• I would eat cat, but not MY cat. Though I frequently threaten to do so. "NOM NOM NOM Imma eat your earsies NOM NOM NOM!" I bet if I fell over dead and no one was around to fill his kibble bowl, my cat would eat me, and who'd blame him? Also, rabbit is delicious, require very little space, breed like, um, cliches, and we should eat more of them.
  • To my eyes, reading about such horrible events via a font of neutral style, one which would be appropriate for any purpose at all, is disturbing. This is fascinating to me, because I have a great deal of difficulty relating to it. To me, the medium is somewhat decoupled from the message. The words I'm typing right now started as a set of neural firings, translated into finger motions, which my keyboard turns into key codes which get turned into ... etc... until you view what I just wrote and translate this text into neural firings. Some intermediate forms of the message would be "inappropriate" (it would require special tools to reconstruct this message directly from its magnetic representation on the servers' disks) but this comment as a message is not essentially visual- once it is served as a web page, it could be read with a screen reader without losing any of the information or ideas that I intended to convey in the original representation (my neural firings).
  • Fair enough. America is supposed to be a representative democracy. I would like to think that there are also politicians who are privately "anti-gay" but who nevertheless are willing to support the civil rights of gays in spite of their own personal views.I like to think so, too. LBJ and the civil rights movement in the '60s comes to mind. I think you've got that one in reverse. LBJ was for civil rights but cozied up to the Southern Democratic Senate leadership to gain power. This is not to say he wasn't racist, but his short experience teaching poor Latino children in Texas was a seminal event for him. I would consult Robert A. Caro's masterful LBJ books for more on this.
  • I can think of a lot of internet content which is created to point out how a specific comic is terrible. And I've almost always liked those things - but this, geez. This is heading into Denby territory. There are two main problems with this. One: Garfield without Garfield, Nietzsche family circus, Explaining Marmaduke - all that stuff is picking on fair targets. Over the hill cash cows. Stuff thats been aimed at the lowest common denominator. That sort of stuff is legitamately insulting to intelligence, and there's no chance in hell that one snarky blog is going to do any real damage to their marketing juggernauts. XKCD on the other hand is just one dude doing his own singular thing. Most of the time it doesn't work for me, but that doesn't matter; I don't think he has any of the artistic failures that those other comics do. Also, since we're talking about a small time guy trying to make a living off his creations, I think the ethics of launching an all-out attempt to destroy are questionable at best. Live and let live, you know? But the second point is more the problem: the other anti-comic material I've seen is funny in it's own right. It points out how terrible those other comics are by taking their basic premise and making it funnier. Lasagne Cat, for example, both ridicules Garfield and makes me laugh more than Garfield ever did. Its not just a fair criticism, its a fun one. This, on the other hand, is just obnoxious, because it suggests not just that he doesn't get the joke, but maybe he doesn't even know what jokes are. The tone is wrong: the medium needs to be the message. If someone is sort of funny, and you come across like an anal, rude boob with an axe to grind, then there's no way I'm going to be on your side.
  • Your favorite food taboo sucks.
  • Or do you only draw the line at humans specifically? It seems everyone in this thread is drawing the line at humans specifically. We disagree on where to draw lines past that. With some exceptions, you do not have to anthropomorphize human beings so it is easy for human carnivores to exclude humans from the menu FOR EXACTLY THE SAME REASONS others exclude dolphins.
  • Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble. The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were connected† concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime.
  • err -- i mean to type e instead of 3 there obviously
  • Why UT? The Ransom Center is kind of a big deal. They have a Gutenberg Bible, too.
  • Potomac Avenue: "i wish someone would spend this much effort dissecting and pontificating on Cathy or Marmaduke." Marmaduke Explained.
  • > In 2008, 11% of marriages were "mixed", mostly between a Korean man and a foreign woman. This is causing tensions in a hitherto homogenous society, which is often hostile to the children of mixed marriages. You can't have it both ways, South Korea. Fortunately, it looks like they've started to figure this out. > I've always been pro-choice, but not pro-picky. Yeah...*sigh* If there's anything that makes me question my support of abortion, it's this.
  • ZOMG I was addicted to this stuff 20 years ago. Really did have a formative effect on my admittedly warped sense of humor. About time it got some press. Milligan was a genius. If anyone is interested, his war memoirs (WWII) are bittersweet, alternately ROFLcopter-funny, and achingly sad. Well worth the read.
  • What are you predicting those men will end up doing? Picking up Kalashnikovs, for starters.
  • Thank you, thermonuclear.jive.turkey, I really appreciate your comments. I will give the major caveat that I haven't seen the film, but the trailers for best documentary showed films that focused on situations of human suffering that I had previously been unexposed to (child migrant laborers in particular). I was somewhat disturbed that they chose a film that seems to ignore human issues completely. I realize that this is part of a larger debate about where animals fall in relation to humans in terms of ethics, etc, but the scene of the woman absolutely sobbing about the injured dolphin reminded me far too much of the PETA posters that went up at my school comparing the treatment of pigs in factory farms to FGM. For me, that is not the same thing. There seems to me to be something extremely privileged in even being able to think about valuing animal life on par with or over human life.
  • Remember Adventure Time with Finn and Jake?! Cartoon Network starts airing it Monday, April 5th. Go watch the promo and then play the totally awesome game!
  • THIS IS THE RULE We should only eat mammals for which we have two names: one for when it is a pet, and one for when it is meat. Examples: cow - beef lamb - mutton pig - pork calf - veal Fish, not being mammals, are excepted.
  • Flying platforms are cooler than this, and 1950s tech to boot. If only someone would try this with modern tech and noise reduction.
  • Also, Randy Thomasson, one of the fiends behind Prop 8, has called on Ashburn to resign, saying, "His lying, cheating ways have boiled over and the public's trust has been shattered."
  • Don't get too righteous unless you don't eat slaughterhouse-killed meat. Ever seen a film of that? And yes, hunting traditions are cultural traditions.
  • Yet with video cameras and tiny microphones, the team behind Sunday's Oscar-winning documentary film "The Cove" orchestrated a Hollywood-meets-Greenpeace-style covert operation to ferret out what the authorities say is illegal whale meat at one of [Santa Monica]'s most highly regarded sushi destinations. Um, I ate at this place on Saturday. I don't think I had whale. I don't think.
  • Yeah, it's not "oh boohoo those poor men without wives." It's "oh shit those men are going to be very frustrated and possibly turn to violence."
  • was somewhat disturbed that they chose a film that seems to ignore human issues completely. In their defense, the award is for best documentary, not best issue.
  • Closeted anti-gay (Republican) politician. Dude should resign just for being a cliché. Why oh why would you go to a gay nightclub if you were an in-the-closet famous person - nay – an ANTI-GAY-RIGHTS, in-the-closet, famous person? Don't be fooled; men like Ashburn get off on the duplicity as much as the sex. They like to flatter themselves that there's one law for them and another for the rest of us. They aren't self-loathing men (though they may be that, too) whom we should feel sorry for; they're sociopaths. They love power and deceit. Asburn probably celebrated every anti-gay vote he cast with a hired twink and chuckled over it on his way home.
  • I liked it. This is a blog with multiple authors, not just one dude with an axe to grind. Xkcd has had some decent, even classic comic strips, but is often pretty overrated. If any comic strip just calls out for beanplating overanalysis, it has to be xkcd.
  • Bottom line: if I laugh, then it's funny.
  • Nice comment, koeselitz. I guess I was maybe less cool with this ad because of my gay, and because of the fact that breast honking is often used sexually, but yea, I probably overreacted.
  • Alternately, the argument made by the director of Outrage is that anti-gay politicians are comfortable with who they are, and use the privileges of politics and the squeamishness of the MSM on this issue to build cozy closets for their sexual behavior.
  • I don't much care for the Goons personally. Wrong era, I suspect. But props to Katullus: if Carlsberg wrote a MeFi post on the Goons, this is what it would look like.
  • You guys don't understand. It's nerd humor, with a scientific bent. Which != geeky, and that would explain some of your anti-reactions to it. Disclosure: I stopped actively visiting xkcd, but I do enjoy the jokes.
  • koeselitz: modern math starts from assuming that numbers underly geometric figures. koeselitz: For example, things like sine, cosine, tangent – all these numbers and equations which define geometric images in our minds – we take it for granted that thinking in those symbolic terms is the sum and substance of mathematics. Speaking as a modern mathematician, I don't think either of these statements reflect how I think, at least. It's possible I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "numbers underly geometric figures," but I can think of lots of interesting modern geometry that has nothing to do with numbers as such. And I don't think of the trig functions as either being explicitly geometric or symbolic, exactly, but rather multifaceted objects which can be described in either language. There's nothing explicit about the modern mathematical way of thinking that requires me to limit myself to one description or another. I think modern mathematicians benefit from a flexibility of thought, which allows them to think in geometric, symbolic, numeric, or purely axiomatic ways depending on what the situation calls for or what produces the most beauty. You call this a "flattening," but I think it's just the opposite. As long as it follows the rules, it's all fair game.
  • Screwing over members of your community for your own gain is not a gay thing, or a black thing, or a jewish thing, or an Irish thing, or any kind of thing other than a greedy human thing. And it's always a bad thing.
  • So, it really upsets me that the big shame this guy has to live down is that he likes the penis, and not that he operated a multi-ton motorized vehicle while intoxicated. No, the big shame that he has to live down is that he led a secret life rather than standing up for himself and living in the sunshine. The big shame is that he has voted against the rights of other human beings, and been too ashamed/mixedup/powergrabbing to do the right thing. And there are several 'things' that could be 'the right thing.' Lying, and voting against human rights to cover up your sexuality, is not one of them.
  • Nobody here is angry about it. There are just some people slyly accusing others of being hypocrites because they consume one life-form and not another, as if they dont do the same thing themselves. Clearly the only way out of this bind, the only path to purity is: 1) Eat everything, including people of course. 2) Eat nothing and starve. This is another of those types of arguments - of which there are millions - which only exist because people are uncomfortable with gray-areas.
  • And goodness, it gets worse. The construction of that last sentence doesn't make sense at all. "I fondle the castle guard." Well that only works if you are rolling the die to figure out what kind of verb you are supposed to do, which of course, is not what you do. You roll dice to get numbers, and those then those represent other things. I mean, that's just top-notch douchebaggery. He probably scoffs at all fiction because "that never happened!"
  • Euler's is the most beautiful? You've never seen the Pythagorean theorem in a bikini.
  • I'm not sure it's more horrific then what goes on in the meat industry generally. Why are dolphins special? We can say it's because they're more intelligent, but I think it's because they're more easily anthropomorphized, or more like us. Does that really make them so superior to other animals? posted by Go Banana 19 minutes ago It is because they're intelligent, which makes them easier to anthropomorphize, I guess. But the mere fact that they're easier to anthropomorphize shouldn't perversely count against them, as you seem to be doing. And yes, their intelligence does make them superior and deserving of special protection. Would you think it moral to kill and eat another humanoid species that used tools and language? Or do you only draw the line at humans specifically?
  • I've seen "The Cove" on DVD. IMHO (and spoilers ahead) .... The film touches on a number of issues, but in a fleeting and superficial manner: politics of international whaling, japanese nationalism, high mercury content in whale & dolphin meat being consumed by japanese people, the captive dolphin industry, global overfishing, and the life history of repentant dolphin trainer Ric O'Barry. Any one of these would be a weighty subject for a sensitive and insightful filmmaker, but here they're juggled around without giving any one of them real weight. In particular I sensed that Ric O'Barry is a tormented man, that he's so troubled by his engineering the captive dolphin industry his penance is to try to help dolphins everwhere. Yet it seems the filmmakers really don't explore his own burdens, except in a matter-of-fact way. The final scenes of Ric O'Barry reminded me of Jacob Marley, the moral burden of guilt manifesting itself as a physical burden on his person, standing there like a ghost that cannot rest, amidst the hustle and bustle of the people around him. Other, older films from Hollywood portray Fu-Manchu 'yellow peril' racism, and I was getting those vibes from watching this film. There's little if any serious effort by the western filmmakers to understand why the japanese aren't anthropomorphizing dolphins as the west does. Instead the japanese fishermen are portrayed as unthinking alien brutes, callous, sadistic, bloodthirsty. There's even a scene where they're portrayed as menacing a western woman. Essentially the film comes down to a moral argument that to me is not explored in sufficient depth: are dolphins people? Do dolphins think and feel in a human-like way? Do they deserve the same humane benevolence that are extended to people, but not (say) cattle or pigs? Or are people simply projecting humanity onto dolphins, the way any pet owner does to his or her pet? This moral debate is again only briefly muttered. Yes the main characters, in particular Ric O'Barry, do have assertions and explanations why they feel this way. But many of them strike me as emotional anecdotes rather than weighty moral decisions. Or at least, any weight behind them is touched upon briefly. For the record I'm not vegan or buddist. But I say this: I'm sure a team of japanese vegan buddist monks could do the same thing that The Cove filmakers did, by sneaking into a beef-cattle processing plant in Texas, armed with the moral argument that all suffering is wrong. They also could easily come up with health and medical arguments about the perils of beef [mad cow disease, E. coli, and the dangers of eating hamburgers that were touched on in, say, Super Size Me]. But I'm not sure the fans of The Cove would have the same enthusiasm towards *that* film, even though they'd film scenes of equivalent suffering. At best, 'The Cove' is a propaganda film. At worst it's lurid death 'porn'. The scenes of dolphins being butchered, that's it. That's the film. That's why it's there. The rest of it is just padding around that footage. And PS There's also a scene where an injured dolphin is trying to escape, it's writhing in pain, bleeding profusely. The filmmakers get lurid footage of its death. "Thank you," one of them says enthusiastically to one of the japanese fishermen who tried to stop them. Yes, 'thank you' indeed. But in that scene, two of the japanese fisherman are chatting and laughing. There is no translation of what they're talking about It could be the wrestling show they saw on TV the night before, but the filmmakers imply that at best they are callous to the dolphin's suffering, or at worse they are laughing at the dolphin's plight. I'm really curious what they are talking about. Could someone translate their dialogue? donkeymon would you be willing to at least show that short 10 seconds of dialogue to your wife and have her translate it for us?
  • uncanny hengeman, I spent a whole afternoon last week exploring racist suggestions on Google after I discovered you need only type "why" to get the suggestion "why are black people so loud". (It's actually become more popular since, moving up to second in the list.) The internet can be so gross. But this site is one of the nice parts. Anyway, I suppose it's better than when people ask those questions to your face. Recently, in a bar in Brittany, an extremely drunk German peered into my mouth and asked me, mournfully and in slow motion: "Why do black people have such perfect teeth?" My dear, the better to eat you with.
  • Can I post a link? http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3581593/Goon_Show_Complete If this is not good re: TOS please delete. It's a huge torrent, but you can pick and choose.
  • I'm sorry you don't like my favorite webcomic. Have a nice day.
  • You mean MeFi isn't an art installation? Everything is an art installation! I can see forever!
  • Americans get it far worse. And if you were to go by the reading material they sell at the grocery store, you'd think this was spot-on.
  • The outfits reminded me of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. They didn't perhaps remind you of Star Wars?
  • Maybe he's not gay...maybe, like Karl Pilkington, he could "eat a knob at night," but not during the day. In any case, it is my hope that at some point--like today--gays are accorded the same right to openly run for office and have their private lives invaded just like any other politician. Seriously though, if I can still be allowed, the closeted politician Democrat or Republican who votes against measures that would accord basic human rights to all people betrays every one of us, gay, straight, or otherwise. Or, what Astro Zombie said.
  • Wow, "Why are Americans so" leads to - stupid - fat - ignorant - religious - dumb - lazy - obese - violent - arrogant - rude All negative. AMERICA! HELL YEAH!
  • Breast of the web.
  • Oh my god. A politician is gay? In MY AMERICA? Well, I never.
  • And Dedekind is, after all, just the last in a long line of mathematicians who moved further and further away from believing that numbers and geometric figures have any inherent significance or real meaning beyond a kind of simple equivalence. Modern mathematics flattens all of this and ignores what math is ostensibly about – quantities, equivalences, numbers, amounts. I'd like to know more about what you mean by this, koeselitz.
  • I don't really think XKCD is good enough to merit much more than the occasional grunt of approval of disapproval, SO ANYWAY i wish someone would spend this much effort dissecting and pontificating on Cathy or Marmaduke. Or Bazooka Joe. Back in college my New Criticism comrades used to use Bazooka Joe comics as examples of narrative upon which it would be absurd to do a close reading, to prove that everyone should read the Western Canon only. It always sounded like a good idea to me though. What I love about Cathy, Marmaduke, Garfield, etc is that once a newspaper comic becomes a decades-long institution, it moves from Creative Work to Landscape. Do we think to ourselves when we wake up, "God, I can't wait to see what trouble Marmaduke gets into today!"? No! No one does! Zero people look forward to Marmaduke! People look forward to seeing how many hairs circle the bathtub drain at the end of their shower more than they look forward to Marmaduke! So what does the comic become? Simply part of the landscape; we open the paper, we see the spread of comics, and we let our minds ooze slowly down the page, nodding without much thrill. The comics soothe us, comfort us, reassure us with their sameness, but are designed to never challenge us. They keep us coming back, but they do not attempt to be groundbreaking, because really, who wants to get their mind bent all out of shape like they're watching Primer when it's 6:30 AM and the kids are yelling about how they don't like CHUNKY peanut butter, they like SMOOTH peanut butter. The comics become the textual equivalent of seeing the sun rise and set; they simply assure us we are still breathing, still able to think. So what's great about that is that it's a situation ripe for absurd re-examinations: Lasagna Cat, mentioned above, or the Marmaduke Explained blog -- they make us take another, slightly more oblique look at these weird text-drawing things that sort of drift quietly over our minds on the last page of the paper. If the comics themselves are flecks of dust, able to settle on a pond's surface without causing so much as a ripple, then the above-mentioned metacommentaries act as electron microscopes, making clear to us all the incredibly weird contours of these barely-noticed flecks of dust. Anyway, my favorite recent example of this kind of re-mixing/re-examining is Kathy. Ack., which mixes the sort of soft-feminism-cum-gosh-women-sure-are-wacky qualities of Cathy with the experimental-confrontational-feminism of Kathy Acker, leading to a weirdly hypnotic sense that the reader has somehow stumbled into an alternate universe where Irving is suddenly way more interesting.
  • Going through what he is going through now I hope his friends and family are keeping a close eye on him.
  • Man, if I ever do something like this, you all have permission to kill me. Life if too short to spend so much time picking apart other people's joys. I understand that he used to love the comic, and then it changed (or he felt that it changed), and the blog blossomed from that frustration of seeing something you love become something that, well, you don't love. But when that happens, I don't see the good in dwelling on it and obsessing over it. Just leave it. Go find something else that will tickle your fancy. Anyway, I'm off to poison people's pancakes at the local diner, so, see ya!
  • this is your brain on cocaine
  • I think that's a dangerous road to go down. What's "picky" exactly? Isn't one of the main tenets of abortion rights that the pregnant female (and their confidant(s)) can make a decision without societal judgment granted such decision is within a certain pre-defined realm of humanity? Well, first, many people are "Pro-Choice" as a legal position. They might find abortion to be abhorrent, but not as bad as the alternative. Thus they want to keep them legal, but that says nothing about social acceptability being guaranteed. I've known people who describe themselves as pro-choice that ascribe to that. It might not be your viewpoint, but it's certainly present. On the the article. China as a nation wants females, but the individual Chinese does not. As much as they want women out there to marry or for the sons to marry, Dobie points out the reason that they don't want daughters: they're expensive and don't have the short and long term benefit to you personally as parents that boys do. And remember that for a lot of rustic farmers, the chances of their daughters going off to the city to become a money-earning biologist is pretty slim. For us, it's like having garbagemen on our street. Sure, you want them in society at large, but do you want YOUR kid to grow up to be one? The difference is that people aren't born garbagemen, so parents of them don't know until its 17 years too late to abort. I don't really know what to do here. Sometimes people make choices that while individually free affect society in a catastrophic way. Perhaps the main government can put out a huge campaign to reverse centuries of dowry tradition to make it so the men are the ones that put it up (which I believe the custom in Iran is), so that parents that have girls can look forward to cash.
  • Fancy Feast Flavored circle jerk This phrase fills me with an unspecific gut-level horror.
  • Just his "So I went on wikipedia [per the mouse-over] and looked up something I don't understand. Since I don't understand it, it's clearly nonsense! Lol humanities!" punch-line is rather hypocritical from someone who considers themselves an open-minded humanist/a friend of geeks/whatever. This attitude is widespread in the Silicon Valley startup world -- an extraordinary number of geeks believe that they are the most intelligent people on the planet, that engineering and science are the only forms of knowledge that are worth anything, and that other disciplines are necessarily inferior. I've had debates with geeks who claimed that a business degree is irrelevant because they are smart and only need to pick up a few Seth Godin books. Sustained study of the field is only necessary for people who aren't smart enough to get into an engineering program. This attitude is reflected in Robert Scoble's advice to start-ups: don't hire anyone except for programmers if you can help it, and shower them with expensive tech toys as a recruiting tool. I've worked at several places run by engineers with this attitude, and the non-engineers universally hated it and felt like their work wasn't important to the company. The hiring process at these companies was pretty brutal, since they were asked technical questions that were irrelevant to the position and only geeks could answer--not the oddball ones like calculate how many gas stations there are in the US, but asking a marketing manager candidate to explain Apache's thread management model. I've known lots of very smart people who were invited to different geek events around the valley, only to come away from the experience feeling humiliated because they didn't know how to write code. The official message is that it's all about celebrating learning and creativity, but there's a very strong hierarchy with science, math and engineering at the top. These are the background assumptions behind a lot of the enthusiasm around crowd-sourcing and open source movements. The idea is that open organizations are meritocratic and allow the best ideas to rise to the top, which sounds nice, but when your organization is populated mostly by engineers, guess what kinds of ideas end up being more popular? In a lot of cases, "open" is a code word for shifting power and control of an organization to them. I wouldn't say XKCD is especially offensive in this regard--there are worse examples. But it definitely caters to an attitude of superiority that has real effects on real people.
  • Eat the dumb! (my cat is pretty dumb)
  • I can't be the only person who thinks of The Rainbow Cadenza when reading about the possibility of millions more young men then young women.
  • Is there more than a small number of people who actually "worship" the strip? posted by KirkJobSluder Yet another LOLXkcdTIANS thread.
  • This is a common critique of, well, criticism. And it's a critique that I absolutely reject. Does Roger Ebert need to make a movie before he can criticize other movies? Do I have to write a book before I can start a blog post with, "I didn't like Twilight because it portrays dangerous and abusive relationships as the ultimate form of romance?" Having just recently read the Dave Eggers interview on the subject of "selling out," I'm inclined to say yes to all of the above. Maybe it's an unfair standard to have, but the alternative, in which any jerk with an axe to grind feels entitled to write a blog shitting on something, just gets a little old after a while.
  • I'm pro-choice, but I really would prefer that cultures and policy make abortion an action of last resort, not something that people would see as an acceptable way of getting a boy/girl. I'm so pro-choice that I think there should be ads on the subway that say "Pregnant? Have you considered abortion?" But delivering a viable child through normal means and killing it (as described in the primary link) is NOT abortion, it's barbarism.
  • Do we think to ourselves when we wake up, "God, I can't wait to see what trouble Marmaduke gets into today!"? No! No one does! When I was really young I was excited to read Garfield every day.
  • A touch sensitive? No, I don't think so. I'm not creating an elaborate blog based on my hate of XKCD, but I don't think I'm being over the top in commenting that the author seems like an ass.
  • There are no cats in Solvay NY
  • Yes! I love Adventure Time, it's ten kinds of awesome! *raises fist* TO THE MAX!
  • Wow. This will be the fodder for grad student theses for decades.
  • how about that we invented easy cheese and youtube comments and yet chinese culture is still dumber
  • Actually it does. Remove opinion from criticism and what do you have? A list of facts about the subject, but no conclusion. This is not quite true. Criticism is built from a causal chain of observations about the subject, which lead to a factual conclusion about the work. The critic may inject his or her opinion about that end result, but the logical chain is there and can be evaluated on its own merits.
  • Any culture that holds boys to be more "valuable" than girls in any way is simply wrong. But these are very, very old cultural stereotypes that are immensely difficult to change. A country with access to the very latest IVF and embryonic gender-selection technologies can still have its cultural preference for boys over girls rooted in Bronze-Age agrarian thinking. And the reality is that denied these technologies, a substantial portion of live births of girl children, particularly in rural areas of China and India, will result parents turning to the oldest solution, that of infanticide. While both outcomes are terrible, and it is clearly not an exclusive either-or choice, I know which I would prefer. Ultimately, there are feedback loops. Nowhere are the consequences of these ancient biases meeting the abilities of modern techology (coupled with the driving force of one-child-per-couple rules) more evident than in China, with a male-female ratio of 118 to 100. When you have 20% more males than females, you have the making of a demographic time bomb... which, given human overpopulation, is not necessarily a bad thing, but is a serious source of concern. I do wonder about the long-term consequences of excess testosterone slopping and spilling over the edges of China's cities.
  • I know Shannon, and that's not her number.
  • I was lucky enough to take my son and watch her perform Hadestown under the St. Louis arch, for free, as the opener for Ani DiFranco. And Greg Brown is a Mighty Love Iowan Cliff Jump of a songwriter. The show was followed by fireworks. A top place in the Midwest for such a scene.
  • Why oh why would you go to a gay nightclub if you were an in-the-closet famous person - nay – an ANTI-GAY-RIGHTS, in-the-closet, famous person? In this day and age of surveillance and camera phones? Something tells me he wanted to get caught. This makes absolutely no sense.
  • strangely obsessed person is strangely obsessed?
  • The long ones tend to get tired after a while. That's why my favorites are trailers like: 10 Things I Hate About Commandments.
  • Sexual orientation is NOT a choice. Yes, but so what? LGBT citizens deserve equal civil rights regardless of whether they choose to be that way or they're born that way, right? Religion is a choice. But discriminating against someone based on their religion is illegal. So why should that be any different than someone who "chooses" to be a certain sexual orientation? The issue of whether or not it's a choice is one that you're never going to win with the evangelicals and the right wing and more importantly, it's tangential to the real issue at hand.....which is, of course, that LGBT people deserve equal rights under the law, period. So the next time, some right winger claims that it's a choice, I'd just say "So what? We still deserve equal rights under the law."
  • Be sure to declaw your roast for the best eating experience.
  • That's the italian intro theme to the Grendizer toon (locally known as Goldrake).
  • When math geeks whip their dicks out, we all win.
  • I think it's time for a little cocaine retro style... blow-stalgia, if you will.
  • There's also it XKCD Explained, which isn't always that great, but occasionally it really nails the issues that krilli and Solon were talking about above. posted by Ian A.T. I'm going to beanplate this one because I take issue with their explanation that this comic MUST be sexism. It could be sexism. However, there are many takes on this comic which they didn't offer as possibilities, and I'd say they are extremely plausible. XKCD overall may have "issues" with women, I will not address that, but I will say that using this specific comic as an example of such, is wrong, as it doesn't hold up to scrutiny as definitely sexist on its own, so should not be used as an example of such. The scenario is a doctor speaking to a patient, the doctor says something insane, the patient replies "What?" and the doctor adds to the insanity. The caption explains that it's not a doctor, just a guy who is wearing a lab coat. The authors of this post assume that therefore, the comic is attempting to demonstrate how easy it is to "trick" women. There was a giant leap though, from a woman saying "What?" in italics (thus indicate perhaps shock, perhaps incredulity) to determining that she has been deceived. She may be saying "WHAT?" with the subtext of THAT IS CRAZY TALK ALSO YOU'RE NOT MY DOCTOR BUT SINCE YOU HAD A LAB COAT ON I ASSUMED YOU WERE A DOCTOR HOWEVER CLEARLY YOU ARE NOT. She has not in this comic demonstrated any lack of knowledge towards the way human reproduction works. The comic in no way claims he has successfully deceived her with his explanation, simply that he made it far enough to GIVE her a crazy explanation, by wearing a lab coat. The joke of the comic, the punchline, is the labcoat making her (and the audience) believe that it is a doctor, while then revealing that it's just a labcoat. Possible subtexts for the joke that don't involve patriarchy or sexism include-- our societies trust placed on seeming authority figures, the awkwardness of visiting a doctor who you don't really know, etc. I also think the joke would still work in exactly the same fashion, were it to be a man (one could argue that he didn't use a male patient and therefore is sexist somehow, but I'm unsure that holds up either, he may have thought of the baby other exists joke first, and then put it in comic context second). Here is an alternate male script-- "Sir, it appears you have lice, and I don't want to alarm you, but now that the larvae have hatched it appears that they have begun to burrow their way down to your brain stem." "What?" "It is a matter of minutes before the parasite, will become the host, Sir. Do you want me to tell your children you were brave?" or perhaps "Sir, you may think this is a case of the chicken pox, but the marks on your skin are notably SMALL. We've contacted the CDC and they've set up a perimeter. You know that heartbreaking scene from E.T.?" "What?" "HAS ANYONE GIVEN YOU ANY BLANKETS RECENTLY SIR!?" And so forth. The "joke" of the comic is essentially the same in all of these instances, and since the inherent joke of it hasn't changed through altering the dialogue and the gender, I don't think their analysis holds up. Essentially they've taken one interpretation from the many possible, and thus extrapolated it to be a further indication of attempted dominance of women, when the evidence on its own merits does not support the case.
  • Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cat ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!
  • I really believe that Zach is the closest thing going these days to Andy Kaufman, and that's not a bad thing. in my opinion
  • The blog's tagline: "[a] vitriolic and bitter collection of unwarranted nastiness about a silly and harmless comic." Note to blog creator: Acknowledging that what you're doing is unwarranted and nasty behaviour does not, in itself, excuse that behaviour. It simply reinforces the perception among the people who read your blog that you are someone who knowingly and repeatedly engages in unwarranted and nasty behaviour, ie. that you're a jerk. This is not something to be proud of.
  • Massachusetts for sale!
  • I'm guessing, but I don't think that "I HATE TEH GAYZ" was what Ashburn ran on. PRECISELY the point I was making in opposition to Pollomacho's comment.
  • Why do Pakistanis... Baffling, sad, and amusing all at the same time. I notice a few search auto suggestions don't activate. I'm guessing there's some kind of PC police force at Google? Or is there a auto suggestion mode function I'm not aware of, similar to Google Image search?
  • Sorry, spicynuts. Open mouth, insert foot .....
  • This is flagrant false advertising!
  • ASDF
  • Oh, I have. I mean - I think there's a lot of funny, messed-up ridiculousness to parody in literature studies. For instance, the Sokal affair is hilarious to me. But Randall's not making a commentary on anything, it's like he sort of gets what the Sokal affair was about... but not really. So he's just uses "deconstruction" and... that's the joke? Uh, okay. Yeah. You're right Randall, literature studies are a sham! `,:| No... the punchline was: "Eight papers and two books and they haven't caught on". So it's not like he just uses "deconstruction" and... that's the joke , as you put it. Also, with the line "I'm not actually an expert in their field", the author nowwhere near comes out as denouncing Literary Criticism to be a illegitimate field of study or populated with sham experts. Because such a statement would be untrue.
  • Mine. And I'm a guy. (It's been a long idle winter. I'll be better in the Fall.)
  • I think the Italian term for cat-eater is probably mangiagatti everyplace i looked it was "magnagati" or "vicentini magnagati" posted by atomicmedia at 7:09 AM on March 9 [+] [!] No, magnagati is right in the Roman Veneto dialect. (FTFY.)
  • Eggars is making the same mistake that so many amateur critics and laypersons make - confusing thoughtful, honest assesment with negativity. I think "xkcdsucks" definitely qualifies as negativity. It's natural that Eggars, as a creator of a work, personalizes that work and feels that criticisms of the work are criticisms of him... Respectfully, Eggars can fuck off. I guess you proved his point?
  • Jesus! That pic of him looks like fire marshall Bill.
  • Are these numbers Hella big?
  • Yeah, it's a slippery slope. First one animal is off-limits as food, and then all of a sudden you're abstaining from meat entirely, and that simply will not—OH WAIT.
  • I hate to say it, but the first thing that popped in my head when I saw this on the Oscars was this.
  • Most of these numbers are quite a lot bigger than 5.
  • So will you be held responsible when the repair job inevitably wears off and someone wrecks their car in *your* pothole?
  • What are you predicting those men will end up doing? Read cgomez's link.
  • > So basically all we eat is turkey. And turkeys are dumb. You're doing it wrong, man. Let the dumb animals live and eat the smart ones before they try to take control.
  • Yeah. It also suffers from the fact that it's not even using jets. It's a fan pack.
  • And then I need a nap and recreational drugs and a hug I don't have any drugs, but I do have recreational hugs. (((hug)))
  • Is my cat trying...? (The answer is yes).
  • I have this open in a tab, and keep seeing "Math is beautiful" in the tab title. And now, running through my head, is: Math is beautiful, Math is fun Math is best when it's One and One
  • WHAT???
  • Braedet Market - Fresh Porpoise:
    In the West Greenlandic Inuit language, traditional food is called kalaalimineq. Imported food is called Qallunaamineq (from Qallunaaq 'a Dane'). The percentage of traditional food in the daily diet of a Greenlanders has declined in recent years. While this may be good news for the porpoises, it leads to an increased consumption of less healthy "western" foods which must be imported at high cost. The traditional diet, with a high proportion of seal and whale meat has been credited with the low incidence of cardiovascular disease in Greenland. Braedet market in Nuuk is one of the few places left on earth where you will find Harbour Porpoise for sale. Harbour Porpoises inhabit coastal waters in the northern hemisphere, often appearing in harbours, and hence their name. The main threat to their numbers is being caught accidentally in nets intended for other species. Notice that the layer of blubber is very thick. This is necessary to preserve warmth in such a small animal with a large surface area. The Harbour Porpoise is on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals.
    More about Phocoena phocoena.
  • There's also The Ground Beneath Her Feet, still the only Salman Rushdie book I've ever read. Mostly because I'm a hopeless U2 fanboy.
  • You think that's amazing? eπ √163 = 262537412640768744 exactly. Doesn't even need an i in it. there may be a slight but surprisingly small deviation from fact in the above statement
  • My great-uncle still has his farm, and when I visited he showed us his cows and so forth and was very affectionate towards them, and then we went back to the house and had steak, and he said stuff like, "This one was Missy. She had the sweetest disposition..." My friend doesn't label the meat to identify the animal, but I think that's only because he doesn't do the butchering himself yet. I've had many meals with him where he would wonder aloud, deadpan, if it were Petunia or Hogsworth that we were eating. He wasn't melancholy, but he wasn't joking around either. Just an honest question.
  • breast honking is often used sexually I... what? I have not frequently encountered breast honking, but when I have, it's been in the context of playful cuddling intimacy, girls having a laugh, or a toddler embarrasing his mum. Before the serious bit, the feel of this for me was just "tee hee! boobies!". Silly and innocent, not sexual, not in the least.
