 parents, 64 years, okay!) this numerical rumination gets queue-bumped to now.

Just recently I wrote about 64-bit numbers and how 64 bits allows you to count to the (small, compared to where we’re going) number:

2⁶⁴ = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616

That’s 18 exabytes (or 18 giga-gigabyes). Just to put it into perspective, if we were counting seconds, it amounts to 584,942,417,355 years; more than 500 billion years! (That’s the American, short-scale billion.)

Leave a comment | tags: 64-bit, 64K, 8-bit, big numbers, binary, bits, exabyte, powers of two | posted in Computers, Math, Sideband

August 3, 2011

Sideband #27: The Invisible Killer

By Wyrd Smythe

Here’s another favorite from my collection. This is a teasing hoax that dates back to at least 1989. It’s aimed at people who don’t know much about chemistry or are actively afraid of anything that smacks of “chemistry” (or sometimes even science). You can read about it on Wikipedia, or you can visit the official site. (Yes, it’s a hoax with an official website.)

I’ve seen an episode of the Penn & Teller cable show, Bullshit, where they send people out with petitions about DHMO to see how many signatures they could get. Many people accept it as dangerous without really understanding it.

It speaks to an interesting combination of fear and willingness to trust (or not) information based on certain attributes!

3 Comments | tags: chemistry, DHMO, Dihydrogen Monoxide, hoax, humor | posted in Sideband

August 3, 2011

Sideband #26: Proof Reading

By Wyrd Smythe

As Homer Simpson so eloquently puts it, “D’oh!!”

It seems to be an iron-clad irony of writing that the number of proofreads required to find all errors in your writing is:

PR = N + 1

Where ‘N’ is the actual number performed. This rule appears to apply regardless of the actual value of ‘N’.

1 Comment | tags: debugging, errors, printed word, printing, proof reading, source code | posted in Sideband, Writing

August 2, 2011

Sideband #25: 64-Bit Address

By Wyrd Smythe

A long, long time ago on a USENET far, far away, I was part of a debate that started with the idea that, even if we had disk drives with 64-bit addressing, people would still fill them up with videos, images and whatnot.

The idea grew from some of us old-timers reminiscing about our first brick-sized 5-meg hard drive and how we thought, “Gee, I’ll never fill that up!” (And look how that turned out; I have single image files that wouldn’t fit on that drive!)

The premise was that, even with seriously gigantic hard drives, we’d still manage to fill them and need more, more, more…

1 Comment | tags: 64-bit, big numbers, bytes, disk drive, exabyte, hard drive, petabyte, terabyte, USENET | posted in Computers, Math, Movies, Sideband

August 2, 2011

Sideband #24: B.O.O.K

By Wyrd Smythe

I’m a big fan of books and reading.

I have a rather large library that I’ve been dragging around for almost four decades. It grew by leaps and bounds in my younger days, but the growth rate has slowed in the last decade or so. (Slowed, but not stopped!)

One of the bigger parts of moving has been getting enough boxes to pack the books, packing the books, unpacking the books, and deciding what to do about book shelves.

2 Comments | tags: humor, reading | posted in Books, Sideband

August 1, 2011

Sideband #23: Happy Anniversary!

By Wyrd Smythe

Happy Anniversary to my Mom & Dad!

They’ve been married for 64 years!!

Pretty amazing in this day and age!

«♥» «♥»

Thanks to them, I know that long-term true love is possible. (Not that I’ve found it (yet), mind you, but I know it is possible!)

So drink a toast to my ‘Rents!!

Way. To. Go!

⇐ Last Band Next Band ⇒

4 Comments | posted in Sideband

July 31, 2011

Sideband #22: Perfect Margarita

By Wyrd Smythe

Now that Sidebands have turned 21 they can have alcohol, so…

Seems that just about everyone has a “perfect” margarita recipe. Not wanting to be left out of the crowd, I’ve decided to give you mine, a recipe based on the incredibly inexpensive, wondrously potent, double margaritas my friend, Nancy, and I used to drink at El Coyote in Hollywood long, long ago. Even back then, it was hard to believe that much punch came in a glass for only $1.95 USD.

It took me years of experimenting, and several false trails, to find a similar taste and potency, but finally I stumbled on the “secret” … pineapple juice!

4 Comments | tags: drinks, El Coyote, lime juice, margarita, orange liqueur, pineapple juice, tequila | posted in Sideband