Heather & Chopper's Wonderful World of ... » geekdom

Ig Nobels are out

Heather — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 02:00:40 +0000

With all the political news around (which I am not touching in this particular forum, except to say that everyone needs to make sure they are duly registered and participate in the process), I was glad to see the 2008 Ig Nobel prizes awarded. For those who aren’t familiar with them, the Ig Nobels are meant to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

I laughed. Did I think? Maybe.

My favorites this year:

NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.
BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert,, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.
PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

The physics prize, in particular, is very relevant, as anyone who has ever handled a pair of headphones already knows.

I think the 2007 awards had more flair, but still.

Did I mention photography is an expensive habit?

Heather — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:41:28 +0000

I. Want. This. Camera. Even the lens that comes in the kit.

Uses of the Internet

Heather — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:06:23 +0000

The Savage Chickens is one of my favorite comics and today’s particularly amused me. Apparently, it’s not just me and Chopper. We’ve been watching a lot of BBC stuff lately and playing our favorite game, which is spotting actors in whatever we’re watching and figuring out where we’ve seen them. Okay. It’s more fun that it sounds. Here’s the cartoon.

Photography is an expensive habit

Heather — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:43:17 +0000

I want this. I don’t know why exactly I need to track the exact GPS coordinates of every photograph I take … but isn’t it cool that I could?

That’s something you don’t see every day

Heather — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:37:32 +0000

And I thought the gingerbread houses at the annual Grove Park Inn competition were impressive … how about the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from Lord of the Rings done entirely in candy? The same group also did Helm’s Deep last year, but it’s not as cool.

My day wasn’t this bad

Heather — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:49:35 +0000

I think we’ve all been tempted to go Office Space on our work equipment and this is possibly the funniest take on that idea that I’ve ever seen.

Multimedia bed?

Heather — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 04:43:51 +0000

Not even I am enough of a geek to want this bed.

There’s a market for everything, it seems

Heather — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 03:10:16 +0000

To any of you who doubt that the world will be coming to a terrible end soon, let me show you one of the signs of the coming Apocalypse.

It’s a an electric toothbrush with a remote monitor.

In the words of Lewis Black:
” … the left hand side of the brain looks at the right hand side and goes, ‘It’s dark in here, and we may die.’”

Miniscule: not very small drama

Heather — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:07:11 +0000

I’ve just been watching a series of four or five minute clips of a show called Miniscule on YouTube, and I am utterly transfixed. The first one that I caught was a very rude ladybug who torments both a spider and then flies — and there’s the most outstanding animated aerial chase I’ve seen in ages. And then there’s the love story. This is really, really good stuff, especially for such short films. I love the combination of animation and real video footage, and the sound effects are classic.

Pixar’s classic For The Birds is this good, but for everything else, I’m with Miniscule.

Office Poltergeist

Heather — Sat, 19 May 2007 01:00:32 +0000

I would never use this, but the idea of making someone’s windows shake and their monitor turn off and on cracks me up.