  • Yeah the best way to defeat a whisper campaign suggesting you're gay is to shout loudly, "I'M GAY!" Provided you actually are gay, of course.
  • What we need to do here is make sure that gay men get outed in the most negative way possible, you know, because we care about gay men. He outed himself. What the heck are you talking about?
  • "Surprisingly easy to understand" being a relative term, I'm hoping.
  • XKCD can't be everything for everyone.
  • Related: Burt Reynolds shaves for Steve Martin.
  • "Is everyone else here somebody's boss or something?"... well, yes...
  • Because we don't eat things we make emotional attachments to? Let's break up!
  • Once you have eπi = -1, adding the + 1 seems kind of superfluous. The basic 'trick' is the trigonometric identity exi = cos(x) + i * sin(x), which is called Euler's formula. Given that, it's obvious that eπi would be an integer. Also, e and pi aren't just irrational numbers like √2, but transendental numbers that cannot ever be created from rational numbers using algebra. (so for example the solution to x2 = 2 is √2, an irrational number. "x2" is the polynomial. But there's no finite polynomial that ever has e or π as a solution)
  • My Erdős number is bigger than all of them.
  • "If it's the 21st Century, where's my jetpack?" Here you go. Flight time of 30 minutes, runs on premium gasoline. Cheap, at just $86,000!
  • I have a question. If this movie were about Nigerian villagers who eat monkey brains, would it be getting the amount of Hollywood love that it is now? It seems to me like we still have this consensus that people in certain parts of the world are "primitive" and have a license to do disgusting things, while Japan, for example, must be held up to a Western standard, and if they fail to meet this standard it means that they are insufficiently civilized and must be subjected to foreign pressure. Personally, I took this movie as a kind of inaka horror flick (i.e. the murders are happening in a "closed room"), and I enjoyed it when I watched it, but I don't like the tone of the politics surrounding it.
  • Dolphins are overrated anyway. Everyone was always talking about how smart they were, how they communicated- that's all crap. They don't communicate. They randomly squeak, they don't know anything, and they'll never like learn to use a computer. Eat 'em.
  • If Mr. xkcdsucks's biggest problem with the comic was that xkcd made jokes about xkcd, then he'd have a point, but his complaint seems to be that xkcd is a comic that makes nerd-jokes, which he believes are inherently unfunny because of their appeal to nerds.
  • an ancient Greek mathematician would have laughed at anyone who tried to claim that π was a number at all. I think you might want to check your facts.
  • It's one thing to loathe yourself (and a sign of mental illness if it's over something that isn't shameful, like being gay--hell, that's like hating yourself because you ended up "too short" or "too tall"). It's another to loathe others like you despite their accepting and celebration of the thing you hate, and actively work to make their lives miserable. That takes a psychopath.
  • le morte de bea arthur: I'm like mippy about web comics. They just don't amuse me. The majority are web comics seem to have been created to a formula that goes... As DU points out, it's a formula that dominates the daily/weekly strip format. In spite of the once-a-generation attempt to move character plots forward Cathy, Dagwood, and Garfield will still be largely the same jokes about the same characters. An exception Mark Trail which is entirely based on the incongruity of giant animals in the foreground of the perspective. A key difference here is that webcomics are not bound by the constraint of offending as few people as possible in as many different newspapers as possible, so I'm more likely to find characters I can relate to telling jokes I find to be funny.
  • But where will they get their prepubescent female gymnasts from now?
  • oooooOooo.
  • With the video just going dead silent, that was a supremely weird thing to watch without having seen that episode.
  • I think a really big issue is not so much that they are eaten - because it's more likely the meat ends up as pet food. It's the brutal inhumane way dolphins (and also whales) are slaughtered. Also I agree with donkeymon's wife - unless you have support coming from within you will be met with resistance and stubbornness. What the movement needs is to pay off some celebrities who'll claim it eating it makes you look older and/or fat. It would never be sought after again.
  • Any farmer-mefites care to chime in? I'm not a farmer, but I grew up on a farm, and I come from a long line of farmers. Several of my great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers were farmers. My grandfather was a farmer. My father was a farmer. My oldest brother is a farmer. Farm people have a very utilitarian, unsentimental attitude towards animals. We feel responsible for taking proper care of animals while they are alive, but the decision to end an animal's life is made on strictly practical terms. On a farm, even the dog and the cats are working animals. When I was a little girl I used to like going down to the barn during lambing season to help feed the lambs. There is also one or two that need to be bottle fed because the mother died or had no milk or had twins and couldn't feed both. My dad and I would go down the hill to the barn very early in the morning and I would feed one or two of the lambs by bottle. The lambs were so cute and cuddly and would snuggle up to me as it fed. As it grew it would follow me around whenever I visited the barn because it thought I was its mother. One year I made a special pet out of black lamb, which I called Coal. One day I went down to the barn and Coal was not there — none of the flock were, for that matter. I asked my father, "Daddy, where is Coal?" My father got a big sardonic grin on his face and said, "Where do you think Coal is?" I wasn't even upset, though some of the pet-related sitcom kid character angst made me feel as though I should be. I don't tell this story in a gasping, traumatized, Clarice Starling-style way. I live in the city now and have a pet cat. I feel responsible for Trilby, for making sure his physical needs are met, including attention and kindness, and I certainly don't ever look at him and think, "Hey! I'd like me some cat fritters!", but I don't love him and there's just no way I'd spend a small fortune on vet's bills the way some people do when their pet becomes ill. If Trilby has anything seriously wrong with him that will cost more than a few hundred to fix, I'll put him down and get another pet. So the brou-ha-ha over a cat casserole seems silly to me. It's just as reasonable for someone to eat a cat as it is for them to eat a cow or a pig or a frog or a swan, for that matter. Humans don't eat each because cannibalism is against the laws of nature. Animals don't eat their own species either, unless they're physically and/or psychologically ill, and it causes health problems when they do.
  • I have this childhood memory, sometimes in the early '60s I think, of not being allowed to watch this TV program. My parents thought it 'unsuitable' for a young lad. How strange that I can now get to watch them 40-odd years later. Great post - thank you!
  • "Feel sorry for the people who never got to see us," he once said. "We were good." The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City faces a $200,000 shortfall for 2009. The museum is battling both the recession and its own backers, as new management tries to distance itself from founder Buck O'Neil, a move that induced long-time supporter Joe Posnanski to announce that he would "never set foot in there again." Will this chapter of baseball history be forgotten? Or can Strat-O-Matic save the Negro Leagues? (Previously on MetaFilter: Buck O'Neil denied a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame.)
  • What?
  • Tom Staley is simply continuing the tradition that preceded him at the HRHRC ... Decherd Turner was no slouch when it came to snagging collections (actually Turner got the first Gutenberg in the house, which came from the Pforzheimer Collection, the entire collection of which was later bought as well by Turner -- our running joke was "Don't have a Gutenberg? Well, go buy one!" ). Turner was just a little more focused on the book arts than Staley, who is going after writers and their papers. The vast variety that has resulted from the stamp of the directors' choices has made it unique. It's what makes the HRHRC one of the gems of research institutions; the photographic collection is mindboggling and then there's the film/theater collection ... definitely not in Kansas, anymore (yes, there's the ruby slippers as well as original story boards from "Gone With The Wind" there ... ). Oh, a copy of the Venerable Bede, just for sheer variety ... Glad to see that they can still buy things for the collections.
  • The majority are web comics seem to have been created to a formula that goes: (i) Create a handful of characters, and make each embody some stereotype or quirk. (ii) Make characters say witty things based on their particular stereotype/quirks. (iii) Add lots of self-references and/or references to other things your audience is likely to know about, even if there's not actually anything funny or interesting to say about them. If anything, this formula applies more universally to non-web comics. I will rest my case after noting two things: Peanuts and golf/nap jokes on Father's Day.
  • Wow, how very sad. It seems that there was a confluence of problems, possibly beginning with the Museum riding too faithfully on O'Neill's back over the years and not building a secure foundation for itself while he was still alive. Now that he has died, they are discovering that they have no actual footing upon which to stand. (You really cannot build a long-lived organization based on one person's existence and efforts, no matter how charismatic that person is.) The real question is going to be whether this new director, put into place through questionable internal politics, has the actual moxie and force of will to move the Museum into a new era. This will not involve "distancing" anything or anyone from O'Neill. But it will, out of necessity, involve putting him into proper perspective and not using him as the main tentpole from which the Museum hangs. I really REALLY hope they find their way through this. Negro League Baseball was one of those wonders of American history, when the sheer bigotry of the country actually served to create something original and unique and possibly even of higher quality than what it was shadowing. It deserves a museum that can live beyond its founder, and if it's still around by the time I have some travel funds again in my life, I will be going to visit it as part of my first trip.
  • Why is my
  • The great thing about this link is that when the XKCD poo flinging begins, we can simply point to this site and avoid the derail. Or not.
  • Wow, I did not know that. Cool!
  • Hey, easy with throwing my name around like that. Disclaimer: Not the the same Randall
  • Sometime, Letterman had a show where he did a number on racism. It had to do with sorting black and white balls -- I recall him showing this early on the Late Night Letterman show. He was proud of it. I suppose it was good back whenever it was done, 70s, 80s -- I doubt 60s, but he had a right to point it out. It was good. That was when he was good. For a little while. Then he had the Leno thing and got sour. I recall Sandra Bernhard telling him, "You used to be funny." And he was, once, before he became a self-absorbed asshole.
  • Who's on first?
  • Essentially they've taken one interpretation from the many possible, and thus extrapolated it to be a further indication of attempted dominance of women, when the evidence on its own merits does not support the case. OK, you've convinced me. That particular xkcd strip is not sexist, nor is it an example of the author publicly working out his weird sexual/emotional problems in comic strip form. That's one down, I figure you've got about a hundred fifty left to go.
  • pleasepleasepleasericksantorumpleasepleaseplease (I'm kidding. I really wouldn't want to wish old Ricky on anyone.)
  • Many sausinges to you, Katallus, for this post! How I love the Goons.
  • I looks like these were done with TeX, which is fairly impressive in itself. For those outside the sciences, TeX is a collection of typesetting programs which excel at typesetting mathematics. Unlike, say, a word processor, you input code, and then compile the code into your document. Here's a brief snippet of some notes I wrote once, to get an idea of what the code looks like. This in in LaTeX, an extension for TeX that makes easy things much easier: \section*{ Classifying Finite Dimensional Irreps of $U'_q(\hat{sl_2})$} Let $V(j)$, $V(k)$ be two $U_q(sl_2)$ irreps, generated by heighest weight vectors $u$ and $v$ with heighest weights $j$ and $k$ respectively. Then the the coproduct on $U_q(sl_2)$ determines the structure of the tensor product $U\otimes V$. Recall that the coproduct of $f$ is $\Delta(f) = f\otimes 1 + K\otimes f.$ Define $p_{x,y}(q)$ such that $f^n(u\otimes v) = \sum_{x+y=n} p_{x,y}(q)f^x(u)\otimes f^y(v)$. So $p_{x,y}(q)$ are in some sense 'structure constants' for the action of $U_q(sl_2)$ on $U\otimes V$. So he probably designed some fonts for use with TeX, using code similar to this, and then bent over backwards getting it to arrange and compile properly. This is a nice technical achievement, even if the results aren't mind-blowing to us looking back.
  • Taboos are not universal. One of my Korean language professors, for example loves dog meat. She told us she thinks it's delicious. She also has a pet dog. And she also lives in a culture which developed around rice-paddy farming, not herding. It's pretty obvious why wild dogs might have become "food animals" in the first case, and "work animals" in the second.
  • So, right-wing politicians see each other go through these scandals all the time and think "Man, I'm gay, but I'm gonna do this whole straight-acting thing to get elected. But this kind of bullshit isn't going to happen to me, no sir, I'm gonna hide Teh Gay like no one's ever hid it before." And then they end up in exactly the same scenario that the last guy did. There's absolutely no learning curve. You can't totally repress your own sexuality while you're in the public eye. Especially since that whole "human nature loves the lure of the forbidden" thing is a pretty powerful force and, I assume from observing various celebrities, must be even more powerful when you have more at at stake. The take-away lesson I see here, that no politicians will ever actually take away because they will continue to believe that it doesn't apply to them: If you're gay, either be honest about it from the get-go or don't run for office if you really, really don't want people to know. Because they're going to find out and worse than being "That gay Senator" you're now "That asshole gay Senator who lied about it." But what do I know, maybe the latter is more prestigious among right-wing social circles. They certainly do seem to operate with their own social code that I obviously can't fathom.
  • I still favor the fans here to the effects of massive fuel combustion firing down my legs.
  • it's quite simple folks if cats were 10 times bigger than us, what would THEY do? Nothing - - because we would have driven them to extinction.
  • Chemistry doesn't rely on opinion. Math doesn't rely on opinion. Criticism does. Actually, it doesn't.
  • Thank you markkraft!
  • Personal video chat? ...check. Black President? ...check. Jetpack? ...check. OK. It's the future now. Carry on.
  • Now you can own your own pothole......
  • I'm assuming that would be LOUD. But imagine how fun it will be to blow that last leaf down the driveway.
  • I remember being very happy to find out about "centillion" as a kid reading an encyclopedic dictionary my parents had. Behold the concentrated nerdosity in that sentence. In my defense, I also looked up "naughty" words in that dictionary.
  • The limit for class-1 numbers is around a million, 1,000,000 or 106. You can just barely put 1,000,000 dots on a large piece of paper and stand at a distance such that you can perceive each individual dot as a distinct dot, and at the same time be within viewing distance of the other 999,999 dots. (I have actually done this, just for fun!) This guy has way too much free time.
  • Yes, some people spend too much time obsessing about / identifying with XKCD. Some people spend too much time obsessing about / identifying with $ART. Many of them are self-indulgent. A handful of them are geniuses. Either way, you're better off just enjoying $ART without the commentary.
  • I was just happy to see that that bad guy from Hackers had finally turned his life around.
  • I think font nerds will agree that at least we got Humor Sans out of this. Although, come to think of it. it's kind of an in-joke for font nerds.
  • Fisher Stevens seems like a pretty cool cat.
  • Let me correct myself. It appears that 13,000 small cetaceans were harvested in Japan last year. The main regions of Japan where dolphins and other small cetaceans are caught appears to be Wakayama (where Taiji is), and the Sanriku coast (Iwate, Miyagi).
  • A bit back, reading about Graham's Number and I worked my way through the Knuth's up-arrow notation to try and get some sort of sense of how big it was... you can think about the towers of exponents and reiterating and such like but it's still mind-blowing trying to relate it to anything. 'Infinity' is much easier. The biggest thing I found when reading about and trying to understand Graham's Number is that it gives me a totally new perspective on just how big infinity really is. Because Graham's Number is far, far bigger than any impression I get when I try to comprehend the idea of infinity. Realizing that a number is so big that if every atom in the universe contained it's own universe of the same size as ours, and every atom in those universes were able to represent a digit, that you still couldn't represent just the number of digits in Graham's Number... then you get just that inkling of how big it truly is.
  • Cat Casserole was a great bandleader and invented the moonwalk 50 years before Michael Jackson.
  • Wouldn't 'catserrole' be a better name? I've heard from many gastronomes that cat is a delicious meat. Why not eat the feral one's? /not a cat lover
  • I guess I'll just imagine the contents of the link since I'm outside the US.
  • A touch sensitive? After three years of comp sci degree students - men who, in my view, wanted nothing more out of their educations than to push buttons and be rewarded handsomely for the fun - telling me that my Linguistics degree would qualify me for nothing more than five stars in McDonald's, I thought that strip could fuck right off too. Geeking should be celebrated whatever flavour it comes in - and with geeking comes, inevitably, wankery and waffle.
  • Okay, it's not really a jet pack, but a VTOL ultralight with a half hour range still seems kind of cool.
  • It's normal for up to four hours. Then you should run away from yourself at top speed because it's about to explode like a mission impossible briefing. 
  • Ads by google:

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  • Unexpectedly, the archive included a small cache of letters between Wallace and DeLillo, a correspondence initiated by Wallace when he was struggling through his colossal novel, Infinite Jest. Wallace's letters show a writer who was deliberate, funny, and often uncertain, but most clearly, they show a writer who took painstaking care with his art. Drool.
  • One of my funnier faux-pas moments was visiting a hippy drum maker with some friends, and when we went to meet the kid goats I gleefully exclaimed: "baby djembes!".
  • A long, long time ago, Long before the Super Bowl and things like lemonade, The Hellenic Republic was full of smarts, And a question resting on the Grecian hearts was; "What is the circumference of a circle?", But they were set on rational numbers, And it ranks among their biggest blunders, They worked on it for years, And confirmed one of their biggest fears, I can't be certain if they cried when irrationality was realized, But something deep within them died, The day, they discovered, Pi.     — Chan & Ferrier
  • Google, you autocomplete me.
  • My wife prefers turkey bacon to pig bacon. And we switched from ground beef to ground turkey because we were nervous about mad cow (and stayed because we prefer it). So basically all we eat is turkey. And turkeys are dumb. This weekend, my wife and I were at this recreated colonial farm in Virginia, the kind of place where they have people in period costumes to talk about life in colonial times and a little patch where they grow some period appropriate crops, that sort of thing. They also had some chickens and turkeys, which pretty much had run of the place. So, my wife and I are standing looking at something when these three turkeys start walking toward us. We stand our ground for a little while, but they keep coming, so we back up a little bit. They keep coming. These turkeys are absolutely fearless. It doesn't seem likely that we're going to be brutally attack by these turkeys, but they're pretty big and we're outnumbered. Eventually, they get about a foot away from us and, instead of backing up, we step to the side, trying to get out of their way. At this point, the biggest turkey turns to follow us, and my wife screams "AHH! They know about sideways!" Apparently, my wife, believing turkeys to be dumber than they are, expected the birds to be unable to follow us if we moved sideways. The lesson is this: Turkeys are probably pretty dumb, but they're not THAT dumb.
  • It's simple, really. We just need a good, bloody ground war to thin out the population of males, once they're of fighting age.
  • Gendercide, or sex-selective abortion aided by female ifanticide, is soberingly common in coutries where a strong cultural and economic preference for male children exists: 100 million women are "missing" in the Asia-Pacific region, 85% of them in India and China alone.

    Improving the status of women could, among other benefits, help reverse this troubling trend: a 2008 study conducted in South Korea offers some encouraging news. Still, some parents feel that even in Western societies people just don't seem to get quite as excited about girls as they do about boys. In the USA, where the IntelliGender test is available in your local drugstore, a bill to ban gender and race motivated abortion has been introduced in Congress – with no chance of passing – while in Sweden officials have explicitly stated that an abortion cannot be denied due to any reason, including gender bias.
  • I get the impression that, within Japan, whaling has been framed as a sovereignty issue; at this point, it's more about not backing down to the West than it is about whaling. Whales are unfortunately caught in the crossfire. Watching The Cove really cemented this idea for me. I can easily see how the documentary might be summarized as "Self-righteous Westerners tell other people what to do. Film at eleven." Japan is only going to stop whaling (and killing dolphins) when there is popular outcry within Japan. And even though parts of The Cove were really good (in spite of being calculated emotional manipulation), I'm afraid it might backfire and be interpreted as an attack on Japan instead of an attack on Dolphin slaughter. And another thing: There's an extra feature on The Cove DVD that starts off talking about high levels of Mercury in seafood, and then transitions directly to vaccines cause autism OMG hysteria. This really tainted the credibility of the film as a whole in my eyes.
  • Gosh, I wonder what hilarious sound effect goes with prostate cancer awareness?
  • I'm having a shit-ton of fun with these links, by the way, empath. Thanks for this.
  • Waitasec. Sometimes I hate the past tense.
  • I guess he hasn't gotten to Brazil yet.
  • Our cheapness changed the world. Indians are so dedicated to being so cheap for so long, that Indian people actually created the number zero. You know how much dedication that took? That means, back in the day some Indian guy was looking at the numeric system ... *Indian accent* "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... Hmmm ... None of those are the amounts I want to pay." Then his friend came along and drew a circle. "Whats that?" "Nothing." "Whats inside of it?" "Nothing." "What's its value?" "Nothing." *Sniff* It's beautiful (shedding a tear). We shall call it jeero. Take it and go." ~Russell Peters
  • The jetpack we were promised but never got comes out every 12-18 months. I'd really love a Build Your Own 50s-Era PopSci Cover tool so I could make one that says "In The Year 2000, You Will Get So Tired Of Jetpack Jokes"
  • Also Orphic film.
  • Should I feel shitty or pissy about all of this?
  • Didn't really like the live action touch, but it's still nice that cartoon network picked it up
  • Ah! Thanks, longsleeves!
  • XKCD is occasionally very funny. The good strips are very good. That said, I don't read it every day, because so many of them (and especially a lot of the most popular ones) are self-consciously "touching" in a way that always strikes me as manipulative and, for lack of a better word, squicky. Creepy. Also, the ones about women are often creepy, and the ones about Cory Doctorow are... um, also creepy. The creepy to funny ratio is just way too high for my taste. I don't care whether Randall has a big cult or anything. I don't hate it, by any means. But I also don't really see the adulation that it seems to attract. Or, I guess, I do see it, and it's sort of depressing, because it's mainly built on the old formula of self-congratulation. It's a comic that's really good at communicating to its fans how brilliant and enlightened they are, and by inference (or sometimes explicitly) how dumb and benighted everyone else is. I mean, read the img title on that last one: "If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction." Christ, what a fucking tool. Never mind, now I hate him too. I'm going to have to go back to not thinking about it.
  • Words DFW circled in his dictionary
  • Sys Rq: “I guess I'll just imagine the contents of the link since I'm outside the US.” It's better that way. Trust me. That's right, folks – this is the funniest thing I've seen on SNL in ten years, and it was a boring clip of some guy shaving his beard off.
  • To those saying his argument about 'representing his constituency' is valid- he ran for an office on a platform. He was elected by his constituency based on that platform. He hid who he was and presented a contrived platform based not on his beliefs, and in fact one that is in direct opposition to his actual beliefs, based soley on his understanding of what he needed to be in order to get elected by that constituency. Whoa now, if one thing is clear from this story, who you screw has nothing to do with belief. One can be gay, gay, GAY! and yet closeted and actively anti-gay rights. His and his constituents' platform was one of anti-gay rights, it matters not if he was gay in the process. Further, his constituents' view is that homosexuality is a moral choice and should be suppressed. If he was attempting to suppress his urges and keep his dirty immorality down in the closet then it seems to me he even more fit their platform.
  • *pfft* are to belive this is some kind of *snun!* magical stick-figure?
  • You've finally discovered what it would take for me to touch your boobs. Now it will be fun.
  • people seem very confused about this hamburger thing
  • METAFILTER --- WIKI --- HAMBURGER
  • The internet-- and the world-- is the richer for some people's weird monomaniacal obsessions. I could make this comment every day on Metafilter, and it would be true.
  • I come from a long line of farmers on my mother's side, though none of my generation farms. My great-uncle still has his farm, and when I visited he showed us his cows and so forth and was very affectionate towards them, and then we went back to the house and had steak, and he said stuff like, "This one was Missy. She had the sweetest disposition..." and then he'd tell long involved anecdotes about the cow we were eating. (He might have done that just to freak out the city kids, but the steaks were labelled according to the cow they came from.) We have pet rabbits who I love. I wouldn't eat them (unless it was the last step before cannibalism) but I like wild rabbit and have only stopped eating it out of respect for my husband's delicate sensibilities.
  • Here's a cartoon version from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Winged Sandals.
  • He probably scoffs at all fiction because "that never happened!" So it's unreasonable to expect fictional characters to act in a sane, rational, and realistic manner? Are we not allowed to criticize, say, modern romantic comedies for scripting the most unreasonable and unrealistic dialogue ever? IMO, it's unreasonable to expect critics to "suspend disbelief" over something has fundamental as human behavior, when that behavior is the focal point of the whole comic.
  • Oh awesome! The first features Ray Ellington, musical director of the Goon Show Pardon my Goon geeking, but wasn't Wallace Stott was the musical director of the Goon Show usually? Ray Ellington did a song with his quartet in every show between the second and third acts (Max Geldray did a harmonica performance between the first and second acts), as well as frequent bit parts.
  • Don't get too righteous unless you don't eat slaughterhouse-killed meat. Ever seen a film of that? Favorited because having a viscerally horrified reaction to The Cove very much does require the thinking ethical person to confront how much suffering they're causing to other animals. Not just slaughterhouse-killed but CAFO-raised meat is arguably crueler than even these dolphin hunts. At least the dolphins, before being rounded up in a cove and slaughtered, got to live in the wild as dolphins. The huge majority of Western meat is tortured more or less continuously from birth to death.
  • gman: This time for real!!!
  • "She hypothesized that the people in the town might be a different race or species or something." You probably could have done without this sentence because it sounds incredibly wrong. The film is not something I'd be able to watch personally, and the trailer during the awards ceremony was too much. Anyway, I liked when one of the guys held up that sign encouraging text messaging a number, and the cameras jerked away quickly. Like, "We're glad to show you being given an award for your documentary film, but don't go using it as a platform!"
  • The Lockhornes is much better to write your thesis on. Never has there been more suburban existential dread concentrated into so few panels. I think Werner Hertzog ghostwrites it.
  • (Seriously, though: if you're an undergrad English major, you may just have not gotten to the shit he is so perfectly parodying there.) Oh, I have. I mean - I think there's a lot of funny, messed-up ridiculousness to parody in literature studies. For instance, the Sokal affair is hilarious to me. But Randall's not making a commentary on anything, it's like he sort of gets what the Sokal affair was about... but not really. So he's just uses "deconstruction" and... that's the joke? Uh, okay. Yeah. You're right Randall, literature studies are a sham! `,:| For instance, there's probably a lot to mock about physics academics. But if I just went "The relativity is the cause of the black hole quasars! LOL Physics!" and... that was the joke... it would be really stupid. Because I have no idea what I'm talking about so my attempt to parody it seems rather pathetic.
  • I made the mistake of jumping to Inaccessible Infinities first. It's going to take forever* to clean up all the exploded bits of my brain. *I was going to say "an infinitely long time" but that might have been going too far.
  • ...but apparently my erection is normal.
  • Utorrent? Isn't that the one that installed some nasty ask.com toolbar, search box, and changed my home page? Another vote for Vuse here.
  • don't miss J Tyler Helms' excellent reappropriating music videos: Arcade Fire - My Body Is A Cage (Once Upon A Time In The West) Radiohead - All I Need (Microcosmos) he also did a beautiful edit of scenes from Albert Lamorisse's Le Ballon Rouge to Grizzly Bear's song Two Weeks, but it's sadly been taken down, due to a copyright claim from Iles Films, Montsouris.
  • We give people the benefit of the doubt. Oh, I do. I don't doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing. "I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I'm screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand."
  • Let's not forget "Black Orpheus".
  • It's a little unfair to say that, because he was, effectively, forced to reveal his sexuality to the general public, he therefore identifies with the imaginary bloc of people that share his sexuality, and that he now has an obligation to undo the perceived damage that he caused to that bloc. Perceived? He voted against expanding anti-discrimination laws with respect to insurance policies and government services to include additional characteristics, including age, medical conditions, disabilities, marital status, and sexual orientation. People die without insurance, and he voted to deny them because they are gay. It's not his obligation to undo that because he's gay. It's his obligation to undo that because he's human.
  • He's √sixteen. FTFY
  • I find this bizarrely depressing. That someone would get so angry about it/at it just seems so irrational. Yea, so it's a bunch of inside jokes, you're clearly not the kind of person it's intended for, so why don't you just fuck off and ignore it. We don't need you rocking up to the ballet only to start ranting outside about how it's clearly only intended for people who like ballet and that it's evil because of that... What in the fuck is wrong with people?
  • So it's unreasonable to expect fictional characters to act in a sane, rational, and realistic manner? Are we not allowed to criticize, say, modern romantic comedies for scripting the most unreasonable and unrealistic dialogue ever? IMO, it's unreasonable to expect critics to "suspend disbelief" over something has fundamental as human behavior, when that behavior is the focal point of the whole comic. I'm not asking him to suspend disbelief for everything; I'm saying the part where a character says "So I fondle the castle guard?" is perfectly fine within the context of a comic strip and to deem it bad because it's unrealistic... well, that's douchey.
  • Many, many thanks for so many childhood memories - my family's all-time favourite radio show! The wonders of internet: Icelandic Katullus in the US recreating for an ancient Brit (not an Ancient Brit!) in Italy happy memories of a Yorkshire long gone...
  • Oh, and William Shatner said it best, about having done great things in the past but not the present:
    What are you afraid of? Failure? So am I Has been implies failure Not so Has been is history Has been was Has been might again
    am I really quoting William Shatner? yes. yes I am. wanna fight about it?
  • I'm petty and small enough to be bothered that this petty small blog makes enough money on advertising to run a contest with generous prizes not by creating unique, thoughtful content but simply by snarking at someone else's work. If snarking is so profitable, why aren't we all millionaires by now?
  • Don't you have to be a little dodgy or have a dodgy doctor or both to get a sex motivated abortion in the United States in 2010? If that drugstore sex test kit works how could such a crime be prosecutable? That is messed up. If it ever happens it's messed up. And it's messed up if some government agents try and interfere with it. Messed messed up up.
  • Oooo...schadenf.... Nope, this is just regrettable in a new way now.
  • I believe there's a bathroom scene in every Kubrick film.
  • Also more people need to watch this it made me hate both the Man Cheney and the Lesser Female Cheney.
  • I once made a webpage making fun of other people's work. It got me a lot of attention and people thought it was funny. But it was too easy and I felt bad inside, so I stopped.
  • Not sure if it's been posted before but I found these series on Radio 4 excellent: 5 Numbers Another 5 Numbers A Further 5 Numbers
  • I'm torn, because I like xkcd ok, but I like pessimistic contrarian criticism better.
  • or like garfield minus garfield, &c? and i guess space ghost made liberal use of repurposed out-of-context editing... oh and jandrews previously :P cheers!
  • in my opinion a person who rages "no! no! no!" against something as a rule yet considers themselves exempt from that rule is not a person we should trust to lead us, to guide us, or even to be trusted. My opinion too.
  • Détournement, if we're getting all Wiki in here...
  • When I think jetpack, I think of something like this
  • HEY EVERYBODY HERE COMES THE CHOO-CHOO!
  • Just go with the videos, they're pretty tough going in the beginning when he's talking about derivatives (especially if you don't know what they are, obviously) but if you just assume he knows what he's talking about in the first 2 or 3 videos, it starts to click -- if you really want to understand the proof completely, he's got a complete series on calculus you can get to from here.
  • There was a scene in one of the Home Alone movies where Macaulay Culkin had a 1940-ish movie playing in his room that tricked a number of hotel staff into fearing for their lives - that they were being attacked by a man with a machine gun. What laughs!
  • Wally Stott, incidentally, transitioned to female and became Angela Morley And arranged Scott Walker's classic 60s albums. Funny old world.
  • I'm ambivalent really - I don't always love it, but then I'm not a geek, and I dislike webcomics in general. (No idea why. They just do not appeal.) However, anyone who wrote this gets a free pass.
  • This makes me inexplicably happy. I want to go home and watch Flash Gordon now.
  • An interview with the director pre-oscar.
  • It will revolutionize commutes and city planning, just like the Segway did before it!
  • Who would win? Life, the universe and everything Why do...?
  • I clicked around but didn't see a link where you could listen to the whole album, so here's one courtesy of Spinner. Hadestown - Anais Mitchell (full album, streaming) I'm listening to it right now and so far it's pretty damn good.
  • I love this show, Pendleton Ward is a guy to watch. His twitter is quite great; he apparently spends a lot of time at bars doodling on napkins and posting the doodles. Also, like most Frederator shows, Adventure Time's Production Blog is lively and full of animatics, character sheets, and other good stuff. Also, Invader Zim is back on the air, all this month on Nicktoons.
  • Watching The Cove really cemented this idea for me. I can easily see how the documentary might be summarized as "Self-righteous Westerners tell other people what to do. Film at eleven." Especially when European whaling never raises the same level of international ire or media shitstorm. I'm against all whaling, but quite bluntly the cetacean conservation movement, much like the Republican party, has been hijacked by classic feelgood racism/tribalism, and while it's an easy way to curry immediate attention, in the long-term it only damages the cause.
  • I have several gay friends who lived 20+ years in the closet. (And one or two former boyfriends, TBH). I have sympathy for men who feel like they can't come out. There's a lot of societal pressure, family relationships (Mr. Ashburn was married and had four kids), and internalized guilt and shame to overcome. I feel very fortunate that I was able to come out at age 17 in 1989, but that makes me a product of my times. For men a generation older it was harder. For men in backwards parts of the country, it's harder. The good news is when they do come out, it's like a whole new life, and usually everyone is better off. Including the poor ex-wife. I hope for that eventual outcome for Mr. Ashburn. You know, I'm all for sympathy. But I'm pretty much out of patience with these types. It's fukin' 2010! Quit living like it's 1965 or even 1985. Here are your choices, oh man-of-50-who-has-been-living-a-lie-all-his-life... Either stop cheating on your wife, swallow your pride (and libidinous urges) and continue to pretend that you're not gay IN ALL WAYS, or else start telling the truth. One or the other. This bullshit "oh, well, I'm sneaking around on my wife and can't ever have sex with the same person twice because they might get to know me a bit and then I'd be ruined in the community forever" bullshit really has to end. And yes, I'm referring to people in MY area, advertising on Craigslist and gay.com, who continue to do this very horrible destructive kind of behavior even in this day and age. Get over it. Come out, or just close the closet door. My personal tolerance for your behavior ended when Matt Shepherd was strung on that barbed wire fence and you still refused to live an honest life.
  • Oh, yeah. Gotta have. Heard a snippet of it on NPR a day or so ago, Greg Brown sounded like the devil incarnate.
  • ha, I never picked up on the fact that his cousin was beardless in those bits. I'm pretty unobservant I guess.
  • Andrew Zimmern reports on the controversy at the end of this blog entry: Cat (The Next White Meat)
  • Wow. I was expecting to come in here totally hating on the hater, but I read a bit of the guy's blog and you know, he makes some good points. I stopped reading XKCD a little while ago. I wasn't finding it funny. But I didn't take the time to think about why it wasn't funny, and this guy clearly has, and, you know, I don't think it's a terrible thing when somebody overthinks something for me. As muddgirl said, there's nothing wrong with criticism. As long as you're making it enjoyable in its own right, you're allowed to hate on somebody else's thing. So far, XKCDsucks has managed to avoid becoming gimmicky, which surprises and impresses me. Sure, he could probably be doing something better with his time, but so what? Most wonderful things in the world are made by people who probably have something better to do.
