Tag Archives: Funny

Kickstarter Open Source Death Star

Recently there was a funny attempt by a guy on Kickstarter to raise money to design detailed plans for a death star (a la Star Wars). The goal was £20,000,000 or around USD$30,500,000. This was in response to the White House replying to an official petition to “Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.” Due to continuing threats of not building it, this was the people’s of Earth attempt to raise the money themselves.
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You Can’t Make This Up

Just got this spam message sent to me. It was trying to get me to buy best man gifts. I couldn’t make something this creative up if I tried!

As a man, you tally to take, you most belike someone never been neat at shopping, or symmetrical liked shopping for that thing. Now that you’re achievement to be married, you’ll feat that choosing gifts for your primo man change beautify effort of your to-do move. It’s a provocative strain, but if you cognise where to perception, you’ll be competent to conceive the perfect heritage in no case.

Prank Research Papers

Sometimes jargon really is gibberish.

Take the “scientific” papers generated by a computer program and submitted by three MIT computer science students to a scientific conference. One of the papers, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted by World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2005 as a non-reviewed paper. “The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking” was rejected.

Graduate students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo had doubts about the standards of some conference organizers, who they say “spam people with e-mail.”

“We were tired of getting these e-mails from these conference people, so we thought it would be fun to write software that generates meaningless research papers and submit them,” said Stribling. All three of the students are doing research in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

The paper’s acceptance proves their point, Stribling said. Their computer program generates research papers using “context-free grammar” and includes graphs, figures and citations. The program takes real words and places them correctly in sentences, but the words used don’t make sense together…

Source: Prank research paper makes the grade

Here’s the group’s website: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, including links to the two papers that they submitted to the WMSCI 2005. Their first computer-generated paper, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was actually accepted. Their second submission, The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking, was rejected for some reason. I don’t understand a lot of the titles of the real papers that are presented at these computer science conferences so these seemed to fit right in.

The grad students raised enough money to attend and present their paper at the conference. They were actually going to have their program generate a Powerpoint presentation for their talk. Unfortunately, the conference heard about this plan and rejected the paper. So, they decided to hold their own “technical” session in the very same hotel that the WMSCI used for its conference. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The grad students presented three randomly-generated computer science papers using randomly-generated Powerpoint presentations that they had not seen prior to standing up and presenting it. The resulting talks were pretty hilarious and are available to watch as a video called Near Science. The website is a little old, but the first high quality AVI still works.

Here’s a SCIgen created computer science paper that my brother and I “wrote”: NAWL: A Methodology for the Visualization of Consistent Hashing

New Math

Aka funny math with words.

Just found this awesome site called New Math that has some really funny math equations.

Here are just a few of my favorites:
Filing = paper – entropy
Handball = racquetball – racquet
Infomercial = Information + commercial +Wait, there’s more
Pirate = thief + boat + bandana – leg
Easter bunny = Santa Claus – breaking and entering
Backyard = manifest destiny + fences

Check out the site because there’s a bunch more, including an RSS feed that I’m now following in Google Reader.

Sweet Spam Email

I was glancing through the subjects in my spam email folder to make sure nothing good was getting deleted. I was fortunate to do this because I almost missed my good friend Andrew, the Chairman National Audit at Barclays, which according to Wikipedia, is actually true. He has a proposal that I cannot afford to ignore. According to the email header details, he must have sent this from his secondary office in Kiev, Ukraine (I’m thinking he’s on vacation.)

Here’s the email. It was quite an entertaining read and someone really put a lot of thought into it.

Dear Friend,
I am Andrew Likierman, Chairman National Audit at Barclays.I am contacting you concerning a deceased customer William Nathan,and an investment he placed under our banks management.I would respectfully request that you keep the contents of this mail confidential and respect the integrity of the information you come by as a result of this mail.
I contact you independently and no one is informed of this communication.I would like to intimate you with certain facts that I believe would be of interest to you.
In 2005, the subject matter came to our bank to engage in business discussions with our private banking division. He informed us that he had a financial portfolio of 2.35 million British Pounds Sterling, which he wished to have us turn over (invest) on his behalf.I was the officer assigned to his case, I made numerous suggestions in line with my duties as the de-facto chief operations officer of the private banking sector, especially given the volume of funds he wished to put into our bank. Continue reading

Couple of Funny Quotes

Here are some funny quotes that I’ve found:

“(of Ronald McDonald) I know he’s a fictional character but if such a man existed, it would be the duty of social services to warn the local parents that he had come to live in the area.” —- Jeremy Hardy

“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.” — Mark Twain

“It’s fascinating to think that all around us there’s an invisible world we can’t even see. I’m speaking, of course, of the World of the Invisible Scary Skeletons.” — Jack Handy

—-
“I have a bunch more where those came from. I’ll have to put them on here sometime.” — this one is me 😉

I’m Twittering

I decided to try the whole Twitter thing. Here’s my page. Scott’s Twitter. I can’t promise much updates yet (until I get my iPhone). It’s been fun to follow Lance Armstrong on his biking come back. But, the best one that I’ve found is Christopher Walken’s page. He is hillarious! Some examples:

I spent $40.00 on a bag of food for a dog that eats extension cords. That’s still probably cheaper than a bag of extension cords I suppose.

I buy a bottle of Green Tea with ginseng nearly every day but I don’t remember why. I don’t like tea and can barely taste the ginseng.

I posed for dozens of photos in California last week. I closed my eyes or made a face in nearly every one. Sorry. I amuse myself this way.

A curious man asked if I was waiting for something as I stood on the curb. I said, “No. I’m ice fishing.” Oddly enough he accepted that.

“Amazing” Battery Life Predictor Tool

This past weekend, when I had my car’s oil changed, I also was told that I needed a new battery. Rather than buy a battery somewhere else, I just decided to have them do it for me to save time. However, I could have just gone to Battery Life Predictor. This tool asks how your battery is functioning and then if you choose “weak” or “not functioning” it suggests having it tested by a battery expert…sort of what I’d do even without this website’s advice. On the positive note it does allow you to put in what type and how old a battery you have and it tells you that particular battery’s expected lifespan.

Shoe Circus Microsoft Video

Here is Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Apple in advertising. It is kind of funny in the sense of a what-the-heck-is-going-on thing. It is hard to tell if anything is actually advertised. The trick is to wait until the end and look for the symbol that Microsoft uses for Windows Vista.

Top dishonors in writing

AN JOSE, Calif. – A grotesque comparison of a steamy love affair to a New York City street has won a Washington man this year’s grand prize in an annual contest of bad writing.

Garrison Spik, a 41-year-old communications director and writer, took top honors in San Jose State University’s 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this opening sentence to a nonexistent novel:

“Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped ‘Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.'”

The contest is named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel “Paul Clifford” famously begins “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Entrants are asked to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Awards are given for many categories, including awards for “purple prose” and “vile puns.” The top winner receives a $250 prize.

Other noteworthy submissions:

“‘Toads of glory, slugs of joy,’ sang Groin the dwarf as he trotted jovially down the path before a great dragon ate him because the author knew that this story was a train wreck after he typed the first few words.”

• Alex Hall, Greeley, Colo.

“Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater — love touches you, and marks you forever.”

• Beth Fand Incollingo, Haddon Heights, N.J.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/odd_worst_writing;_ylt=AhAERJA.dPD6So3F1X9Llg3tiBIF