  • There's any number of issues that "our" (presumably American) media won't touch; you can't argue that the Japanese media is worse than in any other democratic G7 nation... I don't know. From my experience, the gaps in the Japanese mainstream media seemed bigger, and the voice of alternative media felt smaller. And with something as lurid as dolphin slaughter happened in a cove off of the coast of California I think American media outlets would be falling all over themselves to air the "shocking footage" first. And maybe that's the difference.
  • Honestly, Garfield really bugs me because it's often obvious that entire frames have been copy and pasted with minor changes in affect and dialog. But, I don't read a newspaper so I only encounter Garfield on the rare times I visit relatives.
  • Also previously, a slightly more accessible description of the BB numbers.
  • Honestly, Mippy, the one you linked to is as hollow and lazy as the strips it mocks.
  • [Bunch of chaff removed. There is, indeed, a metatalk thread, if you really want to keep talking about the hulu-vs-the-world thing and related matters.]
  • I'll take PBF over xkcd every time I'll take A Softer World over both.
  • I think the slaughter is kept so secret because it would piss off millions of Japanese citizens. The difference between their society and ours is the complicity of the media in that silence. There's any number of issues that "our" (presumably American) media won't touch; you can't argue that the Japanese media is worse than in any other democratic G7 nation, and Japan does have a feisty tabloid culture that does do a great job of investigating (often in lurid detail) issues that don't get covered elsewhere. Japan kills dolphins. It's not great, but people have been doing it since paleolithic times, and the hunt appears to be sustainable (unlike industrial whaling). However, agricultural runoff as a byproduct of the meat and grains and vegetables "we" eat have resulted in the death of the Gulf of Mexico. Not many dolphins there, but plenty of jellyfish. Where is the Academy-award-winning documentary for that issue? Of course, white Westerners rarely jabber and squawk like a bunch of Japanese fishermen.
  • In my bible, we welcome the gays and stone the drunk drivers. No, drunk drivers are even more dangerous when they're stoned. Though I realize it's a joke, in fact, I'd disagree with that. In many cases, if you're drunk, getting stoned may well be the sharpener-upper that you need to more safely commandeer a vehicle. posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:29 AM on March 9 [1 favorite +] [!] Uhh... I'm not entirely sure whether or not *you're* joking but this is not, in fact, the case. For all its virtues, pot does make you a less effective (and therefore more dangerous) driver whether or not you are also drunk.
  • The reason that I love XKCD is that it is full of in-jokes. Not everything has to be universally accessible.
  • I have several gay friends who lived 20+ years in the closet. (And one or two former boyfriends, TBH). I have sympathy for men who feel like they can't come out. There's a lot of societal pressure, family relationships (Mr. Ashburn was married and had four kids), and internalized guilt and shame to overcome. I feel very fortunate that I was able to come out at age 17 in 1989, but that makes me a product of my times. For men a generation older it was harder. For men in backwards parts of the country, it's harder. The good news is when they do come out, it's like a whole new life, and usually everyone is better off. Including the poor ex-wife. I hope for that eventual outcome for Mr. Ashburn. What I don't get is the anti-gay public action. Not so much because it's hypocritical (that too) I just think anti-gay voting is inexcusable for any politician. Gay, straight, inbetween, closeted or not. I'm not sure in this era it makes sense to hold closeted people to a higher pro-gay political standard than anyone else. Experience shows we should expect the opposite, the closet cases seem to be our own worst enemies sometimes.
  • Metafilter: Gleefully doing the homework they dodged in school.
  • Rob Cockerham explored this recently.
  • I wonder if this guy would have felt as strongly if he had never read the forums? Like, I sort of see what he's saying, but I've never felt like there's a cult around xkcd - it's just a comic that is usually amusing and occasionally awesome.
  • I wish Garf-eel was real.
  • Wonderful! I quote the few Goon lines I know to my kids, who love them. Now they can hear the real thing. Thank you so much.
  • I mean, if you use pure logic, there are few good reasons we shouldn't be eating human flesh either This particular taboo exists because eating each other is a fantastic way to spread disease. Just ask the Fore tribe. That seems pretty logical to me. The risks of contracting a disease by eating your cat are far, far lower. Humans don't eat each because cannibalism is against the laws of nature. That's just completely wrong. There are many species who will happily eat each other. Some even eat their own offspring if times get tough.
  • The Fall Guy did this back in the 80s but nobody cares.
  • But XKCD should not make a comic about the beauty of e. That would be wrong and make people angry.
  • 1) Eat everything, including people of course. Some of us clearly misguided humans don't put people on the same level as other animals so while we might think it's ok for someone to eat a dog, we don't think it's ok to eat a human unless, say, your rugby team has crashed in the mountains and there's nothing else to eat. I don't know that I'd eat a monkey either. I can accept that the line between what animals we should and shouldn't eat is based on emotion rather than logic, and I can accept that cats and dogs are not allowed to be eaten in most countries (not sure if "most countries" is correct) because we've collectively decided that they should not be eaten, but I just don't think any meat eater should be too upset if someone, somewhere, eats a cat.
  • Goooooogle.
  • So I take it HULU is the corpspeak for "HAha! U Lousy Unamerican!"
  • Serious love for this post. Thank you!
  • Politics or not, let me say to all good and upstanding MeFites, this is a nonprofit worth support. I've been to museums all over the world and the NLBM remains one of my two or three favorites - well ahead of a lot of places with a lot more to spend. I'm as much a baseball fan as one can reasonably be, and I hate the way the history of the game is sanitized and pastoralized to market it. It's a tremendous success in telling the wide scope of the history of the leagues in detail without suffocating or boring the visitor, and it captures both the sadness and the beauty of those stories like no place else. If you care about history, about baseball, about race in America, or hell, just the wonder of people striving to be great at something, you won't want it to disappear.
  • Holy crap, acro, why was that never an FPP? Far more delightful than confirming yet again that Hulu cannot be viewed through any of my VPNs.
  • Wow, this reads a hell of a lot like Zizek's Pervert's Guide to Cinema - even referencing many of the same films. When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre, looking at the screen... You remember, at the very beginning, before the picture is on, it's a black, dark screen, and then light thrown on. Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet? And is the entire magic of a spectacle shown on the screen not a kind of deceptive lure, trying to conceal the fact that we are basically watching shit, as it were?
  • CurmudgeonApostateRant.diaryland.com
  • Don't get too righteous unless you don't eat slaughterhouse-killed meat. Ever seen a film of that? I don't think I've seen any self-righteousness in this thread yet, and I don't really like this kind of zero-sum argumentation. 'Don't condemn slavery if you have ever shoplifted,' 'You can't talk about fascism since you told a fib,' etc. People can still talk about why something is bad even if they also do other bad things.
  • anastasiav, thanks for the link. I did read that one, in which he referred to WHitlock's column. Jason Whitlock has a talent for excavating straight to the bottom of any heap of bullshit, and hopefully the link to his page will unspin itself and resolve at some point. until then, I understand that it's "nonprofit politics as usual."
  • ...or turn green & pass out before even leaving the kerb.
  • Here's the thing with Japan: they're like my grandparents, there are things that they just don't talk about. Whaling, WWII atrocities, homosexuality, they're all off the table. This is a country that gave people suing over pollution-caused cancer a hard time for being such complainers. Actually, that's not entirely true. Most younger people don't think about this stuff too much because it just doesn't come up, but, unlike their parents, they won't get angrily uncomfortable if you bring it up. I have a Japanese language copy of Shusaku Endo's The Sea and Poison, a book about vivisection war-crimes from WWII and I've loaned it to as many people as I can. I feel like their reaction to the book ("Why didn't anyone tell me about this? This is awful!") would be similar to their reaction to hearing about this incident. I think the slaughter is kept so secret because it would piss off millions of Japanese citizens. The difference between their society and ours is the complicity of the media in that silence. There is less of an drive to get the latest scoop and more of one not to make waves. Additionally, bloggers don't have the same reach as they do over here, so the average person has no idea.
  • donkeymoon: ...the Japanese political system is broken because they can't manage to outlaw stuff like this, and they react with anything but stubbornness and resistance to any ideas originating outside the country. Sometimes this is true, of course, but sometimes the only way to effect change in Japan is through outside pressure, 外圧. I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but activist groups in Japan have actually made international appeals as a way to apply 外圧 indirectly, rather than trying to make their case directly in Japan. The dolphin slaughter may be immune to this, partly because so few people in Japan even know that it's happening.
  • This AskMe sent me looking for visual Goon Show material. All Telegoons episodes I linked to uploaded by YouTube user Dyynamo.
  • "Don't kid yourself, Jimmy. If a cow cat ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!"
  • However, as gruesome as this topic is, I love the typo in the FPP: "female ifanticide". It conjures an image of Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck doing a presentation about how Apple will revolutionize how unwanted children are disposed of. "I present to you iFanticide 2010." And then Metafilter turns into the '68 Democratic Convention over whether or not it's an innovative product.
  • e^{it} is just a matrix, well the matrix group of rotations about the origin in the real plane. euler's identity is just the unremarkable fact that if you rotate by \pi, "x" on the x-axis goes to "-x." or, if that's unsatisfying, you can think of e^{it} as the "universal covering map" of S^1 (the circle.)
  • Interesting tidbit: Jim Clark (of Netscape fame) financed the film an co-produced it.
  • Acquired taste. Never found them funny myself
  • Suppose you had a small house, a couple of blocks from an elementary school. Every day a group of children walks by. One day, a guy comes to your house. "Listen," he says, "I'm a psychopath. Throw a net over those kids the next time they come by, and give me a call. I'll sort through them, take all the ones I like, and give you $150,000 per child. Trust me, do this every day, and you'll be a millionaire in no time at all." Would you say, "no"? People aren't dolphins, and dolphins aren't people. But the same emotional apparatus, the same empathy and compassion, that would stop most people from throwing nets over passing children stops them from needlessly hurting an animal that can obviously feel pain and suffer. You do not have to anthropomorphize dolphins, dogs, or many other animals that share so much of our genetic heritage, to recognize that they experience pain and suffering. It's obvious for exactly the same reason why it is obvious when you observe pain in another human, you see it, and you feel it. The thing is, compassion, despite being an inherent part the human emotional spectrum, is as variable in its manifestation as any other emotion or drive, and equally subject to cultural influences that direct, subvert, and suppress it in many incredible ways. Race, gender and religion have all been used to create barriers to block compassionate responses to pain and suffering. Some of those barriers have been weakened recently, and I personally think society is better for it. I think the question with dolphins, and other animals closely related to us, is this: do people ignore their pain or suffering because there is a cultural barrier to feeling compassion towards them, or because they are close enough to the outer edge of our inherent capacity for compassion that we cannot come to a consensus about whether we can, collectively, ignore their suffering (or even define what they feel it as suffering)? Individuals can't be blamed for feeling compassion for, or not feeling compassion for, dolphins. If they feel it they feel it, if they don't they don't. Cultural barrier or inherent capacity is irrelevant at the individual level. But the distinction is important at the group level, whether that's a village or a nation or humans as a whole. Personally, I feel compassionate towards the suffering of dolphins. I think that our understanding of dolphins, their lives and behavior, has broken down walls between us and them, not that anthropomorphizing has built a rickety bridge between our human empathy and their dolphin emotions. I think that culture is getting in the way of compassion in this case and we should do what we can to change that culture.
  • Interesting, I've read a few things about the millenium projects but would love to get my teeth into something a bit more substantive. Also, I just have to say, I freaking loath AIDWATCH and all it stands for. Easterly uses his contrary platform to spout off just as much ignorance, generalisation and misinterpretation as he derides, and the smug tone of the commenters he enables makes me puking sick. The very idea that you can take a generalised stand in any but the most simple of public policy issues is naive and irresponsible, imho, and it shows that Easterly and his cadre of market-jerk argonauts are more invested in their "iconoclastic" intellectual position than a sober consideration of the data and - more importantly - a genuine dedication to alleviating poverty and disease in the world. Which is not to say Easterly's never right - stopped clocks are right twice a day - and that the Millenium villages are an unmitigated success, but his snide, one-dimensional commentary does nothing to further our knowledge in this field. Sorry, rant over.
  • For companionship, HopperFan, and also because I just couldn't take the mice situation in my house anymore.
  • My first English boyfriend won my heart with his dead-on Eccles impression. Thank you for the awesomeness, Kattullus!
  • The Goon Show was a highly popular and immensely influential radio show on the BBC in the 1950s featuring Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan. They would sometimes do live readings of episodes, here's a video recording of The Whistling Spy Enigma (parts 1, 2, 3) and a much later recording of Tales of Men's Shirts (parts 1, 2, 3). The first features Ray Ellington, musical director of the Goon Show, and the second John Cleese, who, like his fellow Pythons, was a huge fan of The Goon Show growing up. In the 50s BBC turned The Goon Show into a TV show with puppets, called Telegoons. A number of shows exist online: The Lurgi Strikes Britain (1, 2), The Nadger Plague (1, 2), Captain Seagoon RN (1, 2), Tales of Montmartre (1, 2), The First Albert Memorial to the Moon (1, 2), The Hastings Flyer (1, 2), The Affair of the Lone Banana (1, 2), The Africa Ship Canal (1, 2), The Booted Gorilla (1, 2), The Ascent of Mount Everest (1, 2), The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill on Sea (1, 2), Fort Knight (1, 2), The Terrible Revenge of Fred Fu Manchu (1, 2), The Lost Colony (1, 2) and, finally, back where we first began, the Telegoons version of The Whistling Spy Enigma (1, 2).
  • ...Tales of Men's Shirts (parts 1 , 2 , 3 )... Ah, this explains much.
  • I CAN HAS MEEZBURGER? sorry
  • I'll be honest, I liked The Cove because I like to see the cast of Heroes traumatized.
  • And with that, I'm looking into how to make a donation. I have to live up to my namesake.
  • NSFW: http://goatkcd.com/ Enjoy.
  • For instance, there's probably a lot to mock about physics academics. But if I just went "The relativity is the cause of the black hole quasars! LOL Physics!" and... that was the joke... it would be really stupid. Because I have no idea what I'm talking about so my attempt to parody it seems rather pathetic. Last panel: "Branes vibrating in 16 dimensions occasionally collide and in so doing, alter the basic constants of the intersected physical realities, thereby rendering impossible any attempt to measure or predict effects across brane divisions..." [Eight papers and two books and they haven't caught on...]
  • Isn't one of the main tenets of abortion rights that the pregnant female (and their confidant(s)) can make a decision without societal judgment granted such decision is within a certain pre-defined realm of humanity? Sure, but 1. Pre-defined? By whom? 2. I guess that's the question...is this outside that realm? Why are some of you joking about something tragic??? That's a pretty common reaction to tragedy, isn't it? Hmm? If there's anything that makes you question your allegiance to women's reproductive rights, it's evidence that women are considered less desireable and perhaps even less human than men? Not everyone frames the whole abortion thing in terms of women's rights. To me, the most important question is "Is a fetus a person?" If one's answer is "no," like it is for me, then things like women's rights come into play, although even then, I would frame it a little differently.
  • I can't believe there's never been a post about this film, which was featured on NPR. Probably thought it would turn into yet another vegan clusterfuck.
  • One of the strangest Muppet Shows was when Spike Milligan was the guest. And Peter Sellers' Cigarettes and Whiskey was nothing short of kick ass. Oh, and a big THANK YOU for the post.
  • This ain't no jet pack. A jet pack, by any definition that matters (i.e. comic books), is something that a non-weightlifter or nonsuperhuman could wear without external support and still be able to stand up straight. This thing weighs 250 pounds. Plus, "The pilot must also weigh between 140-240 lbs" (and what eye color?), and has to undergo a special piloting course, plus you can't fly it to work. Face it, we're making better progress on the robot butler.
  • (And then there'sthe inevitable...)
  • But XKCD should not make a comic about the beauty of e. That would be wrong and make people angry. Too late.
  • cjets: The issue of whether or not it's a choice is one that you're never going to win with the evangelicals and the right wing and more importantly, it's tangential to the real issue at hand.....which is, of course, that LGBT people deserve equal rights under the law, period. So the next time, some right winger claims that it's a choice, I'd just say "So what? We still deserve equal rights under the law." It's more important than that. When the right-wingers affirm that sexual orientation is a choice, they're telling the world that I'm a liar. I know, from personal experience, that I never made the choice to be gay, but they're telling their constituency that I'm lying when I say that. The basis of their argument makes the assumption that all gay people are liars. This is one of the reasons this discourse is so difficult; of course they won't listen to us when we tell them we just want the same rights as everyone else. They have no reason to listen to us at all; to them, we're liars. Inherently duplicitous, just by being gay. If you ever wonder why these conversations seem so one-sided, with absolutely no-one on the right even paying attention to a word we're saying, keep this in mind. Whenever you see the right get incredibly defensive against yet another study saying that being gay isn't a choice, this is why. Getting them to admit that it's not a choice, and that we're not lying to them, may be vital to making further progress on this. But I'll be damned if I can figure out how, when they already think I'm a liar.
  • Screwing over members of your community other people for your own gain is not a gay thing, or a black thing, or a jewish thing, or an Irish thing, or any kind of thing other than a greedy human thing. And it's always a bad thing. FTFY
  • I hope now that he's come out he starts overcompensating for the next 6 months and passes all sorts of flamboyant legislation. I'm trying to figure out what "flamboyant legislation" would look like: "Speaker calls the floor to order. Motion to consider the Ashburn-Gutierrez Feather Boa and Sequins Banana Hammock Act of 2010. Motion seconded..."
  • I think everyone should lay off this poor guy. I can sympathize with his criticism because my favorite pastime is to go to chick-flicks and stand up in the middle of the theater and explain to the audience that they really shouldn't be laughing at the jokes because they are obvious and not all that funny. Metafilter is linking to his site, not the other way around.
  • "What're you doing here?" "Everyone's got to be somewhere." Epic.
  • "I used to like XKCD. Like, a lot. I was embarrassingly fanboyish about some of the comics." The pretty much explains it, right there. In my experience, strong feelings like this invariably go sour over time, leading to a strong opposite. I suspect this site and its contributors are primarily made up of jilted fanboys. (Or, "ex-cult members" as stavrogin so succinctly puts it.)
  • This is great stuff, thanks. Although I have to say (just because) that, as wondrous as Euler's theorem was, nothing in it can hold a candle to the beauty of the later books of Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections. I've been reading (or trying to get through, for a third time) a fantastic book by Jacob Klein called Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. It's dense stuff – Klein was a student of Heidegger's, and this was (I believe) his graduate thesis, so it takes some digging – but it's highly interesting. Chiefly it deals with the fact that modern mathematics has come to see the algebraic model of mathematics as preeminently reflective of reality, whereas the Greeks would clearly have seen this as a fundamentally flawed perception of the universe; it's clear even from Euclid, who is more conducive to algebra than most Greek mathematicians, that the road of geometrical equivalence with algebra was a long and fraught one. I think that's a fair enough thing to say. I remember hearing a student of Klein's once opine that Richard Dedekind's ideas about number theory (he's the fellow who came up with the number line) "suck all of the meaning out of numbers." Interestingly, I think Heidegger would probably have agreed; there's a lot more to "one" and "many" than Dedekind leaves in it. And Dedekind is, after all, just the last in a long line of mathematicians who moved further and further away from believing that numbers and geometric figures have any inherent significance or real meaning beyond a kind of simple equivalence. Modern mathematics flattens all of this and ignores what math is ostensibly about – quantities, equivalences, numbers, amounts. I think ancient and modern mathematics are probably concurrent, and don't disagree on major factual points, but they do differ in this respect: modern math starts from assuming that numbers underly geometric figures, in much the same way that modern science assumes that numbers underly physical reality – whereas ancient mathematics started from the opposite assumption, insisting that commensurability be proven somehow. Anyhow, that's just random guff, an interesting indication that modern mathematics may be somewhat misled or at least held back by its form. Euler certainly follows Descartes' wholly modern number theory on this point. Sorry to thread-jack somewhat; just thought it was interesting.
  • I, for one, welcome our new...
  • Oh, I love this. Is My Girlfriend Is My Boyfriend Can A Human Can My Parents And, obligatory: Metafilter
  • You rotten swine you! Look at my productivity. You have deaded it!
  • Oh, and xkcd "isn't funny anymore"? I missed the part where was all that funny to begin with. I have read every one of them, and I read it every day. I would recommend reading some other sorts of comic. These kinds of folks worship xkcd because it speaks their language and reassures them daily that yes, they are better than the "normals" (or sometimes "hipsters"!) that surround them. I thought I was geeky until I started boardgaming. I love the gamers but that's a different level of geek. Also, the ones about women are often creepy I've been around enough techies to not notice this. One had a poster in his room - a series of knobs and switches with the caption 'Women', and a single on-off switch with the caption 'Men'. I thought 'when he learns about the prostate, his mind is going to be BLOWN.'
  • As an English major, I just hate it for this one. It shouldn't annoy me because he looks like a babbling idiot to anyone who has ever taken a literature course ever, but going from the whole "I love geeks! I love life! Whee!" to shitting on other geeky people is just being an such an asshole. God, what a douche. As a former English literature grad student who once was in a 3-hour seminar devoted entirely to trying to make sense of a footnote in the article we'd read; and who once had a professor excoriate the class when we protested that something he'd assigned was gibberish (it was); and who once sat through an incomprehensible visiting scholar lecture to respectful attention from the faculty, all of whom later derided her in class as being a complete bullshit artist but none of whom would actually challenge her total crap "scholarship"...well, I like it. In fact, I suspect he may have once delivered the lecture that final-panel quote was taken from in my department--I'm pretty sure I was there. Of course, one take-away from my years of study of contemporary literature scholarship is that it's possible that the primary aim (or at least the primary outcome) of such studies is to render the student unable to recognize a babbling idiot from a literature scholar. Or to render the difference meaningless. (Seriously, though: if you're an undergrad English major, you may just have not gotten to the shit he is so perfectly parodying there.)
  • I'd debate whether this was incredible visual results 11 years ago when it was made. It really isn't incredible visual output today. Sorry but I don't find anything here that engages me. Jagged repetitive pixel wash can be made by any kid with MS Paint.
  • grumblebee: "I believe there's a bathroom scene in every Kubrick film. " Just follow these ten easy steps.
  • By the way, I mean to mention the fact that you're actually incorrect, empath (no offense) when you say that π was "discovered by the Greeks." For the Greeks, π was a completely different thing – principally, it was not a number, and an ancient Greek mathematician would have laughed at anyone who tried to claim that π was a number at all. For, she or he would say, first of all, how can a length be simply a number? Second, how can it be a number when it is not commensurable with any known related length? To the ancient Greeks, π was a length – an incommensurable length which had a relation to other lengths, but a length nonetheless. And that wasn't just because applying numbers to lengths didn't occur to them – they had very real reasons for believing that it was a mistake.
  • Inside jokes are a subset of jokes that a funny to are subset of people.
  • XKCD: It's not funny anymore
  • THIS IS NOT A CULTURAL TRADITION. Don't you think more people would be aware of it if it had been a treasured part of Japan's history I'm gonna have to call bullshit here. The town where I lived had a few local traditions and festivals the next town over didn't know about. A lot of Japanese towns have very localized cultural traditions that date back a long way and are only of any significance in that particular town or area. Same goes for food--I'm sure if you did a national Japanese poll on whether they enjoy baked grasshoppers in soy sauce, a lot of people would say WTF? But people in some parts would say "yeah people ate that around here in tough times, you can still buy it." (it tastes good btw but looks gross) On top of which, I find it very hard to believe that an evil giant McCorporate Villain company would randomly start killing dolphins in a place that had no history of eating/hunting them, having them come out en masse to enthusiastically watch them slaughter dolphins wholesale, sell the people the dolphin meat, and then convince everyone in town that this has always happened, is part of your history, and everyone just said "Oh yeah, I must have forgot about that".
  • XKCD has kind of been sucking lately. I would always click links that people posted to it, but when I added it to my RSS reader it seemed like most of them were duds. --- But man, XKCD fans sure are touchy. I remember an XKCD post a while ago where someone decided to preemptively call out anyone who didn't like XKCD. These "making fun of a webcomic" blogs have been around for a long time, and been linked on here before. But now because it's XKCD people freak out and decide the author is an asshole, etc.
    This reminds me of people who are still angry at George Lucas over the prequels. Sure, they sucked, but just move the fuck on and find something you do like. Unless that's just not possible,
    I don't know about "Still" angry, but he pissed of a lot of people, probably the majority of people who were actual starwars fans. What's wrong with having a negative reaction to stuff that's crap and complaining about it? It's a bit much when people complain about almost everything, but I don't really see what the problem is in complaining about one particular thing that you don't like, in it's own space. If you don't like it, don't read it. Or I suppose you could start your own counter hate blog if you're really that passionate about it.
    This is a common critique of, well, criticism. And it's a critique that I absolutely reject. Does Roger Ebert need to make a movie before he can criticize other movies?
    Yeah. The idea that being a critic makes you a pathetic loser is kind of unusual, but it's something people sometimes bring up when things they like are criticized. People enjoy criticism of other web comics, so I don't see what the big deal is here. It's not just one guy, it's several. Yet people in this thread are arguing that, it deserves "Sudden and hard punch in the back of the head" (due to the fact they're running ads)
    There are two main problems with this. One: Garfield without Garfield, Nietzsche family circus, Explaining Marmaduke - all that stuff is picking on fair targets. Over the hill cash cows. Stuff thats been aimed at the lowest common denominator. That sort of stuff is legitamately insulting to intelligence, and there's no chance in hell that one snarky blog is going to do any real damage to their marketing juggernauts. XKCD on the other hand is just one dude doing his own singular thing.
    Ah, here we get the hypocrisy in just one post! Stuff you don't like sucks and deserves to be mocked, whereas stuff you other people don't like (but you do!) does not! Blah.
  • In my bible, we welcome the gays and stone the drunk drivers. No, drunk drivers are even more dangerous when they're stoned. Though I realize it's a joke, in fact, I'd disagree with that. In many cases, if you're drunk, getting stoned may well be the sharpener-upper that you need to more safely commandeer a vehicle.
  • One extra point I'll repeat is, The Cove juggles (too) many issues, one being the captive dolphin industry (people trap wild dolphins and sell them to Seaworld and related theme parks, for big bucks). Again, this seems to be Ric O'Barry's real concern, moreso than whaling or dolphin fishing. A fair bit of screen time is devoted to this. So, forgetting the fishing of dolphins for a moment, one other question "The Cove" raises in my mind, is this: Suppose you had a small house, on the shore of the pacific ocean. Every spring a heard of dolphins swims by. One day, a guy comes to your house. "Listen," he says, "I'm from Seaworld. Throw a net over those dolphins the next time they come by, and give me a call. I'll sort through them, take all the ones I like, and give you $150,000 per dolphin. Trust me, do this every year, and you'll be a millionaire in no time at all." Would you say, "no"? and Polyhymnia you're welcome.
  • Between this, Chowder, and Flapjack, (non-adult swim) CN is taking up more and more of my time lately.
  • This had to exist. To pave the way for Megaforce, which is only the greatest movie ever.
  • "I don't want to be taken out of context" is the exact reason given by everybody who is doing something wrong to avoid scrutiny.
  • Sadly, you can't do "Is My Penis" due to Safesearch.
  • Celebrity chef Beppe Bigazzi upset viewers and his host with his recipe for "cat casserole", and has been suspended from the program [Italian]. Inhabitants of Northern Italy, particularly those of Vicenza, are still nicknamed "magnagati" ('cat eaters') as a derogatory term in Venetian. Taking a clue from the Aboriginal population, cooking feral cats has even been proposed in Alice Springs, Australia, to curb the out-of-control feral population.

    Personally, I like my cats petted, not poached.
  • I'm ..kinda on hippybear's side. On one hand my reaction is "well, however anyone wants to lead thier liiiiife" but the other part, the louder, angrier, bigger part of my brain is going "STOP IT! YOU'RE HURTING PEOPLE! YOU ARE HURTING YOURSELF! WE'VE BEEN HAVING THIS ARGUMENT SINCE THE 60s ! WE KNOW PEOPLE OPEN UP MORE TO BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS WHEN THEY KNOW SOMEONE WHO IS GAY. THE CLOSET IS A CASKET AND YOU ARE BRINGING PEOPLE DOWN WITH YOU AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" And then I need a nap and recreational drugs and a hug.
  • The interview where State Sen. Ashburn finally came out is available here, btw.
  • as wondrous as Euler's theorem was, nothing in it can hold a candle to the beauty of the later books of Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections. Later books? Are you thinking of Euclid? As for Greeks not considering π a number because it was a length...I dunno. They did number theory via geometry and it seems doubtful to me they could have avoided noticing that the lengths were simply integers. It seems more likely to me that they only appeared to not think of numbers because the most powerful tool they had was geometry and they translated everything to that to do their work.
  • Gawd, if that guy is being serious, he's awful. This one is so mind-numbingly stubborn that I want to find out where he lives and then drive there and punch him. "Wouldn't it be funny if God really was C3P0, like the Ewoks thought" is not the funniest thing ever, and in fact it doesn't even make me laugh, but I'll at least acknowledge that there's enough there to make it a joke.
  • Well he's sure as hell right about this one. What the fuck was he going for there? I dislike Star Wars humour. So I just skip over things like that whilst yawning inwardly. You know, I used to love Ziggy aged ten. He's barely known this side of the pond. And I have warm feelings for Garfield, even though, as a cat, he has no grounds for caring whether it is indeed Monday.
  • OK, I'm willing to accept that the strip formula is pretty much an inescapable fact. But I think a lot of (especially) web comics fail by investing too heavily in their own internal world. It takes a lot of investment on the part of the reader if the only jokes are in-jokes about the characters in the strip; strips that work will find humour by bringing in things from outside, not necessarily by direct reference to the real world, but by taking on the issues and anxieties of the real world even if only obliquely.
  • Dolphins also kill baby dolphins for fun. Quotes: "Marine experts now believe that these displays of attacks on non-rival, non-predatory, peace-loving porpoises and, more shockingly, of dolphin infanticide, may have always taken place." "Inspection showed multiple lacerations and puncture wounds all over the body which could not have been caused by any other attacker than a bottle-nosed dolphin. Two of these fatal attacks by dolphins feature in the documentary The Dolphin Murders, being shown in the channel Five series Nature Shock on Tuesday, January 29. Watching the films, Aberdeen marina biologist Dr Ben Wilson explains yet another shocking phenomenon - that the dolphins use their incredible ultra sound abilties to home in on the vital organs of their victims that will cause most damage."
  • The Ransom Center is kind of a big deal. They have a Gutenberg Bible, too. I'm pretty sure that they have TWO Gutenberg Bibles. Crazy. Also: Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas?
  • Metafilter doesn't actually seem that angry about it. My apologies. I conflated metafilter with cat people again.
  • I'm petty and small enough to be bothered that this petty small blog makes enough money on advertising to run a contest with generous prizes not by creating unique, thoughtful content but simply by snarking at someone else's work. Not to turn this into another websites/advertising thing, but holy crap I didn't realize he had ads on that thing. Making a buck by running down someone's work while liberally using excerpts and entire strips to do so? That deserves a sudden and hard punch in the back of the head, or at least a fierce pinching. Fucking parasite.
  • Mine would sound more like this horn.
  • Rabbits are also somewhere on the food / pet continuum, as are horses and frogs.
  • Way Down Under The Ground. The tale of Orpheus's journey through the Underworld has been retold so many times, on stage, in film. Tennessee Williams saw it as Orpheus Descending. Neil Gaiman took the myth on in the pages of Sandman. Today, we have Hadestown, a new album from Anais Mitchell. Mitchell recorded "Hades & Persephone" for a previous release, but Hadestown is a fully-realized folk opera, five years in the making, a collaborative effort featuring contributions from Greg Brown, Ani Difranco, The Haden Tripletts and Justin Vernon (the voice of Bon Iver).

    From Mitchell's story of how Hadestown came to be: "The real moral of Hadestown to me is, yes, we're f*cked, but we still have to try with all our might. We have to love hard and make beauty in the face of futility."
  • I share a birthday with Spike Milligan. I grew up listening to Goon Show records, and they were the funniest things I'd ever heard in my entire life. For more Milligan fun, check out his war memoirs; they start with "Hitler: My Part in His Downfall" and go on from there. Thank you for this, this is awesome. also my father was literally born in Bexhill-On-Sea, making the Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler particularly funny in our house
  • In related news, Canadian Members of Parliament put seal meat back on the House of Common's restaurant menu. Never under-estimate the cultural resonances or political importance of food. And don't discount hunting as a way of life: hunting is real and still happens, and to the people to whom it is important it is REALLY important. It is vital in every sense of the word. Not sure about the dolphin slaughter, but let's not make this an exclusively Japanese thing.
  • In other LOLrepublicans news, Glenn Beck said that any church that preaches social justice is either Nazi or Communist. But why is he kicking George W. Bush?
  • Man, when I need some of this shit figured out, i'm just going to hire one of y'all to do it for me. I'm going back to the thread about funny comics.
  • I wish I had seen this link to Swiss puppy eaters before I posted. oh well
  • Religion is a choice. Eh, I don't know about that. I could join Mr. Ashburn's church, but that wouldn't make me religious any more than his marriage made him straight.
  • If Mr. xkcdsucks's biggest problem with the comic was that xkcd made jokes about xkcd, then he'd have a point, but his complaint seems to be that xkcd is a comic that makes nerd-jokes, which he believes are inherently unfunny because of their appeal to nerds. posted by deanc Maybe he's a jock. The eternal battle continues!
  • Right, hypocrisy, but I'll give him credit. He actually came out. I hope he can find a happier life now that he's open about his sexual preference. He'll have to reconcile his actions with himself, but I can't think of another GOP who, after being caught out, just admitted it.
  • "Produced by Todd Sickafoose" ORLY He's a pretty great jazz bassist. Interesting mix of styles here. Thanks!
  • Dear Martin Aircraft, Please give one of your jetpacks to Brian Blessed with the explicit instructions that he fly around the UK shouting "DIIIVE!".
  • I mean why is eating dolphin "barbaric" but eating bluefin tuna delicious? Is it because dolphins are mammals are tuna are fish? Does it matter? Do these dolphin belong to an endangered species? Is there a risk that that they are being "overfished" - like the bluefin tuna? Because dolphins are highly intelligent in a way, both quantatively and qualitatively, that tuna aren't. It would be like eating a chimp, orang, gorilla, or human. It's disgusting, barbaric, and yes, worse than the most inhumane and torturous excesses of the factory farming industry.
  • Wow, "Why are Americans so" leads to - fat - obese We're not hungry, we're preparing for war!
  • Dude, that's just weird, a blog ranting about someone else's comic. Not comics, comic. Just one. Creepy weird.
  • Okay, so I need one of these to accomplish my villainy, but I need to be villainous in order to afford one. Damn vicious cycles in the downturn economy.
  • Pretty numbers make bonobo's head hurt.
  • could you imagine the Garfield tie-ins? Lasagna Cat.
  • I don't bother to visit XKCD on my own initiative anymore since invariably I'll come across a link to EVERY SINGLE ONE either here or on Facebook.
  • I'm glad I'm not the only one who draws specs and fangs on author photos.
  • That seems like an awfully expensive way to kill myself.
  • On a related note, I've got a friend who's eaten puppy stew. Reportedly a little on the greasy side, but still pretty good. <NOT CHINESE-IST> The Cantonese have a saying the gist of which is "old cat, young dog" meaning that old cats make for better eating than kittens and puppies make for better eating that old dogs. So it strikes me that if you're going to eat one or the other, it's more humane to eat cats that have led a full life etc. Not that I'd personally eat something feral and probably disease ridden. </NOT CHINESE-IST> And you can bet a cat would eat you if you died. In fact most of the time when they're being cute and snuggling up to you, they're probably just checking to see if you're still alive.
  • The author does not understand what "in-jokes" are in the context that would make xkcd bad. xkcd sustains itself on a set of jokes that are comprehensible to a certain (large) group of internet geeks, but it's not so self-referential that anyone in this group coming to xkcd for the first time wouldn't understand it. Now maybe the author of xkcdsucks doesn't like nerd/geek humor or feel that it's "pure" enough to qualify as standalone humor, but that's a philosophical issue about the nature of humor, which Mr. xkcdsucks believes cannot, by definition, be jokes about a (large) subculture.
  • I think lambs are cute. I've seen and petted and played with many at this one farm. That was right before we walked over to have a picnic and eat some of the best roast lamb I have ever had!
  • http://xkcd.isitfunnytoday.com/
  • "Equality California, a group that advocates for expanded gay rights and other issues, has consistently given Ashburn a zero rating on its scorecard. The group's executive director, Geoff Kors, said Monday that he hopes the senator's revelation will lead him to change his voting patterns. 'He's still the same person, only living more honestly,' Kors said. 'I hope his own self-awareness will result in him no longer voting to deny people the most basic rights.'"*
    It will be interesting to see how he votes on any gay issues that may come up before he leaves office. I'm not holding my breath.
  • I think if this film helps reduce just a tiny bit of the immense amount of animal suffering in the world, then that's a good thing.
  • Why oh why would you go to a gay nightclub if you were an in-the-closet famous person - nay – an ANTI-GAY-RIGHTS, in-the-closet, famous person? According to this post on Pandagon, he was in a glass closet: Delusional Collusion - Roy Ashburn's closet was protected by newspapers, local gays At least two California newspapers and the openly gay mayor of West Sacramento knew anti-gay state Sen. Roy Ashburn was gay and yet they said nothing. The Bakersfield Republican, who has consistently voted against gay-rights measures, said his votes were a reflection of how the majority of voters in his conservative district would have wanted him to vote. This is bullshit. If his constituents are that homophobic no way in hell would they want a gay senator. And yet he didn't resign or decline to run in the first place.
  • What can you say about a series where someone as great as Peter Sellers is only the third funniest guy?
  • "I live in the city now and have a pet cat. I feel responsible for Trilby, for making sure his physical needs are met, including attention and kindness, and I certainly don't ever look at him and think, "Hey! I'd like me some cat fritters!", but I don't love him and there's just no way I'd spend a small fortune on vet's bills the way some people do when their pet becomes ill. If Trilby has anything seriously wrong with him that will cost more than a few hundred to fix, I'll put him down and get another pet." Could I just ask, orangeswan, and I'm truly not trying to be snarky, just curious - why do you have a pet?
  • After three years of comp sci degree students - men who, in my view, wanted nothing more out of their educations than to push buttons and be rewarded handsomely for the fun - telling me that my Linguistics degree would qualify me for nothing more than five stars in McDonald's, I thought that strip could fuck right off too. Geeking should be celebrated whatever flavour it comes in - and with geeking comes, inevitably, wankery and waffle. I think that there's a difference between lit nerds and math/science nerds (although there may be some overlap, in certain cases), and that while they're similar, they're also bitterly opposed on some fundamental level. This strip seems to fall a bit more on the 'spergin' side, and while it sometimes has made me laugh, I too find something squicky and unlikeable about it.
  • uncanny hengeman, he may just have been looking for a man. Not many places you can do that, aside from a gay bar or club. In fact, his sexual drives would likely have been in direct conflict with the idea of keeping them secret, for this very reason.
  • Been following him since the Comedians of Comedy. Nathaniel Buckner bit kills.
  • In the world of beautiful theorems and Newtonian law Santorum is a Gay Parade in drag, tripping on a acid and riding on elephants armed with nuclear tipped atomic powered penises.
  • Okay, the "my gay" comment was funnier before I posted it :p.
  • If there's anything that makes me question my support of abortion, it's this. Hmm? If there's anything that makes you question your allegiance to women's reproductive rights, it's evidence that women are considered less desireable and perhaps even less human than men? The issue of "safe and legal" abortions really has little to do with the issue of selective abortions. Since selective abortions still happen in countries that have outlawed abortions, or in the case of India have legal abortions with off-the-books restrictions.
  • I do have recreational hugs. As opposed to professional ones?
  • In my bible, we welcome the gays and stone the drunk drivers. No, drunk drivers are even more dangerous when they're stoned.
  • I've always loved the Goons, but it's hard to appreciate just how much a part of British life they became. I mean, it's only recently that I realised that they were the source of the word 'lurgy' that every British person understands to mean a general purpose feeling of illness, somewhere between a cold and the flu that needs sympathy but not a doctor. Outside the UK it seems to be pretty much unknown...
  • Only a monster would make a joke about the subject of ifanticide.
  • You're right spicynuts, and that opportunism is the reason the US is in such a mess. The powerful constituencies are the health insurance companies, the banks, the pharma companies, the oil companies. Not blacks, or jews, or papists, or birthers, or people of great height. The powerful constituencies think it's great how angry uneducated lower-middle-class white people are at the gays and the welfare and everything! Because it keeps them from being so angry at the faceless corporations who are pilfering the country.
  • "The Cove" , about the annual dolphins slaughter in Taiji, Japan, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. However, the movie has only been screened once in Japan, during the Tokyo International Film Festival in October. Reaction from the town is a combination of "We're not doing anything wrong" and "It's none of your business what we do" with the added refrain of "We're protecting our cultural traditions" which is already familiar to anti-whaling activists and the like. Due to a media blackout, most Japanese people don't even know the hunt happens, but will the movie's increasingly high profile (It's even becoming a TV show) and the negative publicity force a change? More details on the making and content of the movie.

    Anecdotal: The Oscar was the first my (Japanese) wife had heard of the whole thing. It took her a while to get over the idea of eating dolphins, which just seems barbaric to her as well. Then she worried that people will think all Japanese eat dolphins for dinner. She hypothesized that the people in the town might be a different race or species or something. And then she went on about how the Japanese political system is broken because they can't manage to outlaw stuff like this, and they react with anything but stubbornness and resistance to any ideas originating outside the country.
  • Don't you have to be a little dodgy or have a dodgy doctor or both to get a sex motivated abortion in the United States in 2010? Apparently not. Last year, a survey found that 1 of every 11 Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis treatment was for sex-selection alone. The study by Johns Hopkins University also found that 42 percent of clinics offering PGD offer it for sex selection. A lot of this comes from the dowry traditions of those countries. Female children are required have a wedding fund that makes their future marriage more attractive for prospective males. Also, in simple terms, male children are expected to take care of their parents into their retirement, while female children are expected to take care of their husband's parents. This has all sorts of ramifications in a country when you are only allowed to have one child. Makes me wonder if we'll see a reverse-dowry tradition arising in countries with hugely-skewed sex ratios.
  • Seriously, I'd love to read those letters between him and DeLillo.
  • "From 1980 to 1983, I worked in the kitchen of a small restaurant near Catskill, New York, on a patch of the Hudson River Valley so remote it didn't have an address. The sixty-seat restaurant was owned by René and Paulette Macary (she remains its proprietor today). La Rive, named thus because it sat on a wide running creek, was a fruitful training ground, and New York State had extraordinary livestock. Beautiful veal came down from Utica. I found a man who raised spectacular pigeons. I began to ask these farmers for unusual items to experiment with, things like pigs' ears, cockscombs, duck testicles. One day, I asked my rabbit purveyor to show me how to kill, skin, and eviscerate a rabbit. I had never done this, and I figured if I was going to cook rabbit, I should know it from its live state through the slaughtering, skinning and butchering, and then the cooking. The guy showed up with twelve live rabbits. He hit one over the head with a club, knocked it out, slit its throat, pinned it to a board, skinned it - the whole bit. Then he left. I don't know what else I expected, but there I was out in the grass behind the restaurant, just me and eleven cute bunnies, all of which were on the menu that week and had to find their way into a braising pan. I clutched at the first rabbit. I had a hard time killing it. It screamed. Rabbits scream and this one screamed loudly. Then it broke its leg trying to get away. It was terrible. The next ten rabbits didn't scream and I was quick with the kill, but that first screaming rabbit not only gave me a lesson in butchering, it also taught me about waste. Because killing those rabbits had been such an awful experience, I would not squander them. I would use all my powers as chef to ensure that those rabbits were beautiful. It's very easy to go to a grocery store and buy meat, then accidentally overcook it and throw it away. A cook sautéing a rabbit loin, working the line on a Saturday night, a million pans going, plates going out the door, who took that loin a little too far, doesn't hesitate, just dumps it in the garbage and fires another. Would that cook, I wonder, have let his attention stray from that loin had he killed the rabbit himself? No. Should a cook squander anything ever? It was a simple lesson." - Thomas Keller, from the French Laundry Cookbook (taken from here)
  • Didn't you get the memo? The value of a creature's life is directly proportional to its cuteness. (This also explains why a pretty white girl gone missing is national news, whereas a poorly-groomed middle-aged guy could self-immolate and nobody would care.) Pigs are on the menu; toddlers are not. Cats are adorable, ergo YOU CANNOT EAT THEM!!!!!!
  • It's the new rickroll!
  • Is anyone keeping a running tally of anti-gay public figures who have come out? Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, this guy...
  • I can never find it when I'm looking for it, but somewhere out there is a perfect four-panel xkcd parody that really nails the tone of the comic . . the narrator brags about how he and his girlfriend built a computer and had sex, then he points at the reader and says something like "what did YOU do this weekend?" If someone can dig that up and post it I will love you long time. I think what makes this mostly harmless webcomic such a hate magnet is that it sits at this weird focal point of internet geek culture, where certain people are proud of having no social skills, being deliberately off-putting and difficult to communicate with because "the nerds won" some kind of ambiguous cultural battle, wearing fedoras and collecting replica swords and speaking Klingon in public. These kinds of folks worship xkcd because it speaks their language and reassures them daily that yes, they are better than the "normals" (or sometimes "hipsters"!) that surround them. If you are a defender of xkcd you should be happy because it doesn't need your help, it's like the second most popular webcomic in existence. I don't think that fact says good things about webcomics in general, but hey.
  • What Do You Suggest? is a supercool way of visually exploring the suggestions Google offers as you type, suggestions that have long served to baffle and amuse. If you can't find your own intriguing suggestion tree, use the random word or question option...
  • Well, it "sexualizes women" only insofar as women touching their own breasts is inherently and overtly sexual. It's interesting, because as a guy I tend feel as though it is, but when I think about it I know it's not. In fact, I am the one sexualizing the situation by feeling as though women who touch their breasts in any context - silly, goofy, or medical contexts included - are 'sexual.' I am a guy, so I know what that's like. Those of us who are into women tend to turn female breasts into this sacred zone of pleasure or something, fetishizing what is for women simply a body part. Women, well... they live with breasts, so I think it's healthy to understand that for them they're not really such a huge deal. But I say that as someone who has had the revelation of living with four women (and two men) for the last month, two of whom are lesbians. Hearing "your boobs look fantastic today!" and "oh, your breast is sticking out - here, let me help you with that" was strange and novel to me at first, and some stubborn part of me said that it's unfair that I'll never get to say things like that! But it's not really a big deal - mostly I kind of like the idea of people being comfortable inside their own skin. And I know that the notion that breasts are sexual objects! can be oppressive to women at a certain point. At the very least, it makes for a more rigid and less comfortable world.
  • "Abraham Lincoln?" "Finn, your mind has been transported back in time. And to Mars." "What?" "It doesn't matter" That is totally awesome.
  • Joan Didion was able to launch and sustain an entire writing career (justifiably) talking shit about it Well, to be fair, she also talked a lot of shit about Los Angeles.
  • The World Champion largest number, listed in the latest Guinness Book of Records... lolnonmathematicians
  • As an English major, I just hate it for this one. It shouldn't annoy me because he looks like a babbling idiot to anyone who has ever taken a literature course ever, but going from the whole "I love geeks! I love life! Whee!" to shitting on other geeky people is just being an such an asshole. God, what a douche. A touch sensitive? I think XKCD is a fine web comic and as good as about anything you might find in your daily paper. I don't agree with the blogger here that it's built on in jokes. I'd agree that some of the jokes may be based on having a level of technical or mathematical knowledge, and obviously, there's a heavy geek influence, but not all comics are for everyone. Some people didn't like the Far Side, other people love Beetle Bailey, and arguing that because a comic panders to a group of people is only a grounds to explain your own dissatisfaction, and not a reasonable ground to make a blanket assertion. What is silly is devoting so much time and energy to something you hate. As someone mentioned above, life is short, don't spend so much of it focusing on a negative project.
  • Or are you taking the position that a public office and the democratic process should be no different than any other corporate gig where you know you are gonna hate the job, you hate all the jobs you had that got you to the current place in your career, but one must pay da bills, so you just grin and pretend to love the job because that's what people do?
  • Once you have eπi = -1, adding the + 1 seems kind of superfluous. No, then you wouldn't have the five most important constants in mathematics.
  • NSFW. It's a bunch of women grabbing their breasts.
  • I remember seeing that Mork & Mindy episode. I didn't realize that was Before He Was A Star. I thought he was just doing some TV.
  • Oh. My. God.
  • Yeah, I don't understand meat being off-limits just because most people think the animal is cute. Bunnies are cute too. Eating your pet cat is wrong, eating your neighbor's cat is wrong, eating Sockington is SO FUCKING WRONG, but a feral cat or a cat raised in a farm for meat? Big deal. I'm not saying McDonalds needs to start serving McKitty burgers (though could you imagine the Garfield tie-ins?) but I think more meat eaters really need to accept just what meat is, and if you can't accept it perhaps you need to think about not eating meat at all.
  • His and his constituents' platform was one of anti-gay rights, it matters not if he was gay in the process. Pollomacho...I would agree with you if one fact were true - that he ran on a platform of "I am Gay and I hate myself and all gays and I want to be healed (or whatever) and so I will represent all of you who also hate gays and want them to be healed (or whatever) so vote for me cuz no one hates teh gays more than this gay". But I'm guessing that's not the platform he ran on. Which makes what he did nothing more than opportunism. "I want to be a politician. What issue will get me elected? HATE TEH GAYS!". That's opportunism.
  • Blog: Daily Plays. "Reading a play a day and writing about what I read."
  • Clearly, the most important issue in the murder of millions of female infants is how it will affect men's ability to find a wife. Wait 50 years and see what those men end up doing. See how snarky you feel then.
  • We should really incentivize coming out for these guys Yeah, because being able to express yourself freely and walk around publicly with the person you love is just not enough.
  • >:)
  • Totally Math!
  • I guess you proved his point? Eggers is right inasmuch as Sturgeon's Law applies--most "criticism" is ill-thunk poo-throwing. But criticism can be useful and good and enlightening, and you don't have to be a painter, novelist, or film-maker to do it. You have to be a good thinker, a good feeler, and a good writer. Also, being educated in the domain of your criticism helps a lot, too. Good criticism can turn people on, can infect others with thinking, feeling, seeing, and writing.
  • I apologize for my sloppiness. I should have done five minutes more work and found something that worked. As far as I know, those torrents I linked to still work. Also, there are some very cheap VPNs that were established after the hotspotshield blocking that appear to still be functioning. They are discussed here: hotspot-shield-alternatives. The most recent link goes to a pay-vpn service and is from February 2010, i.e. they're not all free. Also, if you're grabbing torrents, I prefer Vuze to Utorrent, as Utorrent served as a conduit for a trojan virus exploit for my wife's laptop. EZTV also links mainly to torrents of television programs.
  • Don't get too righteous unless you don't eat slaughterhouse-killed meat. Ever seen a film of that? In fairness, Food, Inc. was also nominated.
  • I wonder how efficient it is. I mean, does it get 5 MPG or 50? Also, I enjoy the idea of a two-stroke seizing mid-air.
  • I dunno, diogenes...do you really want to see a video of men getting prostate exams, complete with honking noise? hmm, actually...
  • Not many places you can do that, aside from a gay bar or club. Or the bathroom stall at an airport....
  • What we need to do here is make sure that gay men gay men who actively legistate against the basic human rights of other gay people get outed in the most negative way possible
  • >: Is it ever a good idea to watch YouTube at work? Who the hell actually gets to read Metafilter and watch Youtube videos at work? Is everyone else here somebody's boss or something?
  • I once made a webpage making fun of other people's work. It got me a lot of attention and people thought it was funny. But it was too easy and I felt bad inside, so I stopped. posted by ropeladder at 9:04 AM on March 9 [+] [!] Yeah. This.
  • Whatever, call me when I can get a skintight technological "battle-suit" composed of steel mesh, which could serve as an exoskeleton, allow me to fly, fire energy blasts, has a personal force field for defense and has a pouch for keeping Pop Tarts warm.
  • "Race motivated abortion?" You get a test to see what race your baby will be, and . . . ?
  • a link to Weird Meat
  • Japanese film distributor hopes to screen 'The Cove' soon in Japan.
  • .
  • Ok, I have a question. What about the guys he used to meet at the clubs? What about his booty calls, and what about the people he socialized with in the homosexual community? Just because you're out doesn't mean you're political, and especially doesn't mean you're progressive. It's equally possible that he didn't talk about his work with them, or (as was well-explained in Outrage*) people were more impressed with his proximity/access to power and didn't give a shit about his actual use of it. *though the film does have its own self-righteousness issues
  • So can we do this in Mississippi? Oh right, once they made bank, they'd become Republicans and start complaining about being taxed to help all the losers who hadn't pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. (But that's probably a human universal, to attribute to personal virtue, the luck that comes our way.)
  • I hear this line of reasoning a lot: "You say we shouldn't eat dolphins, but you eat cows! Do you know what cows go through at the feed lot and slaughterhouse?" This is usually given as an argument in favor of eating dolphins. However, it makes a far better argument in favor of going vegetarian. Just sayin'. You don't have to be a hypocrite. It is possible to be against both the slaughter of dolphins and the slaughter of cows. Possible, easy, healthy, AND affordable!
  • Why oh why would you go to a gay nightclub if you were an in-the-closet famous person True Fact:* Most gay clubs have a special lounge called 'the closet' with dim lighting and Bruce Springsteen playing where closeted dudes can talk about sports and play footsie. *Not a true fact
  • Humans don't eat each because cannibalism is against the laws of nature. Animals don't eat their own species either, unless they're physically and/or psychologically ill, and it causes health problems when they do. This isn't exactly true. There are many examples of...maybe not quite standard but far from "ill" or naturally unsound practices of cannibalism in the animal kingdom. Many insects and sea life come to mind. And of course primates are known to do it.
  • And I really don't want to know what happens culinary-wise when he finds out some people like licking ass.
  • After getting his start as a DJ on Ball State's WAGO-FM, David Letterman spent most of the 1970s appearing in a lot of cheesy television, exhaustively chronicled here. Whether kayaking on the Battle of the Network Stars, appearing on an ill-fated variety show with Mary Tyler Moore, working as a panelist on The Love Experts, or hosting a game-show pilot for The Riddlers (part 1, 2, and 3), Letterman more than paid his dues.

    Letterman gets dissed by Otto Preminger Letterman plays a 70s-style encounter group leader on Mork & Mindy Letterman on variety show with Michael Jackson
  • I had the joy of watching Japanese morning TV talking about this. While my Japanese isn't perfect, the "experts" the shows had on seemed to take the stance that the mayor of Taiji has taken, essentially, those people at the Oscars don't understand our sacred traditions, and they want to make us look bad. Just as a throw out, before I go on: I've never eaten it. No-one I know ever has, and I've seen it at a supermarket once. I'm not sure how deeply held the tradition is if it's not really all that common (like, say, whale meat, which was essentially a subsistance alternative during the war, and some old farts are nostalgic about it, while most young people don't eat it). The thing is, they kept showing clips where foreigners would try to get close to take pictures. These people would be chased away by villagers holding signs in English saying "NO PHOTOGRAPHS" and acting quite hostile. The way I saw it, if what you're doing is so dandy, why are you so anxious to keep people from seeing it.I mentioned this to my wife, who's response was quite different from Mrs. Donkeymon. My wife said, basically, they don't want pictures being taken that will be used out of context, or twisted by foreign media. I pretty much left it at that, as my wife had to go to work, and I figure married life is fun enough with out international disputes added to the mix. Though, to be honest, the Japanese morning shows did show the bit where the water of the cove turns bright red from all the blood. I'm not sure how out of context that can be taken.
  • huh, I didn't even notice it, though I've always wondered how he does those bits where he's supposed to be his own cousin with the beard shaved off. I suppose it's all timing.
  • Okay, I think we've established that its not good for the mens or the womens when there are a lot less women than men.
  • I saw her opening for Ani DiFranco a while back, and I was interested to hear the album after she played a few songs live. I checked Amazon last night, and saw it was for sale a bit early (and cheap!) and I grabbed it. It is all kinds of good. Thanks for the post!
  • "I want to be a politician. What issue will get me elected? HATE TEH GAYS!". That's opportunism. I'm guessing, but I don't think that "I HATE TEH GAYZ" was what Ashburn ran on.
  • The Shannon number? Skewes' number? Graham's number? Please. When you're ready to get serious, here are some truly large numbers. (previously, but with dead links)
  • Honk. [SLYT]
  • Don't get too righteous unless you don't eat slaughterhouse-killed meat. Ever seen a film of that? Wasn't there a South Park episode that made this same point?
  • I like the posters. But for a typographer-cum-graphic artist, his written work is pretty painful on the eyes.
  • This is a common critique of, well, criticism. And it's a critique that I absolutely reject. Does Roger Ebert need to make a movie before he can criticize other movies? Do I have to write a book before I can start a blog post with, "I didn't like Twilight because it portrays dangerous and abusive relationships as the ultimate form of romance?" Or, as Samuel Johnson put it, "You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."
  • In case people don't get the reference, Letterman is spoofing EST founder Werner Erhard in that Mork and Mindy bit.
  • By the way, I once again just want to say in this thread that DC is awesome. The sun is shining, the flowers are coming up, it is truly a beautiful day for a couple to get married out there!
  • Right wingers learn that anyone can be born gay. One can hope, but I think every time this happens, it just reinforces fear of the Gay Agenda. They* don't think "Huh, maybe it's okay to be gay," they think "What a shame, Satan and his homo army bagged another decent family man." * You know, THEM
  • Why oh why would you go to a gay nightclub if you were an in-the-closet famous person - nay – an ANTI-GAY-RIGHTS, in-the-closet, famous person? Because that's where the gay men are?
  • Complaining about hulu not working in your country is the new, "Oh, I dont own a TV."
  • I remember cartoons!
  • There's another video of him randomly popping up in "scenes" from other NBC shows ... The link to the video is above.
  • It's probably never, ever a good idea to read a webcomic's forums. They're all tripping over themselves to praise the author the most effusively. It's always disturbing, but moreso when the comic in question is awful. ...which touches on the biggest mystery in all of webcomics, at least as I'm concerned: the sycophants. Some people have 'em, some don't, and there seems to be no correlation to quality. Some strips just have this hard-core group of people who mob every update with praise and generally talk about how the cartoonist is the Awesomest Motherfucker Ever. And this is just as common for awful strips as it is for good ones. I've accepted that I'm never going to make any money off of my webcomic work, and that's fine. But I hope to god I get me some sycophants soon.
  • At what age do you think it's appropriate to tell a pothole it's adopted? (blatantly stolen and slightly altered Zach Galifianakis joke)
  • This is the worst xkcd ever!
  • Interesting thread and discussion. I have always remembered this equation even though I have long since forgotten most of the math I learned beyond basic algebra. Since zero is a big part of the discussion, it bears mentioning that this mefite wrote the book on zero.
  • the Chinese seem to find them palatable That's not saying much; the Chinese seem to find a lot of things palatable.
  • I thought we don't eat cats cause their meat tastes terrible, there isn't a lot of it, and they're prone to parasites? The last two things are both true of rabbits and rabbits taste yummy. I've no idea how cats taste, but the Chinese seem to find them palatable. But even if cats don't taste good, a nice Persian catfur coat would look kind of spiffy.
  • modern science assumes that numbers underly physical reality It assumes no such thing, except insofar as equations match with experimental results.
  • A lot of this comes from the dowry traditions of those countries. Female children are required have a wedding fund that makes their future marriage more attractive for prospective males. Also, in simple terms, male children are expected to take care of their parents into their retirement, while female children are expected to take care of their husband's parents. This has all sorts of ramifications in a country when you are only allowed to have one child.
  • Turns out there are only 400 active heterosexuals in the U.S now. Everyone else just needs a six pack of miller high life and a showing of 300.
  • While I think the author of the blog is perhaps taking things a bit far... Yeah, XKCD did start sucking a while back. I think for me it was when something of the sheer wonder at the world (and occasional meloncholia) which characterized the early comics was gradually replaced with Monroe's mildly smug impressedness with Monroe's own cleverness. It isn't just that it's an in joke. In jokes are fine. It's a self-referential joke. Yes, the image of Cory Doctorow terrorizing the intarwebs in a balloon and aviator goggles was kind of amusing the first time around, but once you get to the point of riffing off someone else's riffing off your original and admittedly clever idea, it isn't actually clever anymore. Someone else thinking you're cool is not actually cool, and I've better things to do than watch Doctorow (can't stand that guy!) and Monroe jerk each other off. He's out of ideas. And like any show that's gone on too long, reruns are more common than new episodes, and even the new ones are increasingly stale. There's such a thing as quitting while you're ahead.
  • These kinds of folks worship xkcd because it speaks their language and reassures them daily that yes, they are better than the "normals" (or sometimes "hipsters"!) that surround them. Which is where I don't understand where the criticism is coming from. Is there more than a small number of people who actually "worship" the strip? Or is it just another stop on a list of bookmarks and RSS subscriptions. Then again, I don't grok nerdrage over a 7/10 review for Heavy Rain, or excessive wailing over Avatar's modest performance at the Oscars either.
  • It's not like we're talking about public transportation or some other policy thing, we are talking about basic human rights. You know, I'm of the opinion that public transportation is a basic human right, too. Religion is a choice. I'm not actually convinced this is true anymore.
  • I'm prety sure Joe Beese meant the costumes the dancers were wearing, which do look kind of like that. Vader, C3-P0 and a Big Brother are in the audience.
  • Of course a Japanese would suspect some other group of not being Japanese or even human. They're the biggest tribalists in the world Isn't this a tribalist statement in itself? THEM THEM THEM!
  • Shrug. I'm a cat lover and (mostly) a vegetarian. The salient part of this story isn't "OMG DUDE COOKED A CAT"—it's the denial and compartmentalization that allows people to be outraged by it, while tucking into a nice plate of chicken cacciatore at the very same moment.
  • ...Thin mints count as drugs FYI.
  • and after reading the blog: wow, we no longer have the market cornered on bean-overthinking.
  • If tis dick can't find this one funny, he's full of shit and I don't have to listen to his overwrought "critiques".
  • Chef Beppe Bigazzi and his producers don't seem to know their target audience very well...rhetorical FAIL
  • Also, with the line "I'm not actually an expert in their field", the author nowwhere near comes out as denouncing Literary Criticism to be a illegitimate field of study or populated with sham experts. Because such a statement would be untrue. You don't think so? That seems exactly what it's saying to me. In other subjects, a sham expert will get called out. In literary studies, a sham expert will be well-respected and sell a lot of books. QED...? No, he's saying he can bullshit literary criticism because he can use fancy words and opinion. Chemistry doesn't rely on opinion. Math doesn't rely on opinion. Criticism does. English lit majors seem to be awful sensitive people. At least based on their reaction to this one comic strip.
  • This comic is not remotely funny, and there is nothing you can do to make it funny, and there is nothing you can say to convince me that it's funny. This is because I am a sane fucking person who has a decent sense of humor and I don't find stupid bullshit funny just because I saw it on xkcd.com. This comic has no joke and no attempt at a joke and no basis in rational thought and it is incredibly stupid So it sucks because he hates it and it's stupid (also, dumb).
  • Man I used to be pretty good at math. AP Calculus as a highschool junior, I read DFW's book in infinity, etc. And now every link in this FPP seems to be some variation on 'The Skewes number is a derivation of the squeedle of ultra-π raised to the 32nd trimester algorithmically, as can be expressed laterally, or as an inverse goost (see the nano-Zanzibar proposition).'
  • More seriously , most of us have decided that eating animals is OK and make it a regular part of our diet. I'm not sure that's really true and this issue is a reason why I think that. Cats are animals. Steaks are food. We know intellectually that steaks were animals, but that's different than viscerally following the process. Mentioning that cats could be food makes one imagine that process, which is uncomfortable. The fact is that most people are uncomfortable thinking of animals as food.
  • I think I'll start a blog about why this guy is a bastard.
  • (warning: self-link to something I was going to submit to Projects next week, but this post will probably be deleted when cortex wakes up) This will foop swell.
  • I'll be glad to go through his papers, be fun to see how he organized his writing, novels in particular, and mostly with the unfinished novel, as he might have had a system down by then, towards the end there... Anyone coming to town for SXSW, you might want to sleaze on over to the Ransom Center, a mile from downtown max, probably not even that, a twelve minute walk or so, very interesting collection and usually a good show or two displayed at any given time. I used to walk over for lunch, once a week maybe, when they had the UT art collection displayed there, all those years, spectacular collection of Mexican art, all of that now moved to the Blanton museum, also close, worth going if you're burnt out on music and partying and standing in lame lines or whatever; SXSW can get a bit much if you're at it more than a day or three. Mid: "Why UT? Sorta sad they couldn't keep this stuff in his native Illinois..." Think he was native somewhere on the east coast, moved to IL when his father took a job as a professor mid-state IL.
  • The outfits reminded me of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.
  • This is so disappointing. I was expecting vintage car horns, or something to do with geese.
  • Here are some reasons that Zach Galifianakis is great: Kanye West Video Conversations on the craft Between Two Ferns Zach on Physical Comedy Fiona Apple Video
  • I'm curious whether there is a "Calvin and Hobbes sucks" somewhere out there. After reading some of Watterson's commentary in compilations, I'm not sure there could be: he was highly critical of himself, and seemed to know when he had to try something new. The setting allowed him to explore a lot, too. XKCD seems to be stuck in having to constantly churn out one-liners, much like Far side (which Larson also admitted was full of stinkers). But the scope of the comic is so limited. valkyryn made the point that his occasional bouts of wonder occur less than they did when it was new. Instead, we get the same math major characters, who are always one smarter than the other characters. I've never been a big follower, but I guess it really is becoming a job, and he's retreating to comfortable zones.
  • And to swiftly pop out of the closet, IMO several things suck about xkcd :) There's something off about it. Some vague feeling of pompousness borne out of insecurity gone famous. To me. I think it is HILAROUS to write an entire blog hating on xkcd. It's a pure and refined gentleman's sport.
  • I mean why is eating dolphin "barbaric" but eating bluefin tuna delicious? Is it because dolphins are mammals are tuna are fish? Does it matter? Do these dolphin belong to an endangered species? Is there a risk that that they are being "overfished" - like the bluefin tuna? Because dolphins are highly intelligent in a way, both quantatively and qualitatively, that tuna aren't. It would be like eating a chimp, orang, gorilla, or human. It's disgusting, barbaric, and yes, worse than the most inhumane and torturous excesses of the factory farming industry. Funny coincidence about this....there's a movie about overfishing called "The End of the Line" where a man who I believe is a fisheries guy specifically equated eating bluefin tuna with eating orangutan, but bc of how endangered they are. For the record I'm not vegan or buddist. But I say this: I'm sure a team of japanese vegan buddist monks could do the same thing that The Cove filmakers did, by sneaking into a beef-cattle processing plant in Texas, armed with the moral argument that all suffering is wrong. They also could easily come up with health and medical arguments about the perils of beef [mad cow disease, E. coli, and the dangers of eating hamburgers that were touched on in, say, Super Size Me]. But I'm not sure the fans of The Cove would have the same enthusiasm towards *that* film, even though they'd film scenes of equivalent suffering. What's weird is that being an animal rights person, I wouldn't want to see any suffering, so dolphins, tuna, pigs, dogs, same thing. Similarly, while I see why people get het up about someone in Asia eating dog, I think "animals are animals." And the emotion that people who get outraged about stuff like that will knock people like me for getting emotional about a fish or cow in the same way is basically the same emotion, just extrapolated. When I was much younger, I was out fishing with my father and uncle when they caught a pretty big mako shark, like 500lbs. And the whole two hour ride home, I sat there and watched it slowly dying. It was a real turning point for me, and my father, who had previously owned boats and done tons of fishing, never touched a pole again. To some people, life is life, and to other people, it's funny to point at a pig - which is far smarter and can be as good a pet as a dog - and joke about it being bacon.
  • Oh, and xkcd "isn't funny anymore"? I missed the part where was all that funny to begin with. I have read every one of them, and I read it every day.
  • I wonder if there would be a sliding scale for potholes in New Orleans. I've heard of one with a shopping cart in it, but the wildlife sanctuary is new to me.
  • I look forward to reading the author's clearly much better webcomic.
  • I'm switching the "time out room" for our little bastards to be the "time out dutch oven".
  • I hope they're not just holding them for Ransom.
  • I would be willing to eat cat-shaped cookies. I would eat the shit out of those.
  • For certain values of 5.
  • In a just world, the very quick mechanism to improving the status of women would be this stupid unnecessary self-imposed scarcity itself. I mean, I would think the absence of women would really underscore the importance of women, no?
  • me: “... modern science assumes that numbers underly physical reality...” empath: “It assumes no such thing, except insofar as equations match with experimental results.” That was a pretty sloppy way to say it, I admit. I should have said something like: 'modern mathematical physics assumes that numbers as algebra conceives of them underly physical reality.' Personally I think it's hard to deny that numbers underly physical reality in general – one and many are all around us – but that's not what I meant, really. And this isn't an attack – more an observation about how all of this stuff works now, in our minds. It's a language that's become so intuitive to us that we tend to forget that it's a language at all. For example, things like sine, cosine, tangent – all these numbers and equations which define geometric images in our minds – we take it for granted that thinking in those symbolic terms is the sum and substance of mathematics. For the Greeks, mathematics was fundamentally different, and when Euclid tried in book 4 of his Elements to get to the point where he could let symbols stand in for lengths, even he did so very tentatively, and there was some controversy about whether it was the right thing to do. I only like the idea of questioning the language, and where it came from – from Vieta, from Descartes, and from a few people who translated the Arabic version of geometry in the 1400s and 1500s.
  • Man you really need to read more Juggalo threads. posted by shakespeherian If Randall doesn't man up and stop being a girlbitch to hos in his comics than he is going to get kicked in the nuggs.
  • Tastes like dolphin.
  • Oh, this rocks SO DAMNED HARD. Thank you for this great post. I'm going to have a blast watching these. :)
  • Inspector.Gadget: "[[Clearly, the most important issue in the murder of millions of female infants is how it will affect men's ability to find a wife.]] Wait 50 years and see what those men end up doing. See how snarky you feel then." What are you predicting those men will end up doing?
  • Is there more than a small number of people who actually "worship" the strip? I know, right? Sloppily constructed arguments => waste of my time.
  • quin: In a just world, the very quick mechanism to improving the status of women would be this stupid unnecessary self-imposed scarcity itself. Yes, in a just world. I used to have those hopes, too. In this world, though, "The scarcity of females has resulted in kidnapping and trafficking of women for marriage and increased numbers of commercial sex workers, with a potential resultant rise in human immunodeficiency virus infection and other sexually transmitted diseases." on preview, what emjaybee said.
  • I mean, in these days of indoor plumbing, the toilet is a naturally potent metaphor for everyday repression, for all the bile and rage and memories and sins and other impure thoughts and unclean urges that can't always kept down or flushed away. Every once in a while when the psychological plumbing gets clogged, the load of excrement becomes more than one's psychological pipes can handle, and the shit all comes bubbling back up from below and spews out onto the surface.
    A survey of plumbing in the movies. Wee bit NSFW in both word and image.
  • Thanks for linking the Eggers thing. I hadn't seen it, and it's friggin brilliant.
  • FTFY So ready for this to go away. I always see it as some sort of wierd abbreviation for fifty-fifty.
  • This seems almost Tim Rogers-caliber humorlessness in its breathtaking scope. I'm not sure if this is the worst thing ever or one of the best.
  • (and Yoko of course!)
  • Any farmer-mefites care to chime in? My god father grew up on a (Serbian) farm, and his experience/attitude is the opposite of orange swan's. He was horrified when he found out that his pets were ending up in his belly & refused to ever tend to the livestock again. He grew up to be a cat & dog person, and will pay any amount in vets bills to keep his pets healthy (that's what pet insurance is for!), and when they do die he (and my god mom) tend to wait a while before getting a new pet, since it takes a while for him to get over the loss. He's still a livestock eater, but buys from a local free range farm. If it's not free range, it doesn't end up in his kitchen. I'm confident that if he knew you'd eaten a cat, feral or otherwise, he'd think you were scum and my god mom would have to spend a lot of energy convincing him not to pop you one, lol. So basically all we eat is turkey. And turkeys are dumb. In my experience turkeys are not just dumb, but also vicious. Same with swans for that matter! A lot of the bigger birds are pretty mean. Beware the geese down by Toronto harbourfront, they'll roll you for your ice cream!
  • My son loves talking about huge numbers (his favorite number is a quadrillion)... A couple of mine like the same thing. The youngest's favorite huge number is "one thousand and ninety-nine nine ninety-nine".
  • Huh? I always thought that gays couldn't get drunk
  • This thread? This is why I became a math major in college. And also why I subsequently dropped it.
  • I was wondering how they were able to cover his beard during that sketch. I thought it might be akin to an actor wearing a "bald cap." They fooled me.
  • lamb - mutton BUT MUTTON DOES NOT COME FROM LAMBS Some of you are not familiar with the concept of taboo, are you? Taboos are not universal. One of my Korean language professors, for example loves dog meat. She told us she thinks it's delicious. She also has a pet dog. Then there are the animals that almost no one thinks of as pets, and are perfectly nutritious, but are still not eaten in some places. So yes, a further explanation of why it's considered taboo to eat some animals but not others is needed.
  • If I try to watch hulu, do I still get to say I don't own a TV?
  • Why are some of you joking about something tragic???
  • I would eat a person.
  • I can easily see why people don't want to see adorable animals get eaten. But I don't understand acting like this dark uncrossable line between cats or dogs and pigs or cows actually exists. In any case, pigs are much cuter than cats.
  • That's pretty coo. It seems sort of like an early version of what we're now seeing with generative art communities around software like Processing and Context-Free Art.
  • I prefer the Judge - Referee analogy. Specifically, the NBA referee that grants unlimited steps to star players.
  • So, maybe he was a bit off-target in calling out English majors per se, but I took that last panel as a commentary on the Sokal affair. That could be the case - if it is, it's rather clumsy but perhaps more understandable. Just his "So I went on wikipedia [per the mouse-over] and looked up something I don't understand. Since I don't understand it, it's clearly nonsense! Lol humanities!" punch-line is rather hypocritical from someone who considers themselves an open-minded humanist/a friend of geeks/whatever. I just see this a lot in XKCD - as others have referenced, his attitude towards women shows some of the same issues. I don't really think it's worth a whole blog, but only because its firmly enshrined in the land of fanboyishness at this point and there's no coming back from that.
  • Will it send me a letter on its birthday telling me how much good my sponsorship money has done for it?
  • Missing the kitsch, Xanadu, Dance Fever, and Barbarella tags.
  • I'm like mippy about web comics. They just don't amuse me. The majority are web comics seem to have been created to a formula that goes: (i) Create a handful of characters, and make each embody some stereotype or quirk. (ii) Make characters say witty things based on their particular stereotype/quirks. (iii) Add lots of self-references and/or references to other things your audience is likely to know about, even if there's not actually anything funny or interesting to say about them. And that formula makes the majority of web comics turn out like a knock-off of Seinfeld written for a school assignment, but featuring two cats and a robot. Having said that, xkcd isn't following that formula, and can sometimes be quite funny. But I'll take PBF over xkcd every time.
  • And what do millions of men with no prospects for marriage do with their lives? What do their governments do with so many unattached young men? Musical Theater! I wish.
  • The closest I ever came to not getting married was when my fiancée found out that I ate, and enjoyed, horse on a regular basis. She's also no-go on rabbit and lamb. I cannot possibly imagine what would happen if I proposed eating a cat, even as a joke, but I suspect it would be ugly.
  • It's driven by a 2.0 L V4 2 stroke engine rated at 200 hp (150 kw) I'm assuming that would be LOUD. Hope they've got room for a muffler on those things, or keep them the f*** out of my friendly neighborhood skies lest their be unfortunate "hunting accidents".
  • Find it offensive? This is nothing! The Carol Baldwin (yes, Alec's Mom) Breast Cancer Research Fund actually PRODUCED T-shirts that said "Save The Boobies!" in huge pink letters. They were all over the New York State Fair, invariably worn by slack-bellied guys in mullets or worse, KIDS. AND another local fundraiser used the slogan "Saving First Base". Talk about objectification of women...
  • nor is it an example of the author publicly working out his weird sexual/emotional problems in comic strip form. You say that as if the same words don't describe Cathy. Or Garfield.
  • The thing is, these guys just obviously looove XKCD, otherwise they would just shrug and move on. They are seriously invested in XKCD as a "serious" web comic (ha!) and its perceived decline strikes at the heart of their geek identity.
  • I mean, if you use pure logic, there are few good reasons we shouldn't be eating human flesh either. Well, other than all the diseases you can get from eating people. We tend to draw lines one service and companion animals, but everyone draws that line to their own satisfaction. I don't eat red meat, but I am not militant about it. When served a pork dinner by friends that don't know better, I'm eating pork (this seldom happens). When a dinner gives me the wrong order or their is bacon in my green beans I tend to eat it. But again, rare. I've gone years between any of these. Fish or fowl. For me it's the size of the brain.
  • A tireless public servant, Ashburn fucks gays both on and off the clock.
  • A related bit of reading would be "A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace" which is a succinct look at the issue from an international relations perspective. It's an interesting read and provides a bit more detail on 'bare branches' in Asian society from the same authors the Economist article referenced. Sidenote: boy this chart is difficult to read.
  • I watched the whole show on Hulu (well, skipped through most of it, but saw the beginning of all the sketches at least) and didn't see the skit where he showed up sans beard. Did they cut that from the Hulu version?
  • Who knew there were historical pictures of Cat's-Meat Men?
  • Having just recently read the Dave Eggers interview on the subject of "selling out," I'm inclined to say yes to all of the above. Maybe it's an unfair standard to have, but the alternative, in which any jerk with an axe to grind feels entitled to write a blog shitting on something, just gets a little old after a while. It's important to make the distinction between jerks and well-intending critics. Nitsuh Abebe elaborates on this a lot more eloquently than I can so I'd rather point you to his response to that Eggers interview. Not all critics are jerks and to put them all in the same light undermines the value of cultural discourse and criticism.
  • Is breast cancer 100 times more common than any other type of cancer? If not, why do I see 100 times more awareness campaigns for breast cancer than any other cancer?
  • The Bakersfield Republican, who has consistently voted against gay-rights measures, said his votes were a reflection of how the majority of voters in his conservative district would have wanted him to vote. This is bullshit It's total bullshit! This makes me incredibly angry, and I have absolutely no use for this person. Good Riddance! Gay rights are the civil rights struggle of our time. It's not like we're talking about public transportation or some other policy thing, we are talking about basic human rights. Have the fucking courage of your convictions, and stand up for what you believe in. If your district votes for you, great. If not, work hard to change their minds.
  • I thought we don't eat cats cause their meat tastes terrible, there isn't a lot of it, and they're prone to parasites?
  • ...[I] don't have a pouch for keeping Pop Tarts warm. What? You're going commando?
  • In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don't count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace. Clearly, the most important issue in the murder of millions of female infants is how it will affect men's ability to find a wife.
  • Also, e and pi aren't just irrational numbers like √2, but transendental numbers that cannot ever be created from rational numbers using algebra Yeah, to me that's really the mindblowing part of it. Two numbers that to all appearances are completely random strings of digits, somehow combine to create a nice round number.
  • Why is it suddenly obscene when the animal is a common housepet? Because we don't eat things we make emotional attachments to? I mean, if you use pure logic, there are few good reasons we shouldn't be eating human flesh either. So, in the same way, it may not be logical and yet be perfectly reasonable.
  • More like twenty years. Read cgomez's link. Some of these men may be drawn to radical movements.
  • What's the size of Sacramento relative to Des Moines? Sacramento is the seventh-largest city in California, but it is only a middle-sized star. It is the most diverse city in America, but its cultural output relative to Des Moines is so picayune that Joan Didion was able to launch and sustain an entire writing career (justifiably) talking shit about it. The alluvial soil quality is unparalleled elsewhere, which is why the decision to flood the hell out of an area that receives approximately 16 inches of rain a year (putting the semi in semi-arid!) and grow rice there is so delightful. Sacramento measures its energy output in ego-watt hours, which is generally converted at a rate of 1 Schwarzenegger = 1,560 Culvers and can power the state for two-thirds of an enron; bloviation and gridlock are just two of the city's many variegated exports--take some home on your next visit! And don't forget to stop by Assemblyman Ashburn's office and ask how it feels to be forced out of the closet and earn universal ire just days after an openly gay man was sworn in as the Speaker of the Assembly.
  • I hope now that he's come out he starts overcompensating for the next 6 months and passes all sorts of flamboyant legislation.
  • The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas today announced that it has acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace. The collection includes "manuscript materials for Wallace's books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace's college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books." The Center's blog has more details.
  • transcendental: numbers that cannot ever be created from rational numbers using algebra delmoi, after 3 years studying mathematics, and several years in engineering, you have expressed in plain english and made me understand the concept of a transcendental number in a simple way, for the first time.
  • She hypothesized that the people in the town might be a different race or species or something. She really did say that though! I was pretty surprised myself, but I guess she REALLY didn't want to be associated with people who would eat dolphins. It just seems totally barbaric and disgusting to her. (And to me.) As for why we find it barbaric, I think it's mainly rooted in our subjective ideas of the sentience level of dolphins, which I suspect to be as close to humans as gorillas. And gomichild, I'm pretty sure that all the villagers involved in this are already old and fat. They're going to need Japanese doctors talking about babies dying of mercury poisoning I think.
  • I loved this segment of his opening monologue: Video: Zach Drops By The Set; Ruins NBC Shows.
  • A couple of nights ago, a co-worker was giving me a ride home, and we were discussing the state of the Minneapolis roads. She said "Oh yeah, there's a pothole in the middle of 94 that someone stood a beer can up in. Not one of the regular size ones, neither. One of the big ones, not twelve ounce, one of the bigger size cans." "Wait... a tall boy... standing up... in a pothole... in the middle of I94." "Yep, it didn't poke up over the top or nothin'." "In the middle of I94." "I know. A pothole that deep in the HIGHWAY." Here I started counting on my fingers. "OK, so what you're telling me is that someone stopped their vehicle in the middle of a busy interstate highway, and that individual happened to have on their person a tall empty can that once contained and alcoholic beverage. That person proceeded to exit their vehicle in the middle of this busy interstate highway in order to place said container, now emptied of its consciousness-altering, driving and judgment impairing contents, carefully, upright, in this large, deep pothole. In the middle. Of. Interstate. Highway. 94. Right?" "Oh, yeah. It wasn't on the shoulder, neither. It was right smack dab out in the middle." "The pothole is not the only thing that concerns me about that scenario. I don't even know if tops the list. There are many layers of wrong." Then we laughed. I did not ask her how she happened to know so much about the dimensions of the can, or what kind of can it was, or how she happened to pick up on that much detail while moving at highway speed.
  • Clearly, the most important issue in the murder of millions of female infants is how it will affect men's ability to find a wife. The opening paragraphs of that article are horrible, but the rest of the article talks about sex-selective abortion, not infanticide. Undoubtedly, gender prejudice is leading to violence and neglect against girls, but I think it's important not to confuse abortion and infanticide when discussing this.
  • Why Russia wanted to keep the Berlin Wall up.
  • Don't forget that Letterman was also a regular on the short-lived variety show hosted by the Starland Vocal Band; sadly, I've yet to find any clips on YouTube of this show.
  • I mean why is eating dolphin "barbaric" but eating bluefin tuna delicious? Is it because dolphins are mammals are tuna are fish? Does it matter? Eating dolphins seems barbaric because they are so clever. They are warm blooded, nurse their young, develop life-long relationships, use reasoning and tools, and can understand human speech. Tuna are fish. It does matter. -
  • The idea that if an idea doesn't work in every instance it must be abandoned in every instance is not the most appealing I've heard today.
  • After three years of comp sci degree students - men who, in my view, wanted nothing more out of their educations than to push buttons and be rewarded handsomely for the fun - telling me that my Linguistics degree would qualify me for nothing more than five stars in McDonald's, I thought that strip could fuck right off too. Geeking should be celebrated whatever flavour it comes in - and with geeking comes, inevitably, wankery and waffle. ... You did notice that the strip wasn't making fun of linguistics, right?
  • Clearly, the most important issue in the murder of millions of female infants is how it will affect men's ability to find a wife. As someone who has very few moral issues with abortion, I would say.. yeah, that might be the most important issue (completely independent of gender - would be the same problem if mostly male fetuses were being aborted). For most people, having a romantic partner is an essential part of happiness. If 20% of the population can't do so, there are going to be a lot of problems.
  • Marmaduke Explained My favorite Marmaduke Explained is the one where (after over a year of wry commentary) Mathlete completely loses it.
  • Overall, what was the perception among his constituents, before the incident that led to his outing? Was he doing a good job? Ashburn was a bit controversial a year ago this time because of a budget vote. Long story short: the minority Republicans hold up the budget in California every year because it requires a 2/3 vote to pass. Last cycle's brinksmanship was particularly bad, Ashburn was one of the Republicans who switched sides and broke the logjam. Not a huge thing, more of a political calculus, but for the most rabid Republicans it was anathema. As conservative as Ashburn's district is, I think most Californians don't much care about who their state senators have sex with. Unless it becomes public knowledge, or unless it's used as part of a whisper campaign along with some lightning rod social issues to polarize a debate or election.
  • As an English major, Solon, I think that comic is hilarious.
  • The Saddest Sound In The World
  • Not to turn this into another websites/advertising thing, but holy crap I didn't realize he had ads on that thing. Making a buck by running down someone's work while liberally using excerpts and entire strips to do so? That deserves a sudden and hard punch in the back of the head, or at least a fierce pinching. Fucking parasite. Wait, hold on, I thought I was the parasite for running an adblocker. Does this make me some sort of double secret parasite?
  • it's quite simple folks if cats were 10 times bigger than us, what would THEY do?
  • That link takes a spectacularly long time to fail.
  • This looked shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels. and from seeing quite a few 'shops in my time
  • Cat casserole? Oh well. <>
  • A bit back, reading about Graham's Number and I worked my way through the Knuth's up-arrow notation to try and get some sort of sense of how big it was... you can think about the towers of exponents and reiterating and such like but it's still mind-blowing trying to relate it to anything. 'Infinity' is much easier.
  • I was horrified to learn that Mary Tyler Moore had at one time attempted a variety show of some kind.
  • I think it would be pretty amazing if he did an about-face on gay rights, ericb. I'm not holding my breath either. Overall, what was the perception among his constituents, before the incident that led to his outing? Was he doing a good job? Bringing in jobs, fixing potholes, stuff like that? I wonder if his constituents would vote for him, knowing he is gay, if he has been serving them effectively. I suspect not, but one can hope.
  • (i.e. nothing with a reasonable level of intelligence). I choose the latter option, so I try not to eat too many primates, cetaceans or parrots. I've kind of fallen into this kind of vegetarianism by accident and with no forces pushing me out of it will likely go deeper. My wife prefers turkey bacon to pig bacon. And we switched from ground beef to ground turkey because we were nervous about mad cow (and stayed because we prefer it). So basically all we eat is turkey. And turkeys are dumb.
  • "I think it's sad more than hypocritical," Lopez said. "We're not in Roy's head. We don't know what is he thinking. We hope he comes to terms with whatever is making him make a choice to be a gay man." Sexual orientation is NOT a choice. Can these "traditional values" people work any harder at making me hate them?
  • I don't bother to visit XKCD on my own initiative anymore since invariably I'll come across a link to EVERY SINGLE ONE either here or on Facebook. Seriously. I sometimes regret knowing so many CS/engineering folks, because my Facebook news feed often feels like the XKCD version of one of those cartoon-a-day calendars. And it's always accompanied by some comment like "This is my life" or "XKCD understands me" or whatever. I wouldn't advertise that some four-panel UNIX joke expresses the depths of my soul, but that's just me. I like the comic just fine, as some mild amusement that I forget about in a minute. I was a CS major in a past life, I get the jokes most of the time, but too much of it is about patting yourself on the back for knowing nerd arcana. It would be just as obnoxious if Randall were a different kind of nerd and the jokes were all references to Foucault or something.
  • A few years ago I was at a sing at a folk festival. Late, late at night in a barn, twenty people in folding chairs and one older man singing "Way Down". It was somewhere between chilling and sublime. You can listen to it by clicking the "music" link from the Anais Mitchell link in the OP. It's a good recording. But it doesn't have a patch in one old guy singing it slow and sad in a barn in the middle of the night.
  • Shredder Orpheus
  • it has
  • Before RTFA'ing, I thought this would have something to do with the Goon Squad. I was glad to be wrong. Stuff like this is why I love the internets.
  • just another excuse for NBC to cross-market its crappy shows. To be fair, 30 Rock is not a crappy show. Maybe it's not as good as it used to be, but it's not crappy.
  • The only way this blog makes any sense whatsoever is if it's secretly written by Randall. No one could actually be this big a dick.
  • Thanks to the internet, inside jokes are being outed at an unprecedented rate. Trololo, am I right? Pfft.
  • The Bakersfield Republican, who has consistently voted against gay-rights measures, said his votes were a reflection of how the majority of voters in his conservative district would have wanted him to vote. That sentiment always bothers me. It's a huge cop out that lets everyone avoid responsibility for voting like assholes. You don't run for office so you can vote the way you think your constituents want you to; you vote for what you think is right and if they disagree, they don't elect you again (and yeah, I know that's not how the world actually works, but wouldn't it be nice?).
  • why don't we eat animals that humans often keep as pets? we only eat animals that aren't cute! bunnies are cute too, save the bunnies! meat is meat, save the cows or eat the cats! eat the dogs too! etc. Some of you are not familiar with the concept of taboo, are you? Or are you just being purposefully obtuse? Human beings have kept domesticated cats in symbiotic relationships for nearly 10,000 years. You need further explanation why it's considered taboo to eat them?
  • Can one ghostride their donk whip while strunk?
  • It also isn't true that fighting corruption is a simple precursors to fighting poverty, it works both ways. In many subsaharan African countries most government officials are unable to live on their salaries. When you can't feed your child on your legal salary, of course you will be corrupt.
  • Some of these men may be drawn to radical movements. Chartism? Female equality? Universal suffrage? Democracy? Woohoo!
  • Yes, claiming that they're not "real" Japanese is an excellent way of avoiding group responsibility for what they're doing. I found in my travels through the region that the concept of animal cruelty doesn't really exist in much of East Asia. I haven't been to Japan, but considering the blank incomprehension I get when I discuss whaling (for example) or eating octopus or live sushi with my Japanese friends, I suspect things might not be that different. People just genuinely don't understand why anyone would bother being kind to animals that aren't pets. They're just animals.
  • Your favourite comic sucks. How dare you say anything about Marmaduke. Marmaduke most certainly does not suck.
  • Ashburn's state senate district is the 18th, which includes Barstow, Needles, Ridgecrest, Bakersfield, Bishop, Visalia, and a bunch of big military bases -- in other words, if you had to pick a district with more right-wing, Bible-thumping, God-fearing, flag-waving, abortion/gay-marriage-hating localities, it would be hard to find one. Ashburn's politics and his vehement anti-gay voting record piss me off to no end. Nevertheless, he could not have run for dogcatcher in that district and won if he had been out or voiced support for any bill or policy that was remotely pro-LGBT. How people like him can sleep at night I don't know, but that's another subject.
  • This is as worthless as writing your masters thesis on Ziggy cartoons. Move on, nothing to see here.
  • My toilet suffered a metaphor only this morning, it was a real fucking mess.
  • (Mr. Ashburn was married and had four kids) There's a joke here along the lines of: Not the Gay Marriage I meant! But I just can't finesse it. Anyone?
  • My son loves talking about huge numbers (his favorite number is a quadrillion); he's even made up one of his own - a quadrillion quadrillions is a wondred! Anyway he also loves the idea that, if someone asks what number is bigger than x you can just say x + 1. Smart boy, don't know where he gets his math aptitude from though...
  • What IS this? seriously. this is pure awesome.
  • No, Vice Magazine already exists.
  • Calling this a gendercide is like following the logic of calling US abortions a "black genocide." However, I do agree that this is thoroughly screwed up. I'm pro-choice, but I really would prefer that cultures and policy make abortion an action of last resort, not something that people would see as an acceptable way of getting a boy/girl. Ultimately, this just makes the one child policy look really bad, more than it makes legal abortion look bad.
  • Although I get the reasons to punch a dolphin in the nose, here are my problems with eating dolphin meat. It's Poison Dolphin meat is laced with mercury. Taiji residents have mercury levels about 10 times the national average. From the article: "We discovered that people weren't eating whale meat every day. At most, they were eating it a few times a month. The problem is that although the frequency of eating the meat was low, the levels of mercury in the meat were surprisingly high." Dishonest Industry The dolphin hunters try to hide their industry from prying eyes, foreign and domestic. They sell their product as "whale" meat, never dolphin. Most Japanese people love dolphins. Even people who eat mislabeled "whale" meat would be horrified if they knew how much of it was actually dolphin. Hint: It's about one third. Tradition != Good Foot binding, female genital mutilation, human sacrifice, slavery, concubinage and eunuchs were all traditions at some time in some part of the world. Just because your dad did it doesn't make it right. If you're in the mood for defending traditions, there are much better traditions to defend. Dolphins are Altruistic A dolphin has been observed guiding a female Pygmy Sperm Whale and her calf out of shallow water where they were stranded several times. Dolphins have a history of helping drowning sailors survive the cold mistress. They've been known to bring injured people to the surface and aggressively attack sharks to protect humans. Any animal that will challenge an apex predator to save my skin is good people in my book, not food.
  • Like many have pointed out before, most people in Japan have no idea that this is going on. Who knows? Probably. However, you can buy dolphin meat at any grocery store in Japan, so there must be a fair amount of denial happening. the gaps in the Japanese mainstream media seemed bigger, and the voice of alternative media felt smaller. SPA!, Friday, Shukan Post, Takarajima, the late, great Da Capo and other tabloids and periodicals all cover controversial issues in great, lurid detail, and I can't see why they would shy away from whaling. None of those sites have much content available online, but, while it may not be Democracy Now! or Howard Zinn, ZakZak is a great source for Japanese "alternative" tabloid news.
  • I'm still tickled that "Why can't I ... own a Canadian" is the top hit.
  • I have the proud honor of having watched Dave as a weatherman for one of the Indianapolis TV stations. Even then, the tongue was planted firmly in-cheek.
  • So basically all we eat is turkey. And turkeys are dumb. Farm-raised, yes; they've been bred to be so. Wild turkeys, def. not so much.
  • I'd never eat a cat because every one that I've met appears to be infected with mad cat disease. That and because a full half of their diet is made up of their own hair and stinky cat butts.
  • He also did a morning show for four months in 1980.
  • This is a common critique of, well, criticism. And it's a critique that I absolutely reject. Does Roger Ebert need to make a movie before he can criticize other movies? Well, he has (The notorious Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but that's neither here not there. The difference is that Ebert reviews the gamut of films out there, with an optimistic eye. The posters at xkcdsucks are obsessing over a single webcomic with an eye towards hating it. Except that it's not about xkcd. It's the fact that so many other people love xkcd that pisses them off. That's weird and creepy. I'm a fan of xkcd, and I'll admit that I laugh at it a lot less than I used to, but I attribute that not to any drop-off in quality so much as to simple diminishing returns from any singular humor-source.
  • 'The Cove' official website [autoplay video].
  • she also talked a lot of shit about Los Angeles Perhaps, but you never hate anywhere else quite like you hate home.
  • And what's the deal with Garfield? For starters, cats are carnivores- lacking the d-glucosyl-transferase 4 protein- so much ricotta in one sitting would lead to basically barfing and skin rash all the time. And for #2 WE NEVER SEE JON BRUSH GARFIELD. He's so cranky all the time, doubtless because his hair so clotted. And the Garfield fanboys? A bunch of long-haired Linux freaks, hopping from one Fancy Feast Flavored circle jerk to the next.
  • Alas, my favorite comic does indeed suck. Gaaah the shame.
  • A sublime prank on an SNL audience: Zach Galifianakis shaves his beard (SLHP).
  • Dolphins also kill baby dolphins for fun. Apparently, so do people. This and more in our nightly Arguments for Cannibalism.
  • It's been called the most beautiful theorem in all of mathematics.

    Euler's number, e, is an irrational number originally discovered by Jacob Bernoulli, who was attempting to solve a problem involving compounded interest. π was discovered by the ancient Greeks trying to find the area of a circle. The imaginary unit i is the square root of -1, and was used to solve polynomial equations which had solutions that didn't exist on the real number line. 0 is the symbol for 'nothing', and was first used by Hindu mathematicians as a place holder in their decimal notation system. And 1 is, of course, the first number. 5 important constants, seemingly completely unrelated, which have a surprising relationship: eπi+1=0 The proof is beautiful and if you take your time, surprisingly easy to understand 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
  • This reads like the bitter ravings of ex-cult members.
  • Why oh why would you go to a gay nightclub if you were an in-the-closet famous person - nay – an ANTI-GAY-RIGHTS, in-the-closet, famous person? I'll see your bid and raise you: Why oh why when someone asks about your behavior of consistently attacking gay rights would you respond with a thesaurusized version of "I was only following orders" to explain your behavior?
  • First, I was going to make an ALF joke. Then, I got to thinking. Not that this is anything original, but I think that this huge line of separation between food and pet is a direct result of consumers no longer being directly involved in the slaughter of their foods. I have some friends who keep chickens, for instance. They've named each and every one of those pullets, and they gush about which chicken did X cute thing the other day. Once the animals stop laying eggs, though, these same people go out into the back yard, guillotine the little fuckers, and sup on the freshest roast chicken you've ever tasted. For them, meat is something they raise, care for, and feed as part of the process of feeding themselves-- there's a clear line running from the egg that they hatch* to the chicken dinner that they prepare. For my friends, there's no problem with a companion also being an edible thing because they are the agents in shuffling their critters from one phase to the next. I think that the process provides an insight that most people do not get if their poultry-based experiences are limited to the petting zoo and the freezer section with nothing in-between. So now some Italian chef talks about his experiences with cat, and Metafilter gets angry, maybe because the folks here don't understand the connection between the Mr. Smiggles sitting on their lap and the pot roast that they had the other night. I don't know. I don't keep chickens, and I haven't had a pet since I was a boy. Any farmer-mefites care to chime in?
  • Well he's sure as hell right about this one. What the fuck was he going for there?
  • In a truly ironic twist, Randall had his own critique of a comic which had also jumped the shark. Is it really ironic? I think most people are put off by this person's obsession with xkcd, not the fact that he's criticizing it. If Randall developed a website that was dedicated to publishing long, rambling critiques of every published Garfield panel, then I think you'd have a point.
  • One very cool thing mentioned in the article is the FAA's "Highways in the Sky" program; 3D highways based on GPS tracks, complete with an FAA video! It's cool technology that makes flying both safer, less costly, and better for the environment. They suggest that it could make it possible to fly your jetpack to work within a decade or so, if there was sufficient demand for it...
  • I dunno, I think they're charming. I remember when I was a teenager this would have looked incredibly futuristic to me, and it's gone straight from "futuristic" to "dated" without stopping anywhere in between. (FWIW, too, the jpgs that are posted are really lousy — lots of detail lost. The original pdfs are more visually interesting, at least, although stylistically they're still pretty mid-90s-Wired-magazine.)
  • What the cabbage?!
  • Overall, what was the perception among his constituents, before the incident that led to his outing? He won his last two elections -- the most recent by something like 60%+, and he had no opponent in the election prior to that.
  • Seriously, check out Cosell's totally chauvinist commentary on that kayak race. "how does she hold her own as a girl against Bill Shatner?" Its like a stream of terrible comments. Saying Tim Reid does not like the water? Why's that Cosell?
  • Farm people have a very utilitarian, unsentimental attitude towards animals. Which is related to what I said. I just want to mention that just because farmers do an important job and are rightly respected and just because this is their traditional attitude towards animals, doesn't make it the right one. (Or the wrong one.) It would be easy (and I'm not saying you are doing this) to fall into this fallacy: "Well, if you lived on a FARM then you'd be TOTALLY USED TO chopping up cats for lunch, so it must be morally OK." The populism of the first half would mask the non-sequitor.
  • I look forward to reading the author's clearly much better webcomic. This is a common critique of, well, criticism. And it's a critique that I absolutely reject. Does Roger Ebert need to make a movie before he can criticize other movies? Do I have to write a book before I can start a blog post with, "I didn't like Twilight because it portrays dangerous and abusive relationships as the ultimate form of romance?"
  • The thing is, though, they're not really random strings of digits, they are defined by their (infinite) polynomials. And their polynomials are really similar. this page does a great job of explaining it. With ex the polynomial is = 1 + x + x2/2! + x3/3! ... (basically xn/n!) for each natural number n. (e would then just be e1) and then the equation for cos(x) = 1 - x2/2! + x4/4! ... and sin(x) is x - x3/3! + x5/5! (so cosine is +/- xy/y! for even numbers and sin is the same but with odd numbers) You can see right away that the formulas a very similar they both involve x raised to a power then divided by the factorial of that power. Except in the trigonometric functions, it alternates between adding and subtracting. What makes it all fit together is is that in is either going to be 1, -1, i or -i. So when you take ei*x all those components get multiplied by one of those four complex numbers. All the 'odd' powers of ix end up as imaginary numbers. Which are exactly the components of sin(x). And all the 'even' powers of ix are real numbers, which also make up the components of cosine. So right there, the component pieces are in the right place for eix = cos(x) + i*sin(x). The last bit is the fact that the components of cosine are either multiplied by 1 or -1, which is exactly what we need. And the components of sin(x) are multiplied by either i or -i, which is again, exactly what we need. Basically you can think of i as causing a kind of loop as it goes through it's powers, which filters out the powers of x that are present in ex into the right spot for the cos(x) and sign(x) (I don't know if that was covered in the video or not)
  • It's the 80's, Where's Our Rocket Packs? Been listening to that song for 25 years now, still waiting.
  • xkcd is funnier when it skewers its own than when it relies upon the superiority of its own (for whichever value of its own you want to say is in play in a given strip) for its humor. I stopped reading it in part because I realized it had become almost completely other-deprecating and almost never self-deprecating. For a while I read xkcd explained and then I realized I just didn't care at all so I stopped. Now I just roll my eyes when I see it every day in my Facebook feeds. Also, cosign the lack of love for the author's creepy issues with women. The "girls want to be chatted up on the train" strip was significantly more alienating to me than any of the snide comments about humanities.
  • I kind of like seeing right-wing politicians get outed. Not to shame the politician, but as a public service. It would be nice to think of guys like Roy Ashburn sleeping alone for the rest of their lives....
  • Ha! I wondered how he had done that. I don't really know anything about him, but I thought he made a great guest.
  • oh oh can I say it.....Christ, what a asshole. /likes xkcd
  • I don't know how much of it is self-loathing, the desire to see others obey standards that they don't apply to themselves, a slippery slope descended after hiding your true feelings/nature from a community that does not approve, or something else; I really cannot conceive why this hypocrisy exists. I don't have any comment on abortion, but it seems to me that closetedness is a deep-rooted characteristic (especially for people of certain generations) that may or may not always even be fully present to consciousness. There are also people who get off on the sense of danger that flouting authority and order offers, even if they are (or maybe especially if they are) instrumental in holding that order together. That adrenaline fix may not have anything to do with the substance of the act itself. It may be contradictory, it may be hypocritical, but it's also human nature. Here is an excerpt from Ashburn's coming-out interview: HOST: Now you've been taking criticism the last couple of days from the gay groups that say that it's hypocrisy that you voted that way. I personally take an insult to that. That to me is like saying every black person should vote for Obama, right? Every woman should be pro-abortion. I don't care for the stereotype myself, but I have to ask you, Roy, now that you have told us that you are, in fact, gay, is it going to change the way you vote? ASHBURN: Again I believe firmly that my responsibility is to my constituents, and so on each measure that may come before me, I will take a careful look at it and apply that standard: "How would my constituents vote on this?" "How would they have me vote on this?" Obviously each of us has differences of opinion on almost every issue but ... when I say that I understand my constituents on these questions I don't think anyone misunderstands what I mean. Related: a San Francisco Weekly blurb titled "How Gay Is Bakersfield," including a note that the Bakersfield Californian (the local newspaper) was complicit in concealing Ashburn's orientation over the years.
  • I just posted this in the previous Whaling thread, somewhat related to this thread What conservationists really want on the whaling front:
    So has the strategy of political and protest action succeeded? Is the fact that Japan now subsidies its whaling industry as a matter of principle a success? Is the fact that Norway continues to take hundreds of whales commercially a success? Is the fact that Canada told the anti-whaling movement to get stuffed and does it anyway a success? Is the fact that even anti-whaling countries still whale a success? After nearly thirty years, it's become increasingly obvious that the strategy of being a hardline, anti-whaling country fails the most basic litmus test. It's not working to end whaling- it is a bad strategy that is failing. ... There's a very good reason why most countries gave up whaling. The economics don't really work. Converting an economic issue to a matter of principle, doesn't seem to help whales out a lot. ... We are at a point where thousands of species are at much greater risk than minke whales. Yet the choice is to take those resources we have and put them into "stopping whaling". Trying to save a small set of species not actually threatened by whaling, and giving up on so many more species that are in more urgent need, isn't the optimal approach. And the fact that this strategy to stop whaling has not succeeded in 30 years feels like a colossal waste of money.
  • Honkys.
  • I submit that all comic strips are based on inside jokes. Is Family Circus funny? I wouldn't know! I've never been to a circus. Also, I've never been part of a family.
  • I miss 70s SF Disco.
  • They're about four kids short of a Brady. Brady kids with golden codpieces. Ew.
  • This seemed kind of obvious to me. (yay! did I get something that everyone else in the world didn't get two minutes before I did? that would be awesome)
  • If tis dick can't find this one funny, Actually, I found that one pretty forced. It was almost UserFriendlyesque. I think xkcd would be well served by dropping the self-imposed schedule. Most of the comics lately seem like filler while he works on the periodic Big Clever One (which are also of decreasing quality, but that's a separate topic).
  • The Bakersfield Republican, who has consistently voted against gay-rights measures, said his votes were a reflection of how the majority of voters in his conservative district would have wanted him to vote. Fair enough. America is supposed to be a representative democracy. I would like to think that there are also politicians who are privately "anti-gay" but who nevertheless are willing to support the civil rights of gays in spite of their own personal views.
  • That was awesome. The Ice King had a drum set in his cave - it was just random background and had nothing to do with the story or anything, it's just that somebody thought, let's put a drum set here. ALGEBRAIC!
  • John Lennon called it.
  • "I think it's sad more than hypocritical," Lopez said. "We're not in Roy's head. We don't know what is he thinking. We hope he comes to terms with whatever is making him make a choice to be a politician." ftfy
  • Oscar Winners Try to Keep Whale Off Sushi Plates-Yet with video cameras and tiny microphones, the team behind Sunday's Oscar-winning documentary film "The Cove" orchestrated a Hollywood-meets-Greenpeace-style covert operation to ferret out what the authorities say is illegal whale meat at one of [Santa Monica]'s most highly regarded sushi destinations.
  • Scorsese's "After Hours" features a clogged, overflowing toilet.
  • So now some Italian chef talks about his experiences with cat, and Metafilter gets angry, maybe because the folks here don't understand the connection between the Mr. Smiggles sitting on their lap and the pot roast that they had the other night. Metafilter doesn't actually seem that angry about it.
  • I'm unable to get to the Whitlock column, which I'm sure will provide the missing piece here. Why the hell would anybody, in charge of the Negro Leagues Museum, want to distance themselves from Buck O'Neil?
  • Shower of Aid Brings Flood of Progress - "An experiment that is bombarding a Kenyan town of 65,000 with health care, education, and job training seems to be achieving its goal of rapidly lifting people out of poverty, but can the results be magnified?"

    [previously, viz. African poverty is falling (mr discussion - Is African poverty falling faster than we think?) cf. More good news about Africa - The African Growth Miracle] and in other africa-related news...BONUS -Development in Dangerous Places -Paul Collier -AIDWATCH -jsachs blogs [1,2] -Sachs vs. Easterly vs. Collier [1,2,3] -A new model for investing in "social"
  • Agree that's 'shopped. Max altitude: about three feet because a failure of that two stroke drops you out of the sky like a sack of potatoes.
  • +1
  • So anyway I leave and get on a plane and go to bed and then wake up, have my coffee, and log into metafilter and read this delightful story. Readers, the photo on the wall was none other than the official portrait of Mr. Roy Ashburn. I married him.
  • Stefania Rotolo performs live! (single-link incomprehensible YouTube video circa 1979)
  • Fantastic! Thank you.
  • Glad you're all digging it. I heard snippets of it a few weeks back and knew I'd be on-board, knew I'd enjoy hearing it. Know that I've spent the morning with it, I want to stage it. In an odd way, the effort reminds me of Jesus Christ Superstar: a Resurrection, a collaboration released by Amy Ray's Daemon Records in 1994. (More here.)
  • I wonder if this guy would have felt as strongly if he had never read the forums? It's probably never, ever a good idea to read a webcomic's forums. They're all tripping over themselves to praise the author the most effusively. It's always disturbing, but moreso when the comic in question is awful.
  • Oh, later books in the sense of the end of the set of books that comprise the treatise.
  • Carnivore: eat pussy Vegetarian: eat bush Simple, really.
  • There is no cocaine retro. Cocaine is a perpetual stalled now. Evil shit. There's definitely a cocaine retro, there's just no cocaine future, although it gives the fantasy that your right on the precipice of a grand, immutable, redeeming discovery... Or so I'm told...
  • this is a nonprofit worth support. it's so hard. The museum collections and content are undoubtedly worth support - but the nonprofit itself isn't just the stuff, it's the people, the board and ED especially. This board is pretty messed up and their new director is beginning his reign under a cloud. It doesn't bode too well. Perhaps there can be some coalition developed to get things back on track within the organization.
  • Another way to think about it that's much simpler, but with the downside that you need to understand vector spaces and I just thought it up, so it could be totally wrong: -- Did you know that 0! = 1? (that means x0/0! = 1). Because of that, if you think of an infinite vector space where the bases are xn/n! for each n, then (i think) ex then would be the vector
    1,1,1,1,1,1,1....
    cos(x) would be the vector
    1,0,-1,0,1,0,-1...
    and sin(x) is the vector
    0,1,0,-1,0,1,0,-1...
    so if you multiply the sin(x) vector by the scalar i you get
    0,i,0,-i,0,i,0,-i...
    and so of course the linear combination of cos(x) + i*sin(x) =
    1,i,1,-i,1,i,1,-i...
    (they're orthogonal) And that's the same thing as the vector
    i0, i1, i2, i3, i4
    so the function ex, sin(x) and cos(x) are all a part of the same 'space', if you think about it that way. They look different: ex goes off to infinity and sin and cos just wiggle around between 1 and -1. But that's because ex is all addition, while cos(x) and sin(x) have addition and subtraction.
  • empatterson: Words DFW circled in his dictionary One of those words is "cete" which apparently means "a number of badgers together". I am extraordinarily happy to know this.
  • It's a little unfair to say that, because he was, effectively, forced to reveal his sexuality to the general public, he therefore identifies with the imaginary bloc of people that share his sexuality, and that he now has an obligation to undo the perceived damage that he caused to that bloc. I struggle with the single-issue focus of American media. The guy probably voted conscientiously and consistently and I can see a principled position in which someone might not allow their personality or preferences dictate their vote in the House, particularly where it conflicted with his constituency. And coming out in an interview? Fuck that. The drink driving is a completely different story, and I condemn it.
  • There was a good recent BBC Horizon on big numbers/infinity, the website of which links to a couple of related radio programs, which you can download as podcasts
  • The "girls want to be chatted up on the train" strip was significantly more alienating to me than any of the snide comments about humanities. XKCD sometimes gets it right on gender issues in academia. Romance, not so much. Count me as another girl who wishes strangers wouldn't feel entitled to start mini-conversations about netbooks. Not shy, just antisocial! Don't talk to me.
  • That's one down, I figure you've got about a hundred fifty left to go. posted by chaff Someone else will have to do it, I haven't even read 150 XKCDs.
  • Crap. Apparently search works better if you can spell. Duly noted.
  • How about saying "breast cancer" for the sake of being immaturely sexual?
  • Mathematical! Been following the production blog since I first saw it. I'm pretty excited.
  • Moon River is the hilarious sound effect that goes with prostate (or kidney) awareness! NSFW, I think.
  • As an English major, I just hate it for this one. It shouldn't annoy me because he looks like a babbling idiot to anyone who has ever taken a literature course ever, but going from the whole "I love geeks! I love life! Whee!" to shitting on other geeky people is just being an such an asshole. God, what a douche. So, maybe he was a bit off-target in calling out English majors per se, but I took that last panel as a commentary on the Sokal affair.
  • Hypocrisy seems to run deep in some groups. Like the pro-life proponents who seek out abortions for their own children, and the homosexual men who fight tooth and nail against rights for homosexuals. I don't know how much of it is self-loathing, the desire to see others obey standards that they don't apply to themselves, a slippery slope descended after hiding your true feelings/nature from a community that does not approve, or something else; I really cannot conceive why this hypocrisy exists. Nevertheless, it does exist, and it transcends anything having to do with abortion, homosexuality, or any other single thing. Be it an ability to sustain a state of cognitive dissonance for an extended period of time (if they're sincere) or a calculated effort to manipulate and discourage and destroy for their own gain at the expense of others (if they're not being sincere), in my opinion a person who rages "no! no! no!" against something as a rule yet considers themselves exempt from that rule is not a person we should trust to lead us, to guide us, or even to be trusted.
  • Based solely on cenoxo's Inuit post above: Cake or Death Liberal Assplode Version: Outlaw consumption/harvest/cultivation of dolphin meat worldwide cuz they are sentient creatures and the minority, traditional, Inuit culture has to get fat, riddled with heart disease, and go broke importing more 'humane' food but the Japanese dolphin 'hunt' that only happens in one or two villages is ended OR Allow hunt/consumption/harvest of sentient mammal dolphin meat so that the Inuit stay traditional, skinny, and can subsist but suck it up and grit teeth at traditional Japanese dolphin cultural hunt.
  • In the hospital where my wife had her ultrasound in Beijing (and we found out the sex of our daughter) there was a big socialist-realist type official poster that said in Chinese, "Telling the Sex of a Child Is a Crime!" I guess it only applied to the locals. On a lighter note, my brother has three sons. I thank the lord every day I have daughters. Ask me how I feel about this again when they are teenagers.
  • But clothed. So SortaNSFW.
  • But the alternative, in which any jerk with an axe to grind feels entitled to write a blog shitting on something, just gets a little old after a while. Umm... I'm failing to see the problem with this. If you want to please everybody all of the time, you're doing it wrong. From the Eggars interview you linked to:
    The critical impulse, demonstrated by the tone of many of your own questions, is to suspect, doubt, tear at, and to take something apart to see how it works. Which of course is completely the wrong thing to do to art... What is it about art that can make us so angry?
    Disagree. Absolutely disagree. And I suspect many MANY artists would disagree as well. Eggars is making the same mistake that so many amateur critics and laypersons make - confusing thoughtful, honest assesment with negativity. Roger Ebert, for example, is rarely angry at a movie he doesn't like. He explained this pretty clearly during his "feud" with Rob Schneider. It's natural that Eggars, as a creator of a work, personalizes that work and feels that criticisms of the work are criticisms of him, but that's a really dangerous road to go down.
    Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books.
    Respectfully, Eggars can fuck off.
  • I am deeply sorry for my actions and offer no excuse for my poor judgment. I accept complete responsibility for my conduct and am prepared to accept the consequences for what I did. Is that for your voting record, Senator? 'Cause it sure would be cool if it was.
  • quin: Two words accurately respond to this: Hiller failed. Kirth Gerson: 100 TBO is standard FAA reqs for maintenance on light aircraft. markkraft: Victor airways are awesome. They're basically a high-traffic VFR conduit, with navigational intersections that TRACON knows. My problem is that, like with everything aviation related, this monstrosity would be loud, cold and expensive to maintain. For this price, I'd rather just stick with the RV-7A.
  • I dunno. I'm torn. I've always been pro-choice, but not pro-picky. Then again, maybe that type of person shouldn't be a parent in the first place. But they'll continue until they "get it right..." 20 GO TO 10
  • As an English major, I just hate it for this one. It shouldn't annoy me because he looks like a babbling idiot to anyone who has ever taken a literature course ever, but going from the whole "I love geeks! I love life! Whee!" to shitting on other geeky people is just being an such an asshole. God, what a douche.
  • Just a warning: the opening paragraph of the Economist story (in the main link) could be really upsetting for some (as it was for me).
  • It would be nice to think of guys like Roy Ashburn sleeping alone for the rest of their lives.... If only it were so. In reality, my trusty crystal ball says there will be a long line of people that Ashburn has spent his political life opposing that will make excuses for him and want to be a part of his life. And meanwhile, I will continue to fail miserably at understanding humanity.
  • How do I get blood out of a ... (darn, no satanic tunics)
  • Well OK. Webcomics fans and xkcd fans in particular seem kind of intense to me, but I'll allow that this may be an unfair generalization based on limited experience, and I agree with those who have pointed out that the xkcdsucks blog is so far out of proportion to be unsettling in its own right.
  • I still miss The Parking Lot is Full.
  • This is technically a ducted fan pack.
  • Zach's beard is one of my favorite things. I was sorry to see it go, but 1) it's good to see he's still handsome under all that fabulous fur, and 2) I know it will be grown back starting, well, immediately.
  • Slaughtering dolphins is bad and all but as others have said above, I'm not sure it's more horrific then what goes on in the meat industry generally. Why are dolphins special? We can say it's because they're more intelligent, but I think it's because they're more easily anthropomorphized, or more like us. Does that really make them so superior to other animals?
  • Is it ever a good idea to watch YouTube at work?
  • Huh? I always thought that gays couldn't get drunk They can, but only on Chardonnay.
  • Every time a Cory Doctorow XKCD comic pops up in Google Reader, my testicles recede into my body and the Fight-or-Flight impulse kicks in, except Flight is hanging out at the bar taking book and cheering Fight on. This has nothing to do with my dislike for Doctorow the individual. Either Randall has found the absolute worst outlet for hero-worship or he has struck a Faustian bargain in order to get featured on BoingBoing semi-regularly. I do not know which is worse. I fear for his soul.
  • This is why I don't trust republicans. They can't even be honest with themselves. How selfish is this asshole. If you are a self hater then be a self hater but don't screw over members of your own community in the process.
  • le morte de bea arthur said: "...I'll take PBF over xkcd every time." thank you so much for introducing me to that strip - I find most webcomics unfunny, but PBF renewed my faith in the creativity and originality of webcomics.
  • I wonder what hilarious sound effect goes with prostate cancer awareness? Swanee whistle.
  • One of my favorite bloggers had a hilarious entry on this recently.
  • I can't believe I researched this. I've never even seen the movies. Maybe just 10-15 minutes here and there. It was Home Alone 2, and it looks like it was a PRETEND old 1940s movie. The pretend old movie also featured in the original Home Alone on three separate occasions if I'm reading imdb.com correctly.
  • I think the Italian term for cat-eater is probably mangiagatti everyplace i looked it was "magnagati" or "vicentini magnagati"
  • * quietly moves to obscure mockups for billwattersonsux.com *
  • huh?
  • There was a scene in the novel (ersatz autobiography) Papillon where there were two guys dining and the host's cook had cooked a cat and said it was a rabbit. They were eating and the guest said "this cat is great". The host said "no, this is rabbit." Guest said "no; look at the way this rib curves here. Definitely a cat. Delicious." I have never knowingly eaten cat meat and I have no idea if that is remotely plausible. Any cat eaters want to chime in? Bunny rabbit is very tasty. As is lamb. And veal.
  • I just added one to the largest number ever. Put me in the Guinness Book!
  • Is this another one of those people devoting a large part of their time to criticising someone else's completely harmless project? Pffff.
  • xkcd often sucks. Obsessing over it either way sucks a whole lot more.
  • I visited the Negro Leagues Museum a couple months ago. I recommend the museum to anyone who gets the chance to see it. It captures a somewhat forgotten angle to the story of race in the 20th century, and O'Neil had a better perspective on this than anyone. I don't know much about the issues above (besides that O'Neil's HoF denial is an obvious travesty). It does looks like Bob Kendrick, the guy O'Neil favored to take over for him, stayed with the museum after losing the Exec Director vote in 2008 until a month ago. Seems like he was happy to work for Baker, or at least his loyalty to the museum ran deeper than personalities. Either way, I'm not sure how Posnanski's protest helps. It's certainly disappointing that they've de-emphasized Buck O'Neil's birthday celebration as a fundraiser, but on the other hand, O'Neil man himself would have been the main attraction for that event. That's not necessarily distancing the organization from O'Neil, just trying to figure out what course to take now that he's died.
  • omg omg omg I looked ALL OVER for these. I LOVE THE INTERNET SO MUCH RIGHT NOW.
  • ...you are someone who knowingly and repeatedly engages in unwarranted and nasty behaviour, ie. that you're a jerk. This is not something to be proud of. But it improves your chances of getting a gig at FoxSnooz. Still, this blog follows in the proud tradition of "Your Webcomic Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad" and "PVP Makes Me Sad", both of which have closed up for good. Good. A while back, the Mefite formerly known as wendell attempted to do a blog about webcomics with a mostly-positive spin. That one has folded too, but before it did, one webcomic parodied the comic-haters, using a fake domain name he hadn't registered. This was the result. Still, sometimes things work out in different ways, like maybe a webcomic about a crappy blogger? (warning: self-link to something I was going to submit to Projects next week, but this post will probably be deleted when cortex wakes up)
  • i wish someone would spend this much effort dissecting and pontificating on Cathy or Marmaduke. Or Bazooka Joe. The Comics Curmudgeon
  • Your favourite comic sucks. "The problem is basically this: Randall does not write jokes, as such. He writes inside jokes."
  • I was thrilled when I first discovered there was a number named after me.
  • Memo to SNL: Less Charles Barkley-types, more Zach Galifianakis-types.
  • the twist at the end really got to me. They sure know how to make these videos!
  • Jesus fucking Christ. I like XKCD just fine. Not every day, but if it gives me a chuckle once a week it's worth what I pay for it, which is nothing. This reminds me of people who are still angry at George Lucas over the prequels. Sure, they sucked, but just move the fuck on and find something you do like. Unless that's just not possible, in which case you should just sit on your porch and yell at people all day. Life is way too short to spend so much time hating stuff.
  • Orpheus: the Flash game (previously).
  • Um, I ate at this place on Saturday. I don't think I had whale. I don't think. I accidentally ate whale once...you'd know pretty quick it wasn't fish if you ate it. It's dark with a flavor and consistency not unlike liver.
  • Wee bit NSFW in both word and image. I see what you did there.
  • There is no cocaine retro. Cocaine is a perpetual stalled now. Evil shit.
  • Additionally, isn't Vuze now bloated-as-hell software? I double utorrent for Windows, prefer Transmission on OSX, and rtorrent in Linux.
  • This guy is a politician? I thought he was a gay funereal director, in LA.
  • Okay, I'm not really, like, offended by this, but yea: Immaturely sexualizing women for the sake of breast cancer awareness is not okay. Immaturely sexualizing women is only okay within a relationship or an art installation.
  • Haters gonna hate. Arguments about repetitiveness and formulaic comics are very weak. It's like trying to argue that super-hero comics suck because the bad guy always loses. I mean that last Batman movie sure did suck. Batman lived! I mean, talk about repetitive and predictable, amirite? So XKCD no longer does it for you. Move on. Invest your time in something that you enjoy. This is the path XKCD is taking. You don't have to follow it, but you also don't control it and arguing that your hating on XKCD is your attempt to help improve it is ridiculous. That you continue to focus on XKCD tells me that maybe you secretly enjoy it, but are sensitive to being labeled a "fanboi". Or you're simply pissed off (read: jealous) that some random guy is making money drawing stick figures. Or maybe you sent off an e-mail or posted on a forum and got hated down for something you said about XKCD and this is your payback. But I really think your motivation is that you were a big, big fan of XKCD and then a comic or two came through that hit really close to home. It's stuck a big chip on your shoulder that you can get rid of and now you're doomed to spend the rest of your life chasing XKCD so you can hate on it. So be it. Haters gonna hate.
  • That promo is longer than the one on the air, and that's a good thing. The one TV got me SUPER PUMPED but was edited really quickly and wasn't all that funny. This one is funnier and longer! I am EXTRA PUMPED.
  • This reminds me of stuff that I made using Logo on an IBM PCjr in Middle School. It was a lot more fun to have it create Spirograph-like art by making the turtle draw over and over and over.
  • The Ransom Center archives are really incredible. That they have acquired these papers is not a bad thing at all. They will be well cared for.
  • All of that, and not a single a-ooo-gah!?
  • "Charlie Rose" by Samuel Beckett was recently posted in a separate thread, but it's hardly the first example of filmmaking based on reusing footage out of context. Among the more recent examples of the genre are Jandrew Edits (containing footage from Star Trek: the Next Generation) and the Japanese Okusan Domon Desu (and the fourth episode. It may help to have seen the original G Gundam too). It's also been the basis for a couple of feature-length, real-theater-type movies, including Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (Wiki links), though in those cases, to be fair, they had new footage filmed to tie the bits together. Naturally, the technique tends to lend itself to comedy.
  • Yeah, I must have grabbed it from the Wrong Place.
  • My gaydar isn't even particularly sensitive, but could anyone look at that dude and not immediately think "Oh, that man GAY."? Of course, I get that from pretty much all republicans, so what do I know..
  • 3 10/71 and 3 1/7 are not numbers.
  • ZsigE, I know what you mean. Still, it's not exactly nasty behaviour in itself: No-one is harmed. Criticism is just criticism. And calling criticism nasty – even though the critic calls it so – it doesn't make it that way.
  • If all of the bigots turn out to be closeted queers, the percentage of the population that is homosexual (in the US, self-identified as 4% in 2004 and 2008) is gonna turn out to be WAY higher! A good thing, in the long run.
  • Lentrohamsanin: Wallace Stott was the musical director of the Goon Show You're absolutely right. I misremembered Ellington's role. Wally Stott, incidentally, transitioned to female and became Angela Morley and had a successful career as a TV composer in the US.
  • Um, Moon River - for real this time. Must get more sleep...
  • Now?! I've owned potholes all over the city for years! All you gotta do is pee on them, and that is some marked territory. Sure, you have to make certain no one else tries to usurp your claim, but that's what maintaining a kingdom is all about.
  • SCORE!! And I'm glad to see others share the love. I work at a horse farm, and when one of the animals has some skin infection or other, it makes me sad that if I said, "Looks like a touch of Lurgi," nobody, but nobody, would know what I was talking about. (But I always think it.) >>thinks<< Looks like a touch of Lurgi. I have about sixty episodes on my mp3 player permanently, and I listen to them again and again. Eccles: Do you have any idea of who you're talking too? Seagoon: No. Eccles: Have you ever heard of the Duke of Windsor? Seagoon: Yes. Eccles: Well I'm...Eccles!
  • MATHEMATICAL!
  • modern mathematics may be somewhat misled or at least held back by its form. Or, you know, maybe pre-modern mathematics was misled and held back by its form? Sure, you can do mathematics of a kind in which pi is not a number -- or for that matter in which 3 1/7 is not a number. In which infinities and probabilities are by definition not quantities, in which -1 has no square root.... but there are really good reasons that nowadays we operate in a different way, and as a result we understand things our ancestors were conceptually unequipped to grasp.
  • Delillo's archives are also there, which is interesting bc Wallace considered him a bit of a hero and some people think that some of Infinite Jest was loosely based on End Zone, by Delillo.
  • But then it will taste funky!
  • Man, I LOVED battle of the network stars when I was a kid. With all the reality tv now, why don't they bring that back?
  • Ok, I have a question. What about the guys he used to meet at the clubs? What about his booty calls, and what about the people he socialized with in the homosexual community? Why didn't any of them lean over to him and say, politely: "I'm not going to touch that until you stop acting like one when you're at work."
  • It's driven by a 2.0 L V4 2 stroke engine rated at 200 hp (150 kw) Jet Pack? Since when does a jet have a two stroke engine?
  • I've always been pro-choice, but not pro-picky. I think that's a dangerous road to go down. What's "picky" exactly? Isn't one of the main tenets of abortion rights that the pregnant female (and their confidant(s)) can make a decision without societal judgment granted such decision is within a certain pre-defined realm of humanity?
  • I've never heard one make that type of noise... I think this whole thing is phony...
  • Nice.
  • Alderaan wasn't the only planet fucked up by Star Wars.
  • The judge-umpire analogy has a long historical pedigree.

    Note: Some links are apparently just supposed to be mouseovers. If there's not a URL listed in the mouseover popup, clicking takes you to a 404 page.
  • "Don't get too righteous unless you don't eat slaughterhouse-killed meat."
  • I tole heem we already got one!
  • It would be just as obnoxious if Randall were a different kind of nerd and the jokes were all references to Foucault or something. But you see, the deconstruction would be inextricable.
  • There are several strands to this problem, not all equal: 1. Aborting a female fetus--actually this is the least problematic to me, in that it's better than infanticide, or, than a family raising a daughter who will be, in her society, horribly abused. If I were a woman in that society and knew exactly what kind of life my potential daughter (vs. a potential son) would face, I'd probably think I was doing her a favor by not letting her be born into that. A grim and hopeless choice, but yeah, I can see it. 2. Infanticide; objectively horrible and hard to even think about, but unsurprising. 3. Gender imbalance; the most worrisome part, because this has already resulted in quite a few kidnappings/rapes/trafficking of women from other countries, and of course is only going to cause more disruption in the culture in the long run. You would think that it would make women more valuable, and it does, but only as wombs, not as people. You can still beat and abuse the owner of the womb, or sell her, or kill her if her womb doesn't work. Scarcity of women /= higher status of women, at least, not yet. It's funny actually, because I just came from another blog discussion about Australian panic over (the right kinds of) women not reproducing enough to maintain (the right kinds of) population levels there. Perceiving women's reproduction as a society's common property (rather than her own) manifests itself in lots of strange ways.
  • In a truly ironic twist, Randall had his own critique of a comic which had also jumped the shark.
  • Does Richard Branson have one? Because that guy ruins everything fun for me....
  • Because we don't eat things we make emotional attachments to? I'd be quite happy to eat a cat, a dog, or a hamster if I thought it would be tasty and had been reared and killed humanely.But then, I have no emotional attachment to cats, either individually or collectively. If you're going to draw a line, it should probably be an absolute one (i.e. no animals at all) or one that's based on some kind of ethical stance (i.e. nothing with a reasonable level of intelligence). I choose the latter option, so I try not to eat too many primates, cetaceans or parrots. I'm slightly hypocritical in regard to pigs, which appear to be quite clever creatures, but if they don't want to be eaten, why do they insist on tasting so good???
  • I HAVE A STORY. So It was my last day in New Orleans and I'm at, of course, a bar. It's nice and empty and I'm enjoying my rum hoping to get out before the rain starts. There are two other people in the bar with me. They note a headshot of middle-aged man in a suit hanging near the bar. It doesn't fit in with the bar's cut-rate pirate motif, so they ask "hey, who's the suit?" Barmaid says "I don't know, it just appeared here last night." "Looks like a politician." "I know, right?" So anyway I leave and get on a plane and go to bed and then wake up, have my coffee, and log into metafilter and read this delightful story. Readers, the photo on the wall was none other than the official portrait of Mr. Roy Ashburn.
  • Complaining about hulu not working in your country is the new, "Oh, I dont own a TV." Yes, because it's just so pretentious not to live in the U.S.
  • Clearly, the most important issue in the murder of millions of female infants is how it will affect men's ability to find a wife. I had no idea we were only allowed to talk about the first-order effects of bad things. Thanks for clarifying.
  • We lived in London in the '50s, and my father was a working studio musician there. He tells how they sometimes used to go into a BBC studio to do some radio broadcast or other, and find out that the previous users had been the Goons, doing a program taping. (You don't want to read what's coming next) The Goons left crap all over the place - including their own marked-up and annotated copies of the typed scripts for the show - just tossed aside. Dad and his buddies would pick these off the floor, flip through them for a laugh or two, and then ... toss them aside again. Sigh ...
  • Grew up in a Goons-loving house (well, a Goons-obsessed dad and merely tolerant mum). Hence vast overuse of "Sflashoo!", "He's fallen in the water!" and "What time is it, Eccles?"
  • Wake me when they put Invader Zim back on the air. Because I am unimpressed by this
  • i wish someone would spend this much effort dissecting and pontificating on Cathy or Marmaduke. Or Bazooka Joe. Back in college my New Criticism comrades used to use Bazooka Joe comics as examples of narrative upon which it would be absurd to do a close reading, to prove that everyone should read the Western Canon only. It always sounded like a good idea to me though. We'll call the first book 'Stuck in History'. Now who wants tenure?
  • Not many places you can do that, aside from a gay bar or club. Uh, internet? Maybe Michael Steele should start an initiative to distribute laptops to closeted Republicans.
  • Zach Galifianakis on SNL. Jesus, it's like watching a blowtorch fall into a tar pit. You hope it'll all catch on fire, but it just fizzles out and dies.
  • vacapinta: "Nobody here is angry about it. There are just some people slyly accusing others of being hypocrites because they consume one life-form and not another, as if they don't do the same thing themselves." There was no slyness in my comment. I was responding to the situation described in the article: a man lost his job over sharing a recipe. I do happen to think that eating one kind of non human animal and being OK with it and then firing someone for sharing a recipe for another is hypocritical. Personally I am not a vegetarian, but I was from infancy until the age of 30. I made the considered decision to start eating meat. I am fine with gray areas, and yeah I will eat some meat and not others, but I don't go so far as to be scandalized by other people's food choices. Even when it comes to cannibalism it isn't the eating part so much as the slaughter part the bothers me, and I would probably try it given an ethically unquestionable opportunity.
  • I think we can agree that most most baseball/law analogies don't work.
  • If his constituents are that homophobic Dude, they don't hate the gays--some of their best friends are gay. They just don't think they deserve the things that they themselves deserve.
  • Man, I wish I had someone this passionate about dissecting my comic.
  • Max altitude: about three feet because a failure of that two stroke drops you out of the sky like a sack of potatoes.
    If humanity consisted solely of those who fretted about being dropped out of this or that like a sack of something or other, we wouldn't be the monster badass motherfucker species we are.
  • I think everyone should lay off this poor guy. I can sympathize with his criticism because my favorite pastime is to go to chick-flicks and stand up in the middle of the theater and explain to the audience that they really shouldn't be laughing at the jokes because they are obvious and not all that funny.
  • The Alban Grimm exhibit, `Text of the Apocalypse as Graphics,' displayed at the recent TUG'99 meeting in Vancouver, shows what happens when a typographer-cum-graphic artist is introduced to computer programs and finds that inputting code can lead to outputting incredible visual results.
  • English lit majors Technocrats seem to be awful sensitive ignorant people. At least based on their reaction to this one comic strip. I am a programmer, by trade, so this kind of judgment-from-complete-ignorance that is tragically common in my peers is especially annoying to me. You know how you feel when some newspaper article absolutely butchers the technical details of a really interesting new scientific result? Yeah, that's what you're doing. Stop it.
  • Thank god it's not a live action show.
  • Now, now, Octobersurprize, that is what makes us better than the bigots. We give people the benefit of the doubt.
  • Any good leads on where to get these in mp3? I've never heard, but always wanted to!
  • Which I mean to say is awesome!
  • I WOULD HAVE SEX WITH ALL THIS CLOSETED REPUBLICANS
  • I like how the Hulu clip was sponsored by Trojan Condoms...because if I was ever allowed to have my way with Zach Galifianakis(I hope I said that right) I would need a truck load of those babies. /Went to The Comedians of Comedy Tour in Gainesville. I was in line to have my ID checked, felt a hand on my lower back and heard a soft "excuse me" turned around and there was Zach. I think i managed to blurt out "sorry" or something. Also, that was one of the best opening monologues in a long time
  • The Bakersfield Republican, who has consistently voted against gay-rights measures On the one hand it's hugely inconsistent, on the other, not as clear cut. I mean, if you're in denial, it makes sense to deny, right?
  • I guess I've been indoctrinated into the belief of "constructive criticism." Man you really need to read more Juggalo threads.
  • TWO THINGS: To claim that this is tradition... is utter bullshit. Like many have pointed out before, most people in Japan have no idea that this is going on. Why? Beyond the obvious fear that the town and the government have of people finding out and trying to obscure their actions is the fact that THIS IS NOT A CULTURAL TRADITION. Don't you think more people would be aware of it if it had been a treasured part of Japan's history? The whole cultural angle is something that the Taiji fishermen like to claim so as to avoid any fucking scrutiny. SECONDLY, and more importantly, something that is mentioned in the film but that I haven't seen mentioned here is that not only are the dolphins slaughtered tens of thousands at a time but the slaughter is really only incidental to the real reason the fisherman are there: to round up dolphins to sell Sea World and other places all over the world. The film is very careful to explain how individual dolphins can fetch up hundreds of thousands of dollars for resale at marine parks. THAT is the real reason the dolphin drive goes on, the slaughter only happens so that they can make some extra money off of it. This is why dolphin meat has made its way into the Japanese diet (in select parts), because they've murdered all these dolphins and now have nothing to do with them except sell them for meat, which is kind of a problem because dolphin meat isn't a staple of the Japanese diet. SO, what happens to all that dolphin meat that no one really wants (and as someone mentioned earlier, is essentially poison)? Well it gets relabeled, often times as high quality fish meat. Thus people eat what they think is fish but is in fact dolphin meat that will fuck your insides way up with mercury. In conclusion, there is nothing at work here other than profit and pointless slaughter.
  • filthy light thief: My memory is failing me, but there was a good comment on a previous outted politician thread It wasn't an outed-politician thread per se, but maybe this?
  • There's another video of him randomly popping up in "scenes" from other NBC shows like "30 Rock" which is supposed to be high-larious but seems to me just another excuse for NBC to cross-market its crappy shows.
  • This news gives me the howling fantods
  • Hey, I have that t-shirt! I'm sorry - I'm a member of Generation X. The only way I know how to relate to the world is through products and things I see on TV. oh god my username
  • Abstract: Let's replace a stupid analogy with an even stupider one.
  • My memory is failing me, but there was a good comment on a previous outted politician thread, where the poster hypothesized that closeted gay politicians who voted against gay rights did so because they imagined everyone was like them. If all men really wanted other men and didn't get aroused by the lady-folk, then no one would procreate, and the America we know and love would disappear because no one was making babies. You know, I'm all for sympathy. But I'm pretty much out of patience with these types. It's fukin' 2010! Quit living like it's 1965 or even 1985. Old mentalities die hard. Hopefully there'll be some tipping point, but I worry that as long as "fag" can be used as a derogatory term, there will be shame in living your life as you really are.
  • The Onion has a helpful and informative video on this very subject.
  • THEY LIED THERE'S NO POT IN HERE
  • Why UT? Sorta sad they couldn't keep this stuff in his native Illinois or perhaps California where he taught or Massachusetts where he spent time. Texas? There is sort of an explanation here. Essentially, I guess they bought the stuff.
  • The fact is that most people are uncomfortable thinking of animals as food. Some people. You'll have to back up the "most people" assertion with something more than just saying it's a fact. Because we don't eat things we make emotional attachments to? Some people make emotional attachments to animals. Some do not. I totally get that some people love animals and don't want to eat them. Fine. No problem. Don't eat them. Kindly leave those of us who do not agree alone to enjoy our food choices.
  • My dad had a Goon Show LP (The dreaded batting pudding hurler of Bexhill on sea) which was in a plain brown paper sleeve. He never introduced me to them, but I found it and played it at the tender age of 10 (in 1978)... I can still remember howling with incomprehensible laughter at the funny voices and the few jokes I got (this finger is loaded, the running gag of the germans shelling them every time anyone struck a match)... Later that year he bought me the book of the Goon Show scripts. Lifelong fan... Thanks for the post.
  • The youngest's favorite huge number is "one thousand and ninety-nine nine ninety-nine". He's sixteen.
  • Please, it was season 7.
  • I personally wouldn't eat cat, but as an omnivore I can't get all superior about people who do. I think feral cat (or any feral carnivore) would taste pretty nasty though.
  • *waits for khan to get to quarternions and clifford algebras* (oh and you forgot the khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! tag ;)
  • The Ying Tong Song. The Ying Tong Song with Muppets. The Ying Tong Song with ukuleles. (doubleplusawesome)
  • Caturday is cancelled.
  • it's quite simple folks if cats were 10 times bigger than us, what would THEY do? Bat us around for a while until we're bruised and bloodied, and then bring our twitching, barely alive bodies as a gift to their Lovecraftian masters?
  • What's the size of Sacramento relative to Des Moines? What about the soil quality?
  • I think the Italian term for cat-eater is probably mangiagatti
  • Or, as Samuel Johnson put it, "You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables." Hunh, I always used to say "You don't need to be able to build a house to tell when a door's hung crooked." Whomever this Johnson guy is, he better back off of my lines.
  • Of course a Japanese would suspect some other group of not being Japanese or even human. They're the biggest tribalists in the world, eclipsing even pure laine Quebeckers. Just ask an Ainu, a Korean, or an Indian who, like his or her grandparents, was born there.
  • showbiz_liz: "Yeah, it's not "oh boohoo those poor men without wives." It's "oh shit those men are going to be very frustrated and possibly turn to violence."" Fair enough. It just seems odd to me to put possible future radicalization on the scales with actual current murder. [To be clear: I'm speaking of infanticide again - not selective abortion.] To me it's like saying if we don't stop the Holocaust, we'll suffer a dearth of Yiddish literature.
  • Steve Martin interview from the morning show.
  • In more detail, for the excluded: He walks quickly to a bathroom, stands at the sink, and shaves with clippers as a blond streaked bouffant wig is placed on him, puts on a tacky white dinner jacket, and walks back, pushing past the various hangers-around and is seen standing on the set before the cameras, where we cannot hear the action going on. Later, he dons an imitation beard and joins the crowd milling onstage for the closing. exciting! edgy! I hope he later shaved properly, and moisturized.
  • Hey Grubi! The plum pudding model! amirite?
  • I've heard some less than flattering lawyer analogies.
  • {topic}suckssucks.com What, you mean XKCDsuckssux? Or the more-recently updated XKCDsuckssucks? Or XKCD sucks sux sucks sux? Meh, I like XKCD sucks. Their analysis of why clunky comics are clunky (or why good comics are good) is informative, even when I disagree.
  • Hah, I always wondered where the hell "The lurg" came from. My father would always say that's what we had when we were sick.
  • To those saying his argument about 'representing his constituency' is valid- he ran for an office on a platform. He was elected by his constituency based on that platform. He hid who he was and presented a contrived platform based not on his beliefs, and in fact one that is in direct opposition to his actual beliefs, based soley on his understanding of what he needed to be in order to get elected by that constituency. That is not democracy, that is opportunism. Democracy is supposed to be about working for what you AND your community believe in, not about making a career by being whoever the most powerful constituency in your district wants you to be.
  • holy shit
  • Space Ghost!
  • To be clear, the Japanese dolphin hunt is fucked up. It's a mixture of cultural chauvinism, casual brutality, anachronism, defiance and pork-barrel politics. But it's a small-scale, "artisanal", nominally sustainable fishery that only occurs in just a few communities in Japan. If you really want to get mad at the Japanese, get pissed about how their pelagic longline fleet (also based in one small port, Kessanuma, in another rural community) has helped wipe out bluefin tuna stocks in the Indian Ocean. Besides, westerners, and I can only speak for Canadians and to some extent Americans, are complicit in what happens at Taiji. The various Seaworld Aquariums are doing the exact same thing as Taiji all over the US, yet there is no covert documentary being made about Shamu's living conditions.
  • Pendleton Ward, the show's creator, is on Twitter.
  • This is just weird. I was at this very moment preparing an FPP about famous conjectures for which the first counterexample is some extremely large number, including Polya's conjecture and the Skewes' numbers. Now I needn't bother, I guess. It really must be math geek day or something.
  • Somewhere on the internets right now, there is a Rotolo/Trololo mashup being made.
  • I have some friends who keep chickens, for instance. They've named each and every one of those pullets, and they gush about which chicken did X cute thing the other day. Once the animals stop laying eggs, though, these same people go out into the back yard, guillotine the little fuckers, and sup on the freshest roast chicken you've ever tasted. Most of the people I've known who kept livestock for butchering didn't name them. Seems a bit cold to brain Fuzzles the Bunny when you're ready to make stew. A ranch hand once told me that some of the old time cowboys didn't name their horses because "you don't name something you might have to eat". On a related note, I've got a friend who's eaten puppy stew. Reportedly a little on the greasy side, but still pretty good.
  • Whoops....strike that "yet"
  • Okay, I'm sold.
  • Jet pack not. Jet pack yes — with stewardess. The future ain't what it used to be.
  • Cocaine is a perpetual stalled now.
  • FTFY So ready for this to go away.
  • Also, rabbit is delicious, require very little space, breed like, um, cliches, and we should eat more of them. And rabbit was on the front page of the New York Times Dining section this past week as the latest culinary trend (oh my), so there's that.
  • Because dolphins are highly intelligent in a way, both quantatively and qualitatively, that tuna aren't I should know better than to do this with you, but: when did we quantitatively and qualitatively determine a hierarchy of intelligence of the world's animals and determine dolphins were like orangutans or humans?
  • It's like A boy and his dog meets Fosters home for imaginary friends
  • In related news: Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'.
  • Looks like someone seriously screwed up their kerning.
  • Clearly, the most important issue in the murder of millions of female infants is how it will affect men's ability to find a wife. I know really, do we really want a society like that to breed more?
  • Fly in ointment: ...patented fan jet technology and 100 hours engine TBO (Time Between Overhaul). So I could use it to commute to work and back for three months before it required an overhaul? I'm assuming that would be LOUD. Hope they've got room for a muffler on those things... Expansion chambers, one would hope. ...because a failure of that two stroke drops you out of the sky like a sack of potatoes. If their 2-stroke engine is that unreliable, they haven't yet caught up to 1970s engine design.
  • Is today secretly Math Geek Day or something? Cause it's awesome, but I'm sad nobody told me.
  • I got turned on to Joe Posnanski by this post about Red Klotz and picked up his book The Soul of Baseball. Great stuff. I'd love to visit the museum someday, no matter who's running it. I hope it stays open long enough for me to make it there.
  • Oh hai guise is this the thread where I say I don't like Cat and Girl any longer?
  • I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked... DFW's work is unparalleled. I'm glad these materials are safe but I hope his wife and editor have some control. I don't know what things he might or might not want seen. I'm oddly protective of him for someone I've never met and never can. Still after Broom of the System, Girl With Curious Hair, Oblivion, Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing..., and Infinite Jest I count his words as a primary source for who I am today. I feel protective of him and his work as though I was an older brother. I had never been to AA when I read Infinite Jest. Later after my first few weeks of AA I re-read the long [of course it's long - duh] section where Gately describes Boston AA and how it seeps into him and is infuriating because it seems to work without making any damn sense. My first meetings were a sort of coming home because I recognized my surroundings from what I'd already read. Then when I re-read I was moved to tears by the accuracy and unflinching cold tenderness of that section. His ability to simultaneously evoke the terror, comedy, hopelessness, and optimism of life demonstrates the empathy he had for the universe. That kind of empathy is hard to sustain when the universe can be such a cold empty place.
  • I'm just glad that no pesky protesters get in between me and my dog and civet cat.
  • I just had to share this from his senate website.
  • The Pacific Northwest has it's own whaling justified by tradition.
  • No, drunk drivers are even more dangerous when they're stoned. Ah yes, the strunk driver. Worse yet, Ashburn is a honky, so he'd be both Strunk AND White.
  • What's wrong with having a negative reaction to stuff that's crap and complaining about it? Is that what this is?
    No, the worst part's the fans, because some of them do love it, thankfully the vast sane majority doesn't, but some of them do and I hate them for it.
    Navelgazer seems right to me. I've only read a handful of posts, but it seems that this blog doesn't hate xkcd. It hates everyone who likes xkcd. All of the posts I read were more angry at the fans' response to the comics than the comics themselves. I see a difference between that and "having a negative reaction to stuff that's crap." I guess I've been indoctrinated into the belief of "constructive criticism." This criticism is not constructive. It's an "us vs. them" mentally where not only are the authors right and the xkcd fans wrong, the xkcd fans are inferior. The more I read, the more delusional the blog gets, e.g. "Why won't people admit it?" It reads a little bit like a psychological study of neurosis. So the blog mostly seems like a delusional, overblown, negative reaction to a somewhat frivolous subject (a comic strip). That's the generous interpretation. The less generous impression is of a leech sucking off a creator's popularity to make Google Ad bucks.
  • Also, with the line "I'm not actually an expert in their field", the author nowwhere near comes out as denouncing Literary Criticism to be a illegitimate field of study or populated with sham experts. Because such a statement would be untrue. You don't think so? That seems exactly what it's saying to me. In other subjects, a sham expert will get called out. In literary studies, a sham expert will be well-respected and sell a lot of books. QED...?
  • I believe Trainspotting trumps everything else in this regard. And yes, including Brazil.
  • schulbus der über ein schlagloch fährt
  • (But that's probably a human universal, to attribute to personal virtue, the luck that comes our way.) Sounds related to the fundamental attribution error. Mr. Easterly argues that the Millennium approach would not work on a bigger scale because if expanded, "it immediately runs into the problems we've all been talking about: corruption, bad leadership, ethnic politics." Yes, if you try to scale by conventional means (handing things off to a struggling nation state or growing another large hierarchical organization), you risk exactly those results. The problem I have with this kind of criticism is, for one thing, that it's delivered like it's some kind of blind spot among people who study and work in development when it almost never is. And, for another thing, not everything has to scale that way. This isn't a manufacturing business. Once you figure out the pattern, you don't have to expand organizational operations, you only have to spread the concept so it can be reproduced, one committed regional focused group at a time. You can argue that's still a challenge, particularly if we're talking about bringing the apparatus of western nations to bear on the issue, and I'll agree, but it's hardly an insurmountable problem to delegate partitioned power and focus out to sub-units. We do it all the time in the dance between the Feds and the States.
  • What's the size of Sacramento relative to Des Moines? What about the soil quality? Please don't bring his kind here to Iowa. And by "his kind" I mean hypocritical politicians who, as SLC Mom says, vote against the rights of other human beings and lie in order to get into office so they can keeping getting whatever power/ego-fix they're addicted to. It's no different than Death Panel Palin's (yes, her again), admission that she "used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn't that ironic?" The English major in me says, yes, that counts for irony in the same way Ashburn's voting record v. his sexual orientation is irony. The rest of me is just pissed off. Again.
  • Then she worried that people will think all Japanese eat dolphins for dinner. I don't get this. Is she not worried that people think that all Japanese eat fish for dinner? I mean why is eating dolphin "barbaric" but eating bluefin tuna delicious? Is it because dolphins are mammals are tuna are fish? Does it matter? Do these dolphin belong to an endangered species? Is there a risk that that they are being "overfished" - like the bluefin tuna?
  • I've been exhausted, lately, having recently recovered from pneumonia. I work with and am friends with a lot of conservatives. We have spirited debates. But recently, I've just been so tired, I find myself refuting any argument regarding the current batch of GOPers with a sigh, a handwave, a gruff "closeted homosexuals."
  • Fair point, inigo2.
  • Also, if you're grabbing torrents, I prefer Vuze to Utorrent, as Utorrent served as a conduit for a trojan virus exploit for my wife's laptop. Any torrent client can download something with a virus. Looking around, it looks like 1.6 had an exploit, but obviously that's been fixed. Lots of internet facing software has had exploits, Firefox, acrobat, flash, etc.
  • Enter Bluebottle Kattullus to rapturous applause! Grew up with a Goon-mad dad and we bonded through a shared love of Goon insanity - his record of The Scarlet Capsule (a joke on the Quatermass and the Pit film) was a revelation that adults did silliness too: Bannister: Knick knack, knick knack. (sings) Paddy-whack, give the dog a bone... (rhythm-type humming) Crun: (hums accompaniment to Min's line) Crun and Bannister: (hum for a while, then stop) Crun: What are you doing, Min? The dog's had four bones already, you know. Three of them are mine, I tell you. Now, look, another one. Oh, look! Bannister: Ohhh! Lord Crun? Crun: What? Bannister: This skull is 5 million years old! Crun and Bannister: (sings) Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.
  • What, no Farce of the Pengions? (NSFW) (see also)
  • And a PS to The Devil Tesla: You mean MeFi isn't an art installation?
  • Who would be the washed-up celebrity on the verge of tears for the commercial? How about Drew Carey? I'd be more inclined to sponsor one with his endorsement than for Susan Sarandon or the chick from Rosanne.
  • Ok I'll add a really great Orpheus poem. The recording sounds cool. I'll have to look for it.
  • I'm not a fan of blow, no.
  • What we need to do here is make sure that gay men get outed in the most negative way possible, you know, because we care about gay men.
  • xkcd is never funny anymore. But it is still very funny as far as comics go.
  • Yes, I've been Tivo'ing the Invader Zim like crazy this month. OW, MY SQUEEDLYSPOOCH! is possibly my favorite expression ever.
  • (The Khan Academy series on calculus is pretty good in general, and it would probably help to do them in order before getting to the last links there, but I think its basically understandable even if you don't know exactly what he's doing at all times)
  • Calling this a gendercide is like following the logic of calling US abortions a "black genocide." No, it makes perfect sense. It's not as if the racially disproportionate rate of abortions in the US is a result of black women saying to themselves, "Gosh, I was all set to have a kid but I don't want a black baby." This is a case of fetuses being aborted because they are female.
  • For those not in the US: He shaves off his beard backstage for a skit, then puts on a fake one for what seems like no reason for the goodbye part. No need to thank me.
  • There's also it XKCD Explained, which isn't always that great, but occasionally it really nails the issues that krilli and Solon were talking about above.
  • Of course, any half decent computer scientist knows linguistics is a closer cousin to their own field than the humanities anyway.
  • What about his booty calls, and what about the people he socialized with in the homosexual community? What about them? I doubt the topic of his legislative record (and maybe not even his identity as a legislator) ever came up. Even in West Sacramento. The Pandagon post that nooneyouknow links asks a similar question, but why is it perceived by Pandagon as OMG ATROCITY that a bar pick-up would not have indignantly and defiantly asked Ashburn for his LGBT bona fides before having a drink and/or sex with him? We're talking about bar pick-ups here, folks! In Sacramento!
  • oops, didn't finish that sentence. "...or even to be trusted with the simplest of tasks or responsibilities."
  • Mork calling Orson. Come in, Orson...
  • "We're sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States." No, you're not truly sorry, and fuck you, Hulu.
  • I just want to point out that all of these arguments against eating cats or dogs or whatever are purely a product of privilege. Or, to quote an earlier version of the field manual, "If it's a mammal, you can eat it."
  • I don't think this is incomprehensible at all. After all, we're entertained by it. Were people in 1979 really so different? 1979? nobody was alive then!
  • Damn! And there I was about to launch Justabouttobeouted.com -a discreet service for Republican politicians caught in awkwardly gay predicaments. We'll drive you home from the club, we'll attest that you really do have an unnaturally wide toilet stance. All our operators are certified 100% heterosexual, with not even a hint of teh ghey*. *Those are police mustaches, not the other kind.
  • Personally, I've many times considered buying picturesforsadchildrenrules.com and turn it into a blog where every post reads something like "oh man the latest comic is so great I want to swim in the dark sweat of my own despair now what's behind this door" but I figure people - and John Campbell - would tell me to shut it after about 23 such posts and I can't handle that kind of rejection.
  • This is bullshit. If his constituents are that homophobic no way in hell would they want a gay senator. And yet he didn't resign or decline to run in the first place. Yep. I'm not surprised to hear it was an open secret in Sacramento. It's sort of par for the course in any city where politics rule.
  • Wow, I've never felt motivated to write a {topic}suckssucks.com blog before this.
  • What gets me is that he isn't even going to stick around to help undo the damage he did to the people with whom he now publicly identifies. I'm glad he was able to be honest with himself and everyone around him, but fuck this guy.
  • Toodleydoodley: this column by Posnanski, sort of half-explains it. Insider board politics. Its a classic example of how personalities can kill a nonprofit once the founder is out of the picture.
  • Shut up! Quit your counting! You're a buncha cajoles. I'm trying to read the damn racing form. 24's the highest number, and that's it! Let it go.
  • Why oh why would you go to a gay nightclub if you were an in-the-closet famous person - nay – an ANTI-GAY-RIGHTS, in-the-closet, famous person? Because on the off chance the media decide to actually investigate something you can ask your good ol' boy network to shut it down.
  • Also, if you're grabbing torrents, I prefer Vuze to Utorrent, as Utorrent served as a conduit for a trojan virus exploit for my wife's laptop. uhh, what? utorrent is the most popular torrent client and is owned by bittorrent inc, sounds more like you downloaded from a sketchy site?
  • an ancient Greek mathematician would have laughed at anyone who tried to claim that π was a number at all. I think you might want to check your facts. Somewhere, I have an mp3 of an ancient Greek laughing, but, back then they were not very happy about irrational numbers at all, let alone transcendental ones. The idea that 2 lengths could be incommensurable , that is, that 2 line segments couldn't always have some measuring unit which could be laid end to end a whole number of times in both segments, was very disturbing to all the ancient Greeks I know, with the exception of Pythagoras, who was something of a mystic and thus more open to weirdities.
  • This conversation is going in weird directions.
  • 3 10/71 and 3 1/7 are not numbers. what
  • We should really incentivize coming out for these guys, because it's really what's best for everyone. Right wingers learn that anyone can be born gay, legislators start pushing for laws they actually believe in, and the liberal press gets a good laugh. I propose we set up a pot of cash. Donors can fill the pot with money. The next vehemenantly antigay media/legal figure (ie senator/congressman/preacher) to come out gets the pot of cash. We then refill the pot, and the cycle continues. We could call it Money Shot or some other nonsense.
  • Maybe, but this equation is also pretty beautiful. Nice post. I cant wait to watch the proof videos.
  • The Formula SASS
  • Another example, Woody Allen's first film, What's Up, Tiger Lily?
  • Reminds me of These GI Joe spoof videos that didn't make any sense. Unfortunately the link is dead, but they're probably still floating around the 'net.
  • (Wearing a fanny pack doesn't sound so cool, in retrospect.)
  • This is as worthless as writing your masters thesis on Ziggy cartoons. Ziggy is a masterpiece worthy of study by anyone.
  • Rotato what?
  • No, I don't think so. I'm not creating an elaborate blog based on my hate of XKCD, but I don't think I'm being over the top in commenting that the author seems like an ass. - Solon As someone with an advanced degree in a humanities subject, I thought it was pretty funny. There's an aspect to the humanities where it does seem rich with jargon and essentially for saying things that fall into line with what the last panel was poking fun at. Calling the guy an ass for doing so seems a bit over the top. If he did it regularly, sure, go at 'em, but I don't see the big deal. Hence my sensitivity comment. With regard to the second person with the linguistics degree, I can understand your reaction as it seemed you were daily immersed in those types of jokes (straight forward comments?).
  • I support Sen. Ashburn. Perhaps now he can find some love and support and stop hating himself and taking out his self-hatred on other gays.
  • @the other side Bat us around for a while until we're bruised and bloodied, and then bring our twitching, barely alive bodies as a gift to their Lovecraftian masters? But what if the cats were ten times larger than THEM?
  • Fair enough. America is supposed to be a representative democracy. I would like to think that there are also politicians who are privately "anti-gay" but who nevertheless are willing to support the civil rights of gays in spite of their own personal views. I like to think so, too. LBJ and the civil rights movement in the '60s comes to mind.
  • #695 is the saddest thing since Lie Bot told us what the saddest thing is.
  • I know that the first time I saw this equation it made zero sense to me, but I was proud a few years later when I saw the series definitions of trig functions and, knowing the Taylor series for e , I could see that it was true. (or, what delmoi said)
  • What's wrong with having a negative reaction to stuff that's crap and complaining about it? It's a bit much when people complain about almost everything, but I don't really see what the problem is in complaining about one particular thing that you don't like, in it's own space. If you don't like it, don't read it. Shouldn't the guy with a hateboner for xkcd do the same thing? If he doesn't like one particular webcomic, why does he keep reading it?
  • All in the Family featured TV's first prime-time toilet flushing sound, aptly enough.
  • I think the Italian term for cat-eater is probably mangiagatti posted by I_pity_the_fool 2 minutes ago No, magnagati is right in the Roman dialect.
  • (NLSP) No Link Snark Post
  • jabberjaw, you really need to personally know Not Me to find those comics hilarious.
  • This is as worthless as writing your masters thesis on Ziggy cartoons By which you mean: as worthless as a pretty diamond that everybody wants. Because I want to read that thesis a lot more than I want to read your Lacanian analysis of Middlemarch.
  • Oh lordy, thanks for this! These guys were the beginning of some wonderful stuff- for me, Beyond the Fringe was my introduction to this melange of humor (dudley moore, peter cook, paxton whitehead...) and I still have most of that stuff memorized.... I know, I know. I need a life. And get off my lawn! And- what flabdablet said. You have just deaded my productivity. Damn good thing I retired last year.
  • Actually it does. Remove opinion from criticism and what do you have? A list of facts about the subject, but no conclusion.
  • Let's not forget "Black Orpheus". It's the "film" link in the fpp. This is cool. Thanks!
  • Ducted-fan packs are cool and all, but I'm holding out for personal helicopters! Mine is going to be (predicatively) called "Death from Above"
  • I love my cats. And I am sure they love me. But right now, they would probably eat me out of spite, to thank me for bringing a baby home to live with them. Eating cats though? We don't typically eat companion animals. And by "companion animals" I mean in historical terms "those animals that provided services for us". Dogs hunt. Cats keep rodents out of our food. We don't eat them. Dogs help us catch our own food, and keep predators away from our livestock. Cats feed themselves while preserving our grain. Cows we use for meat and milk. Horses for work, some cultures for milk and meat as well. Same for goats and sheep. None of these animals are any good at hunting, or at helping us protect ourselves or or food. Sure, the aversion to cat or dog meat is cultural, but it's also sensible if you live like humans used to live. These days, the non-edible status of cats and dogs is primarily due to history rather than current usefulness, but dogs still help protect the home and cats still kill and eat rodents. Whether you think this is enough to keep them off your plate is your business I suppose. Just don't eat my cats. I like the little bastards.
  • If snarking is so profitable, why aren't we all millionaires by now? You haven't been getting your checks?
  • I was lucky enough to attend a performance of Hadestown in, I think, Bellows Falls, VT., at the end of a Vermont tour. What a show! Fantastic staging for a small production, and of course, the music carried us away. Anais was something like 24 when she wrote most of this. She is going places, and maybe so is this Opera.
  • auch god my brain. It rare to encounter sentences that awaken parts of my frontal lobe so viscerally. "Since the infinities all have an integer subscript, the "number of infinities" (or number of classes, if you are working within an ordinal system) is ℵ0, and the "limit" of the process of defining higher infinities..." and that's when my brain goes "okay buddy you stop right there that's about enough."
  • You forgot Jenny's number.
  • Please don't bring his kind here to Iowa. I don't know. A choice between a closeted state legislator like Ashburn and a (presumably) non-gay and non-lying but even more powerful, influential, and above-board hater like Steve King, whose activities make Ashburn's look like small potatoes. Talk about a paradox.
  • Oh great, another xkcd fan site.
  • I always said VH1 would regret canceling Late World with Zach.
  • I don't see how this is sexualizing women at all. The breast honking in the video represents self breast exams. Self breast exams in relation to detecting cancer lumps aren't a sexual act. The tone of the video is light hearted (except the end) but that doesn't make it immature.
  • The funny thing about the self-proclaimed vitriol is that this blog would actually be a hell of a lot more interesting to read if it weren't for the personal attacks on Randall and fans alike--I mean, I understand why it's infuriating, I even welcome the need to express that anger, but if you're going to do it so consistently, be entertaining about it or don't bother at all and get to the real meat. Critical discourse on web comics is actually a really neat idea. Past the links already posted, are there any other intelligent discourses on comics I can peruse?
  • This reminds me of people who are still angry at George Lucas over the prequels. It reminds me of those people who think The Simpsons stopped being funny after the "legendary season 5" ... and they must comprehensively catalog all of the non-funniness in extensive detail.
  • well, writing it as 3πi+1=0 also has the fancy benefit of using all the basic operators (addition, multiplication and exponentiation) exactly once. I think it's prettier that way.
  • I normally refrain from this kind of "america is fucked" pessimism, but I'm kind of drunk right now. So, it really upsets me that the big shame this guy has to live down is that he likes the penis, and not that he operated a multi-ton motorized vehicle while intoxicated. In my bible, we welcome the gays and stone the drunk drivers.
  • Space Ghost! (and Bjork!)
  • MeTa, so we can take our stupid derail somewhere else.
  • He had to shave it because it huwted.
  • Something definitely got lost in translation when this guy read about the rising popularity of eating pussy.
  • fourcheese, I agree with you, up to a point. Culture's where the hunting of a specific animal, and it's consumption (or use of parts) is part of a long cherished ceremony/feast abound, and I respect their rights. The difference here? No one really eats dolphin. Very few people eat whale here. It's there, on the menu, occasionally (it's usually written in hiragana, as くじら, just so you know), but it's pretty unpopular. If I remember correctly, there were reports that the vast majority of whale meat harvested "for scientific research purposes" as the line has it, goes unsold. Most of it ends up in cold storage, or ground up into pet food. It's not so much a cultural tradition as a bunch of hardline old people who try to sell their rapidly fading commercial enterprise as a sacred relic of the good old days, even though those days weren't good, and they generally ate whale (and dolphin) because there was nothing else to eat. They've just managed to catch on with the right political folk in Japan, the kind that maintain that if it's old and outmoded, it must be a national treasure.
  • The Law of Large Numbers: You must be this tall to ride in the numerator position. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  • That's kind of a really neat comics font.
  • "It's been called the most beautiful theorem in all of political science."
  • The Bakersfield Republican, who has consistently voted against gay-rights measures, said his votes were a reflection of how the majority of voters in his conservative district would have wanted him to vote. I call bullshit on this. I think he voted anti-gay because, in his mind, if he hadn't, people might start to suspect he was gay. He deliberately voted to make life worse for a substantial number of people in order to protect his imaginary closet. The fact that he'd drive drunk makes perfect sense in this context. There are no words for what he deserves.
  • After being caught drunk driving on his way back from a gay night club, consistently anti-gay California State Senator Roy Ashburn has publicly come out as being gay.
  • RHOMBUS
  • While missing women is a huge problem, it's just bad math to blame abortions for a sizable percentage of the problem. Much of the consternation in development circles is based off a terrible understanding of basic science and women's health. Ultrasounds give a poor prediction of sex even at 20 weeks and for sex-selective abortion to play a big role we'd need there to be more than 50x the number of physicians capable of performing second- and third-trimester abortions than actually exist in China and India. South Korea might be a different story although the data there is heavily compromised as well. A lot of the data gathering has been done by World Bank researchers with little understanding of technology and even worse research methods. The Economist article is only slightly more complex than a Reader's Digest version of the underlying research, which is so laughably thin that it would get laughed at by any peer reviewed journal. But this isn't peer review. This is the World Bank. Joe Stiglitz may have gone easy on them when he described the researchers there as third-rate students from first-rate schools. The missing women problem predates ultrasound technology. You think someone would point that out. The real cause is far more likely to lie in girl-infant morbidity and mortality rates. Amartya Sen, one of the leading proponents of the missing women concept, noticed this decades ago. Importantly, he had data. If sex-selective abortions are having an impact, it must, by the numbers, be a tiny fraction of this. The idea of sex-selective abortions is sexy to a lay audience because it combines moral discomfort while turning politics around. It's just not based in fact. And anyone who works on these issues knows that restricting women's rights is really not the way to make societies value women more.
  • Black with lace. Oh. Did I get the wrong bandwagon?
  • More seriously , most of us have decided that eating animals is OK and make it a regular part of our diet. Why is it suddenly obscene when the animal is a common housepet? Pigs make decent pets too if well cared for. Even chickens can be quite friendly and domestic in their own way.
  • Anyone else notice that they muted all the audio from the show? What was that all about?
  • Got to be one of the most frequently watched videos on youtube EVER.
  • i totally agree with the jonas brothers sucking part but Metallica better then AC/DC.
  • For Some Really Hot Mixes Visit My MySpace /frankiefreshmusic
  • this group are crap
  • hes sucha legend who is he lol
  • Lady gaga sucks very bad this is way better lady equals crap
  • They are unbelievably cute!!!
  • One Republic - Apologize (feat. Timbaland)
  • watch?v=YDbzTmqnSag watch?v=YDbzTmqnSag watch?v=YDbzTmqnSag watch?v=YDbzTmqnSag watch?v=YDbzTmqnSag check this new shit people
  • i LOVE this song<3 i LOVE them:) NICK you are so HOT i want you so bad baby:)
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • Cutee song =] lovee it <3 but she sould dance more =[ It's black when it's white baby!
  • amanda is so beautifull @ 2:10
  • MICK JAGGER BRASILIAN SON IS IN A ROCK BAND IS REALLY COOOLLLLLLLLLLLLL NICEEEEEEEEEE CHECK IT OUT : /watch?v=IMUzryh3-8I
  • Click My Name To See the WienerGhost! (ITS AWESOME!)
  • Hey people look at this milpop . com
  • Hello beautiful youtube! Please come listen to my songs! If you like please Subscribe rate and comment me! xxxxx
  • why cant they take a revolver to their mothers face?
  • PUT SOME CLOTHES ON YOU SLUT!
  • THIS IS NOTGING HEAR THIS O.O OMG /watch?v=l8uS8Iiriws
  • Overrated....1 star.
  • fake and gay
  • Nessun Dorma...
  • hey! check out my new song Looking In The Mirror. you will love it, i promise! thanks again. S A I N T
  • Great musician!
  • what's the name of the song he's playing ??
  • Connie Talbot has given happiness to countless millions of people. She is the brightest star of peace in our world of today.
  • As J Garner says, Connie is now one of the world's premier singers and moves many people because she really sings from her heart.
  • la verdad es una niña plastica y ya cometio la fiebre del exito .......
  • its so wicked , loved it for all the years ive known it and well... its still as good o.O
  • Hello beautiful youtube! Please come listen to my songs! If you like please Subscribe rate and comment me! xxxxx
  • this song makes me think of my baby!!i am 15years old and my baby is 6weeks old
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • hahaha. hilarious
  • follow me and ill follow youu. (: @katieeb123
  • is this the original
  • Hes high!
  • WAAAAAAKE UPPP CHARLIEEE
  • Best site to promote YouTube Channels, Websites, Myspace, forums. It's the best online promotion site! moreviews 。 (net) NOTHING TO LOOSE! CHECK IT OUT!
  • somebody can tell me the name of the end song??????'Pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
  • how about i dont.
  • the song sux but the choros ROCKS!!!
  • lol. dumb slut got boned and dropped
  • alt aber gut xPPPP x3333333
  • 00:39 hahahahhaahhahahahahahahahaahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahah
  • New Song watch?v=oEG5FTMHtT8
  • watch his throat, this is funny but u can see his throat is moving when achmed talks
  • she is six but sings like an adult
  • luv u Miley<3 you are so talented!
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • Fans add me pls:)
  • 62.000.000 views O__________O
  • HAHAHAHAHAHAHA 1:21
  • @ansing16 so am i
  • goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooodddddddd song!!
  • Happy Thanksgiving And Happy Holidays to Everyone and Thanks to everyone for the views of my Channel..
  • Ridiculously wierd but incredibly funny!!!!!!!!!!!!! :):) awesommmeeee!!! x
  • @ngocqui123 not really a kid, but anyways hell yeah! south korean guitarist!
  • are you girls if yes would you like to go out with me
  • THIS IS NOT A SPAM! I am in love with this site, so I thought I would share it with everyone! The site provide youtube services such as views, ratings, and etc. and many more! AMAZING! Site is : bit。 ly/9Z9U8n Check it out! Nothing to loose! Love you guys!
  • NEW Justin Bieber and Michael Darby VIDEO - Hottie NEW Justin Bieber and Michael Darby VIDEO - Hottie NEW Justin Bieber and Michael Darby VIDEO - Hottie NEW Justin Bieber and Michael Darby VIDEO - Hottie NEW Justin Bieber and Michael Darby VIDEO - Hottie NEW Justin Bieber and Michael Darby VIDEO - Hottie NEW Justin Bieber and Michael Darby VIDEO - Hottie NEW Justin Bieber and Michael Darby VIDEO - Hottie
  • Knock Knock whos there?? Me I KILL U !!
  • Wow
  • i just love this song
  • ◄ Hey guys ◄ I am Ivan ◄ Wanna have a little fun ◄Come in my channel and see my funny videos ◄ If you like the videos rate ◄ If you like me subscribe me ◄ Answer the question of the day ◄ Comments ◄ Video responses ◄ Massages ◄ And more come and check out Ivan's Channel
  • im white and i like this
  • poor kid ( the one who got bit from charlie)
  • Mamado de que voleteen (dañen, caguen) la musica electronica. Por que no crean sus propias pistas... Don't fuck electronica music...
  • suck cock
  • 110.004.571 views wtf this video is in south park as baby lo9l
  • I checked the views and I jizz in my pants!
  • Hey I'm an Independant hip hop artist that is better than some rappers in the rap game ..Hip- Hop is not dead, the proof is on my page. Just check me out and Subscribe .. Thankz -2Cold Kingpin
  • Search: The baroque boyz jealousy! You wont be disappointed!
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • jacked a ring tone for my Droid from 1:49 - 1:57 on tub e2tone{.)com
  • He is much better today. It must have been the food at the party. Bad reaction. thanks so much for asking. he is fine now
  • she def got paid to sing this song for all the kids in the world....I fucking hate this bitch
  • xDDDDD
  • supcio piosenka chce być jak hannah monatana jestem nawet do niej podobna ;D ;*:*:*:*:*:*:*:******************** buziacziiiiiiiii słitaśśśśśśśśśśśśśśśśnie
  • S.O.S ! help me i got OJD (obbsesive Jonas disorder) Jonas<3 i Heart U JoBros!
  • We unlock cell phones....email us via YOU TUBE for our AMAZON listing on unlock codes! We have great prices and the best service! Permanent cell phone unlock! Call/Text 949.232.6060
  • New Song watch?v=oEG5FTMHtT8
  • what is this?
  • i'll put on a few more logs before i go and have an early night as i have come across a pile of books i have yet to read night
  • imm 77150880 AND 1 VIEWER!! =OOOOO LOO AT DA VIEWS!!!
  • holy shit, 120 million+ views!
  • @123misamisa why dont you not watch these videos! if its such a big deal than forget about her and let her fans watch them...... u prob luvv her so much that u have a cardboard cutout of her that you talk to every night because she is ur only friend. now put a straw in ur juice box n suck it
  • absolutly most awesome song i ever heard
  • LOL
  • this was not funny at all
  • me to -.-
  • Funny shiot...now go see uncensored vids on my channel
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • She is so annoying..I went for a coffee with her today...and she suddenly broke out into song. What does she think this is...highschool musical?
  • some people are soo funny thinking miley is hot. if u like sluts den u have more of a chance gettin laid by a hoe on da corner shes like every other singer if u realy wanna hear her sing take all the fkin machinery away and damn straight ull hear how pathetic she sounds love kikibaby :)
  • roflcopter. It's so funnt when the little child laugh out laud when the other kid cries.
  • plooong..... plooong....so funny...lol
  • You were just like that when you were a baby so shut the fuck up retarded idiot
  • most overrated song ever
  • WTF? If you wanted hotties uncensored, try my channl
  • THIS IS NOT A SPAM! I am in love with this site, so I thought I would share it with everyone! The site provide youtube services such as views, ratings, and etc. and many more! AMAZING! Site is : bit ( . ) ly/9Z9U8n Check it out! Nothing to loose! Love you guys!
  • Guys do you want to learn guitar? Do you want to learn songs by loads of great bands?well if it's a yes check out joeefc129's new video which teaches you how to play times like these by the foo fighters
  • This is shit!!!!!!
  • @alvinboy24 Same lol
  • O.O" Why did it have so many viewers? Why the hell did I watched it? ¬¬
  • It's terrible, isn't it? It shows that people nowadays have no taste in music
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • Watch invader zim 4 free check out my vidz :D
  • payce!!
  • heyy check out our videooss pleasee :) xxx
  • i'll sit at the fire with a sherry
  • This is the only time I'll ever say this. "VIACOM or WMG come to our rescue and delete this video for no copyright infringement whatsoever" Jeez wtf is this garbage, as a Hispanic guy I must say I'm ashamed of being one sometimes due to the stereotype that we get, this song is one of them. Don't call me "white washed" or that I have lost my heritage, its not me its you people with your garbage fabricated culture of dancing sluts that want to be treated like one then complain about it, sick.
  • "CRAZY DANCE MASTER"!!!
  • 3:51 - 3:55 xD how she dances hahah!
  • "CRAZY DANCE MASTER"!!!
  • Grrrrrrrarrghhh! cute little kid !xD:P
  • this is a okay song :(
  • pow!!
  • win 100 subscribers and hundreds of video views on my channel
  • just recorded a custom ring-tone 0:20 to 1:00 from this track at tub e2tone{.)com
  • this... is... crap...
  • @3dd0011 photoshop skills i think
  • original is better, but this rock version is quite interesting ^^
  • (L)(L)(L) it !
  • that's very funny. i like it!!!!!
  • Goodnight Sadie! Happy unwinding. Sweet dreams!
  • hey! check out my new song Looking In The Mirror. you will love it, i promise! thanks again. S A I N T
  • @M3LPRINC355: Aerosmith - I Don't Want To Miss A Thing
  • i love youuuuuuuu s2
  • only if you check out "CRAZY DANCE MASTER"!!!
  • lol timbaland sings only the eeh eeh's the songs really by one republic :P
  • loves it so much loves
  • ◄ HEY ◄ we're two HOT ◄ 16 year olds ◄ ◄ with FUNNY videos so ◄ ◄ come watch and SUBSCRIBE if ◄ ◄ you like them! ◄ ◄ ◄ ◄ ◄ ◄ if you like Fred, NigaHiga or Smosh then you might like us! ;)
  • pourri!
  • NO IDEA :D
  • Miss the old jonas ...=( Love from PARIS
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • Haha that was bad ass. Go check out my CHEVELLE/BREAKING BENJAMIN covers on my page.
  • @McProZak shut the hell up u racist piece of shit
  • absolutely fantastic!!!!!!!!!
  • win 100 subscribers and hundreds of views on my channel
  • lady gaga bad romance has more views than this thank you very much. 141 million go check yourself vevo video
  • crying
  • Sorry I cannot stay and chat. Weird day and I had less down time so felt rushed all the time. Will need at least an hour just lying in the dark to unwind. Chat tomorrow. Nighty-nite
  • discovery781 belongs in a psychiatric hospital; the guy is badly disturbed.
  • i heard miley cyrus is one of the gals from 2 girls one cup i also heard from a reliable source that she has green waffle
  • shes 17
  • RIP Nick Jonas. You were too young
  • My personal life is so much better since I dumped religion alltogether and saw through the hypocrisy. Religion will destroy the human race. Each religion thinks it is right and every other one is wrong. They all preach that its better after your dead if you obey all the rules, and they all preach hatred and intolerance, then they develop nuclear weaponry. Come on.Religious nutters will simply try and blow everyone that doesn't believe the same as them up. Madness. Religon should be banned.
  • LADIES, take a break from this comedy........ and See ROMANTIC video: A knight and his lady
  • Well, do we see 70 milion views by May?
  • @Tony3498 soo are yew
  • fake not real stupid retarded weird sick nasty blah blah blah how did u guys do that.
  • @9175wignarayzor this is just a racist comedy disgrace and should be banned, its propaganda against islam, this will spark more terriorism, and people who don't belive in god will all go hell
  • Check out my videos on my profile
  • 167,273,368 views when I came
  • i flaged this go me! FUCK JONAS!
  • Hello, this is Magnus! I hope you want to help Miley Cyrus! And then I called holly has started this account here on Youtube! What we do here on Youtube is to stop ALL Miley Posers! And I hope you will join and help us! If you want it, you will help not only us! but also helps you Miley Cyrus! She would no longer be called fake and poser! Hope you want to help! Thank you!
  • SCANDAL
  • i like his voice
  • " Charlie " Didnt Seem To Care
  • its not mexican ¬¬
  • nice
  • só tem marra, HAUAHUA
  • Hey guys check out my latest video and provide me with feedback. Subscription is not required but preferred.
  • Uuuh, I got really scared... Fuck yourself!!
  • omflol
  • Click My Name To See the WienerGhost! (ITS AWESOME!)
  • hahaha you couldnt have worded it better! thumbs up!
  • 40% views from under 12s, 50% views from pervs 10% views coming from people advertising their videos- LIKE ME FOR REAL MUSIC CHECK OUT MY CHANNEL
  • Connie Talbot is the Princess of Song in North America, Europe, and the Far East.
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • lame.........
  • spox :)
  • god dammit oh no i mean allah dammit
  • why does this video has so much views? i cant understand. srry for my english
  • Hi Brenda. Just to let you know, I have sent those scribblings of mine off. You know what I mean.
  • these are the people who hacked youtube, changed freds display pic, and gave themself all these views
  • nice
  • che stronzata!
  • ugly
  • Hello, this is Magnus! I hope you want to help Miley Cyrus! And then I called holly has started this account here on Youtube! What we do here on Youtube is to stop ALL Miley Posers! And I hope you will join and help us! If you want it, you will help not only us! but also helps you Miley Cyrus! She would no longer be called fake and poser! Hope you want to help! Thank you!
  • Hey everyone hows it going? Please may I spare a moment of your time to tell you a little bit about my youtube page. Im a 16 year old singer-songwriter, and have all original music and videos on my page for everyone to view and comment on, so please check it out, and I hope you enjoy. Thanks everyone Take care Steve
  • phew this is gay overload
  • thst songle moment at 0:25 made my lmfao!!!
  • @TheOTSProductions shut up loser do you reely have time for that? get a life please
  • why in his videos he doesn't show himself?? look at the related videos
  • All 3 of them are faggots. Sorry Jofags, they only want to fuck men up the ass not you. Unless you are a male Jofag, you should stop hopping.
  • Sexyyy :DD
  • 77,175,880
  • hello anybody
  • na nanana nanana nananananananana nana na! i love canon rocks!
  • mad tv
  • Y is this video so popular? its not even that funny! Anyone can do this!!
  • Hey go check out my videos!! just click on my lil blue name. and please leave comments!!
  • i thought pitbull was black NOT TRYIG TO RASIST!
  • Miley Don't wave at the guy in 0:29 hes in his late 30's and your 17 unless he likes hoes like u then you should go for him!
  • i know this has noting to do with this vid,but im trying to get my CODMW2 monatges and GH n RB vids out there.i think there good.let me know comment,subscribe and rate :)
  • Hi Sadie, I guess you are going so have a good sleep!
  • look at the pastor
  • I am fine - have to go out again to get some veggies for supper. Dumb-dumb here picked up the BBQ chicken but forgot the veggies, grr. Must have been something in the food for sure.
  • Haha XD
  • lol that was quick....you must think this is a good video. Whats wrong with you?
  • @farris89 LMFO! Saucers!
  • @hannova: for you: ^^ ARTIST: Timbaland featuring One Republic SONG: Apologize everyone else is able to read the video title or the discription
  • Well first i want to said shes singing awesome !! But i guess The parents off The kid leave here sing alot! C'mon isnt it weird à Kid of 6 years old sing so amaizing :x ?
  • this are FAMU tape did she stop watching? freeall porn, net - thanks just watch it
  • Re tar ded!!!
  • Gemans, is there anything they can't do? This is definitely their best work since the holocaust.
  • Your music is shit.
  • New Song watch?v=oEG5FTMHtT8
  • brilliant !!! Watch our Version
  • FIRST!
  • 167m views...? r ukiddin me? lol??!
  • JOE HAIRFLIP 0:25
  • SO FUNY
  • Nothing I've ever seen has made me want to learn how to play the guitar like watching this video. Seventy Million Views makes the following statement: "HATERS, SUCK IT!! IT AIN'T FAKE, AND IT IS VERY SPECIAL. AND IF IT'S SO EASY, AND IF YOU COULD DO IT OR SOME GUY YOU SAY IS 'MORE SPECIAL,' HOW MANY VIEWS THEY GOT??? Give this boy his props - he deserves them.
  • why is the word "timbaland" in the title?
  • No, it is to promote her line of work. The association that she is member of asked for her because of her experience in the field.
  • @Notharius1 Nice comment! :)
  • i know u want me u know i want u
  • Check out my videos on my profile.
  • guys can be such dickheads.
  • there something i dont like about her
  • i jizzd in my pants when i was watching this vid
  • this girl rocks!
  • not picky just a 19 female who wants a big pipe inside me
  • 40% views from under 12s, 50% views from pervs 10% views coming from people advertising their videos- LIKE ME FOR REAL MUSIC CHECK OUT MY CHANNEL
  • im trying to get 500 subs....please help i will sub back!!! im trying to get 500 subs....please help i will sub back!!! im trying to get 500 subs....please help i will sub back!!! im trying to get 500 subs....please help i will sub back!!!
  • io so dio......e pure negretto....sborrami dentroooooo
  • you r awsome
  • 1. say your name 10 times 2. say your mom's name 5 times 3. say your crushes name 3 times 4. paste this to 4 other songs. if you do this, your crush will kiss you on the nearest Friday. but if you read this and do not paste this, then you will have very bad luck. SEND THIS TO 5 SONGS IN 143 MINUTES. WHEN YOU'RE DONE PRESS F6 AND YOUR CRUSH'S NAME WILL APPEAR IN BIG LETTERS ON THE SCREEN. THIS IS SO FREAKY
  • fake.
  • I passed the veggie section not once, twice but three time and did not stop and pick something up. Kathy is home yesterday and today and has a job fair to go to on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the local junior college. The cats found her old McGill U sweatshirt and have now taken it over, How are Saffy, Molly and Pinky? 0340 PM EST
  • wth....hahahaha...little bit creepy
  • gay
  • go to my channel to see an exclusive interview i have with Justin Bieber
  • Watch invader zim 4 free check out my vidz :D
  • ahuhahahah =)))))) omgg im roffl
  • what the fuck
  • Click My Name To See the WienerGhost! (ITS AWESOME!)
  • Gaga is a talented and creative dancer/singer and she realy inspires me and i wont to be just like her!=) - "naked lady gaga DOT comm" NSFW
  • Looks Kinda Fake?
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • I love lady . I think she's the future of pop music and an inspiration to a lot of people including me. ;D - "naked lady gaga DOT comm" a girl like her wow
  • i reckon u shuld jus like set it off right about now
  • i think this i very funny and to those who think this i racist and against islam ..i think its more of poking jokes at terrorists so ppl r no longer scared of them
  • go to facebook, type in "WEESNAW" in the search bar. join the GROUP, not the FANPAGE. thanks! (weesnaw is the noise that a magical seahorse makes, incase you didn't know.)
  • My, my, disco must really hate me. I know it is him using multple sock puppets to down-thumb me. It just goes to show that disco is really good at hating - me, Connie, and anyone who likes her. What a crabbed soul!
  • Hi all!! @Mildred, not enough to eat!! Did you eat all the chocolates already? You have got to remember to look in the walk in fridge!! There is more than enough of everything, even your salmon. I had the trucks come in Monday night after I placed the order on Mon. morning! I even made Scottish Slumpie! ♥
  • Here you are blaming the countries that they say they speak in the name of religion in which your point will be true .. but if u take a look at the basics of every religion Jewish Christianity and islam you will find a similarity that can not be a coincidental due to the time gap. Forget what you see on tv and read about the basic of religions and see why people are believing on them , then look at why are peopl are coverting to islam even though its known for violence and destruction
  • not much here for eating lee
  • everyone rate this comment up! i want to see how high it can get!
  • There is so much glare on the screen i can't see what i'm typing. forgive errrors please. Beautiful sunny day here. Would rather be in dirt outside than dirt inside. oh well!
  • Miley get ur ass off screen! Nobody likes u anymore!! Ur a done deal!! U can't sing and never will be able too! Ur a sluty bitch and need to get off screen so someone with talent can! Ur a fake ass hillbilly whore and ur a daddys little bitch get that through ur thick no brain head
  • the best song 2008
  • Search: The baroque boyz It was Time to Go! You wont be disappointed!
  • who is Miley Cyrus? dunnoher...in europe she's unknown. And why 112,217,573 views?? This song is poor! Is it only because she's beauty?
  • The bass player your thinking of for this song is FUNKY MACHOMAN. he's on you tube i think.
  • aww, she made me cry!
  • Silly silly silly......
  • New Song watch?v=oEG5FTMHtT8
  • @Peddadaft Then we'd like to know what made him not a pro. I can't see any mistake he did in this vid, though I'm NOT a good guitar player.
  • loved the song. big fan of opera. but i have to ask....i thought Britain had universal health care. so i wonder why so many british people have such horrible teeth. not tryin to be a jerk but it seems to be a recurring theme
  • Connie's CD 'Over the Rainbow', as usual, again today enjoys a significantly higher sales rank than much of the stuff for sale by Madonna & Britney Spears on Amazon.c m; Connie is the wunderkind.
  • u wanna see something funny check out naked man encounters 1 u will laugh ur ass off
  • people please help me go to this channel and flag this guys video they are sick and inhumane and torturing animals please flag and help kick him off you tube!! the user name is wtfvideoproductions4
  • Hey everyone hows it going? Please may I spare a moment of your time to tell you a little bit about my youtube page. Im a 16 year old singer-songwriter, and have all original music and videos on my page for everyone to view and comment on, so please check it out, and I hope you enjoy. Thanks everyone Take care Steve
  • @spock711 true, but it's a good song :)
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • i heard she has some tits
  • "-So what do you think of Bush? - Oh, I love Bu.. Oh, you mean the president, I'm sorry!" xDDDDD
  • what is dumberdor on man
  • We unlock cell phones....email us via YOU TUBE for our AMAZON listing on unlock codes! We have great prices and the best service! Permanent cell phone unlock! Call/Text 949.232.6060
  • Sie ist so umwerfend süss! Und Amanda weint wieder einmal ...^^ Ich weiss garnicht, wen ich von beiden niedlicher finde!
  • That was amazing, I wish I could sing like that
  • im trying to get 500 subs....please help i will sub back!!! im trying to get 500 subs....please help i will sub back!!! im trying to get 500 subs....please help i will sub back!!! im trying to get 500 subs....please help i will sub back!!!
  • great song but she shod alot of her body parts that is very bad. i dont curse or spell i am a goody goody . and also this song is great watch more ty people for reading bye coolcrazymegazap
  • Same here, SouthyMandem, i'm 23, not into opera in the slightest yet i have paul potts' album, One Chance, on my ipod. I like nothing more than to listen to his entire album with a glass of wine, lazying around in the garden! Mmmm!
  • okey dokey! Back to work for me too. hub called. must run. Don't know when i'll be home. PM or comment when you want to chat or perhaps you want an early night
  • Hi Sadie! Yes i know and we are pulling for you! How are you in SA today?
  • What is it about?
  • today's music sucks music was good in the 70's 80's went down in 90's i went down 2000s even more this decade better be a comeback only good modern band is muse
  • DANG.... their FINEEE!
  • he has a very beautiful laugh ;;)
  • @localboyrlm i agree with you.. this isnt the least bit funny
  • rolf hahahahhahahh xD
  • hey! check out my new song Looking In The Mirror. you will love it, i promise! thanks again. S A I N T
  • That's sweet! I love how it's "they". They stick together! Molly and Saffy licked each other earlier. Shock. But Pinky still hates Molly. Otherwise I left them asleep in the sunlight. Each in their own window.
  • Check out Breakbeat Uksp - Feel it in the air He's Amazingg!
  • another useless lie from usa "useless" erin
  • i will give anyone that comments and rates the video on my page 20 free subs!!!
  • this guy is freakin awesome
  • @AslamDudeeh so do u if ur watching this. i like her music so put a straw in ur baby juice box n suk it
  • Connie is now one of the world's premier singers and moves many people because she really sings from her heart.
  • Awesome!
  • what a tune
  • amazing, and the most viewd vid on youtube?
  • oh my god so many klicks
  • its michael jackson billie jean
  • HAHAHA!
  • thts fuckin wkd
  • @serpenttao relax i didn't see that before just now.
  • people please help me go to this channel and flag this guys video they are sick and inhumane and torturing animals please flag and help kick him off you tube!! the user name is wtfvideoproductions4
  • A 16 Year Old Rapper Who's Trying To Get Heard, So Check Out His Videos On My Page & Drop Some Feedback, You Will Not Be Dissapointed!!
  • wuts at the top? where it says dont click here
  • iv seen it nearly 100 times and yes im counting jk
  • Hey, what i am about to say is not a scam. There is a site called lockerz that gives out free prizes (macbook, xbox 360, ps3, wii, iphone and more) with little effort (and it's 100% legal) Please, If you are a skeptic or if your into getting things for free private message me so i can invite you (thats your only way into lockerz)
  • i song to neards! She do porn and are crazy,
  • this isent funny. baby is annoying like the rest of you
  • if you want to see a teacher dance search melcoish
  • Is Kathy hiring at the job fair?
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • this is the greatest video since PRISCILLA HIGH FASHION
  • SNL??
  • Fantastic!!!
  • he sings like an angel
  • i luv her and hersongs
  • i just started utube can people add me
  • This song are soooo Geilll!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • Check out my videos on my profile.
  • MICK JAGGER BRASILIAN SON IS IN A ROCK BAND IS REALLY COOOLLLLLLLLLLLLL NICEEEEEEEEEE CHECK IT OUT : /watch?v=IMUzryh3-8I
  • @Yeaearl. I think its in Italian. Nessun Dorma in english means None Shall Sleep. Its an aria from the final act of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. It is sung by Calaf, il principe ignoto (the unknown prince), who falls in love at first sight with the beautiful but cold Princess Turandot. However, any man who wishes to wed Turandot must first answer her three riddles; if he fails, he will be beheaded.
  • so iif u dont fuckiinq care den y dha fuck u watchiinq iit u fuckiinq loser u a diick bro on dha real fuckiinq haters
  • Watch invader zim 4 free check out my vidz :D
  • ghehee
  • @localboyrlm Underrated.... 10 stars :D
  • Like there is God
  • Miley Is Awesome, Deal With It. I Love Miley Always And Forever! Haters Get A Life!
  • this is horrible? how does it have so many views??
  • the song is NESSUN DORMA from Puccini, is a story of a man that could marry a princess only when he will knowns her name, when he will know it he will win (VINCERO'), best performance by Pavarotti
  • @123misamisa shut up you prob have a cardboard cut out of her and shes all over ur wall with posters if you dont care about her than dont listen to her videos.
  • lol
  • te amoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
  • when i think about "how i met your mother".. i JIZZ in my PANTS
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • VASCO
  • people please help me go to this channel and flag this guys video they are sick and inhumane and torturing animals please flag and help kick him off you tube!!
  • when I watched this video I JIZZED IN MY PANTS!!!
  • this is fucking shit... How can anyone like this?!
  • Well done guitar 90. Nicely put together !
  • johnny "the perv" Garner states "she realy sings from the heart" the reality is, she sings like a trained chimp for the amusement of mentally deficient adults like you johnnyboy.... does a 6 year old even know what singing from the hear even means??? i think not
  • @farris89 HAHA!! How did you spot that?!
  • alrs elle j'avoue el me fai kiffée el cartonne
  • cool der nigger is ehhh.... vool geil fickt euch alle ins knie
  • Found one that's actually funny. Just search, Bald Wally
  • needs more tiger= Skjegget singing o::: and i would scream fiu fiu :3
  • hey go check out my videos! first time i ever ride a horse! please leave comments!!
  • start is a little rasist
  • Great Video :D Check out our new youtube channel, new music every week, Please subscribe. Thanks :)
  • "CRAZY DANCE MASTER"!!!
  • Hahajahahahahaaha
  • @almiieham2 es española is spanish
  • nothing is too late .
  • haha it´s hunters bad day song !!!
  • Check out my videos on my profile
  • ""♥Selena Gomez ♥ ♥ 2010 Pictures ♥ ♥clik on 1masudazizi♥ ♥?What do u thin..."
  • fuck you if you don't like these kind of music then don't watch them hater your just a fucking pussy so don't fuck with me cuz i'm 15 and i can hack you and i can even find where you live so don't fucking mes with me mother fucker and fuck your mother to tell her that for me !!!!!!!!
  • we do everything for you girls. we pay, we have to be charming and all for you girls so not realy true. ofcourse we got our bad points. but you got that 2.
  • what the fuck a fifteen year old and a baby keep your pants up
  • Check out my videos on my profile
  • im dont now this, but this song haw 112,217,573 hits
  • This is the best version
  • @theteamshmiley ur dumb
  • FREE STEP /watch?v=sUYQVQC9Wqc /watch?v=sUYQVQC9Wqc
  • Alright!
  • lol, almost 79 million views.
  • What is the matter with you guys?? First justin bieber now nick jonas with these RIP rumours??? Get over it!!
  • I love this song xxx
  • i think this is really cute and funny!! i luv it when babies just have fits of laughter!! ahahaha keep posting!! ^_^
  • Please Dont Google--'Blue waffle'
  • you suck!
  • kjdsh
  • that girl has been anything but safe-and that's why people love her . "naked lady gaga DOT comm" a girl like her wow
  • just click on my lil blue name to see my videos!! leave comments
  • Hammer^^Voll lol^^ Snape Snape Dumbeldore Ron^^
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • Kathy is happy that they are getting along. I have things to do so chat later. Around what time? Send it as a PM or comment here if you don't mind others knowing. 0349 PM EST
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • no fake.if a fake, whos playing that? get taiwanese jerry C and korean funtwo googled. .. BRAVO!
  • Nice video!!! Check out the funny video of a baby pooping his pants and cracking up on my channel :)
  • YO YO PLEASE come check out my video about awkward car rides!! =D
  • @thometalstar well, i must say that girls have it way harder than men. we constantly have to be good looking, we will never be completely equal as men(there will always be sexist people), we bleed internally every month and hormones go crazy, id like to see you with a period, and we have to shove a 8 lb baby out a dilated hole in our vajj while you just got to have sex. we have to shave, put on makeup and such, so i would like to conclude saying we do a lot of things for men. sorry hunn<3
  • Doesnt seem so dificult :)
  • number 77.175880 viewer :D
  • JOE you are seriously the sexiest man alive<3 come in my bed, NICK you can come too<3 you are ALL soooo hot and have sexy bodies:)
  • Ed-not dumb dumb! everyone forgets. How is Kathy and Sam and Dot? How is your dad? Sadie-I'm glad he's behaving! did you really like girlfriend? I'm glad he has someone. i hope she is good to him. You can't put a price tag on emotional space.Very important.
  • ◄ HEY ◄ we're two HOT ◄ 16 year olds ◄ ◄ with FUNNY videos so ◄ ◄ come watch and SUBSCRIBE if ◄ ◄ you like them! ◄ ◄ ◄ ◄ ◄ ◄ if you like Fred, NigaHiga or Smosh then you might like us! ;)
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • first time ive ever botherd to listen to one of their tunes pantts..
  • Not as funny as 'Patrick the Provisional'
  • last time i saw this vid it had like 68 million views.... it's sick
  • 70570078 views o.O. BTW. GREAT JOB MAN!
  • He looks MUCH better now
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • OMFG what is this shit?
  • This is so gay Harry potter is 4 fags
  • :P singing a song all day long at hooogwarts!!
  • im also the 77150880 viewer
  • awsome
  • @Jesus1rocks14 i like your name, and the fact that you have a kid at 15 years old
  • it sounds like he is saying the evolution of dick
  • I'm not ¬¬
  • nice video like it a lot!!!......check my remixes from The Game, Nas and 50 Cent!!!
  • Hi I hope all is well with you. I'm taking a break waiting for hub to call for me to pick him up. Yes, he went to work. We think it was food poisoning. I had a strange rash on my hands and arm and it is gone today. Very odd. how are you?
  • show us more akon
  • @discovery781 discovery781 is u-tubes very own Fritzl LOL
  • Akon my boy, your the man. Best songs, best voice ever. Keep it up
  • haha n1
  • Which one? Miley's?
  • bonas brothers sucks AC/DC rules!!!
  • All of you commenting really piss off :| There amazing! I am a giat fan! and There music isnt crap its just not your type but millions of others! soo go die because they are amazing! and they dont need to stop being a band you ghys need to get a life you basterds
  • hggmhg
  • haahahhh
  • you diciple of the lie you suck your own cock
  • people please help me go to this channel and flag this guys video they are sick and inhumane and torturing animals please flag and help kick him off you tube!! the user name is wtfvideoproductions4
  • EVERYONE GO TO MY PAGE PLEASE
  • hahaha I've seen you nude!!! =)
  • she sucks and so does taylor swift
  • tear
  • ◄ Hey guys ◄ I am Ivan ◄ Wanna have a little fun ◄Come in my channel and see my funny videos ◄ If you like the videos rate ◄ If you like me subscribe me ◄ Answer the question of the day ◄ Comments ◄ Video responses ◄ Massages ◄ And more come and check out Ivan's Channel
  • I permanently unlock most cell phones including iPhone and international cell phones! Call or Text 949.232.6060. I've been in biz for 5 years! I don't need the phone in my hand to unlock, I just need the cell phone model number and imei number! : D
  • ★hey go 2 my channel, subscribe ,comment,and add me.i do the same!! ★ ★ THE Sexiest Pics Of Robert Pattison at my channel!!! ★
  • my alarm goes off and i jizz in my pants xD
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • Y do u people like this ugly hillbilly whore! She can't sing
  • whoa what gay band i hope nick dies from diabetes
  • ripped off ripped off ripped off ripped off ripped offripped offripped offripped off
  • awsome
  • smile:D
  • what the fuck was that
  • las morenas estan tremendas¡¡
  • @Funky1267 timbaland is making all the beats
  • who is the girl at 2:25?
  • i love this song!
  • She's fuckin hot
  • Visit my profile for the Hottest tracks from the top artists. SUBRSCIBE
  • Hey guys. If you like funny videos that are gonna take you away from the world for 2 minutes.Come and check out my channel.I am filling it right now with funny videos.If you like nigahiga smosh ext i think you will like me.
  • @ChazzyNazzy45 LOL!!!!
  • @discovery781 LOL what are you like 781, still bashing a child, life doesn't come lower than you Myra Hindley and Ian Brady would be proud LOL
  • _i love this song _
  • Lockerz is a website where you can redeem cool prizes like ipods, macs, tvs, PSPs, PS3s, Wiis, Xbox 360s, and more ALL FREE! The Lockerz website is invite only, meaning if you want to register you have to be invited. So if you want to join, simply PM your email to my youtube account and i will invite you.
  • luvin this vid!!! snape sooo funny lol xxx
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • omg...she;s soo ugly....zac is too good for her!!!she sing very ugly!!!!!!!!111
  • hhahahaha i love baby's want to see new movies just search yezmo into Google and enjoy thx
  • @theteamshmiley i'm with u
  • its tears. She's crying.
  • @TrionBulldog maybe kuz ppl lykk disz sng idio(:
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • OUT SOME DAM CLOTHES ON YOU SLUT!
  • wher is timbaland
  • Every day I forget to bring Susan here to keep me company. No that's Dumb dumb!!!!!! Get veg for tomorrow as well. save yourself a trip. It will justify oopsy of forgetting veg today!.
  • Hey guys check out my latest video and provide me with feedback. Subscription is not required but preferred.
  • i don't thing so
  • When it comes to youtube, think stupid. Like REALLY think STUPID and you will get tons of veiws.
  • r u spesh
  • So what's this song called then?
  • Nearly 10.30 so will toddle off soon. How is your hubby tonight?
  • lol =)
  • If you do not like it they do to see her videos?
  • WOW many have watched this vidio :P
  • Great song...I tried to sing it......if someone can bear my voice...check that out then in ma channel...lol.. :D
  • I really, really, hate this music!
  • yeah this song is so good!
  • I love this song! GO CHECK OUT NEW SINGING GROUP HAZEL AT YOUTUBE CHANNEL HAZELMUSIK NOW! COMMENT AND SUBSCRIBE WHILE THERE! THANKS ;)
  • pause at 1:51
  • When I watch Star Trek I jizz in my pants
  • purity rings lmao x) this band sucks and this guys looks like 3 slutty virgin bitchs!!
  • HP rules
  • i just took a shit in my hand and threw it at my screen.... im typing through the fudge keyboard
  • good
  • whats the name of this song
  • sorry... what century are you from man? and 'being charming' is not something you have to do... it's something everyone should be. unless, of course, I'm mistaken and u consider bad tempers and cruel tendencies a turn on.
  • i love it
  • genius its so funny
  • It should have the name of all music
  • dont wanna miss a thing-aerosmith
  • hey what type of mexican is this guy?
  • ...im going to kill who ever made this song
  • you hate "CRAZY DANCE MASTER" girlfriend. how could you
  • COPY AND PASTE >>>>>> Regal - Movie Magic
  • no thc
  • @munro93777 THANK you!<333333333
  • no :)
  • wats the name of the song on 1:40
  • good thing obama and clinton didn't react on this :)) i hope they would make a video response better than this lol :))))
  • @sweetsavannahstar If you think she is like that, you shouldn't watch this video. She has plenty of clothes on and if its that much to you that you need to comment on this video and watch it, you must be in LOVE with her.
  • Right!
  • hear me sing this song and crazier and please don't forget to comment and rate
  • süüüß:)
  • Nice video!!! Check out the funny video of a baby pooping his pants and cracking up on my channel :)
  • iii liikee thiisss soonnng!!!<3333
  • That's great! I hope Kathy has fun at the fair!
  • lol. stop at 0:45 well funny
  • there is only 1 Xbox LIVE gen working right now. Search this guys name "ssxxdragonssxx" and find his xbl gen
  • watch my video''' experiment handjob with cumshot''', leave a comm and i sub to your channel. enjoy
  • LOOK AT THE START OF THE VIDEO, God, ignorant fool >_> It says it right there
  • MY EARS ARE BLEEDING! THIS IS CRAP!
  • and?
  • lmao me and my freind can do a dance to this its really wierd tho :P
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • i only like the chorus of this songgg .x
  • HEY EVERYONE! CHECK OUT MY VIDEOS! I do different covers of songs! SUBSCRIBE! if you like! thanks! let me know what you think!
  • I met Vandy Hodkgins once in a small fishing port in south west mexico, she asked for a rod and I smiled and winked and told her she could have mine, suffice to say when she took hold of my broad shaft she was overwhelmed and I was a little aroused, by the end of the night she had caught 28 hallibut and 10 skate, I cooked them in lemon butter with some parsley and we spent the night talking about old times until she fell asleep, I mounted a salmon and had my wicked way over her face god bless
  • damn he is so good : D
  • She may be kinda crazy w/ her clothes but i love her songs just dance, poker face, love game, paprazzi :) - "naked lady gaga DOT comm" founded
  • Pitbull seems to be very into the Amazonian types...
  • lol this is great, favorite is the grapes lol
  • gr8 pussys ssssssssssssssss
  • ....
  • Search: The baroque boyz It was Time to Go! You wont be disappointed!
  • shut up!they are both awesome
  • i prefer the Silverstein version more....
  • people please help me go to this channel and flag this guys video they are sick and inhumane and torturing animals please flag and help kick him off you tube!!
  • ◄ Hey guys ◄ I am Ivan ◄ Wanna have a little fun ◄Come in my channel and see my funny videos ◄ If you like the videos rate ◄ If you like me subscribe me ◄ Answer the question of the day ◄ Comments ◄ Video responses ◄ Massages ◄ And more come and check out Ivan's Channel
  • 80 million views holy crap!
  • To the guy who said its fake.....someone seems just a teensy bit jealous(you)
  • I am tired. Geoff has been reasonably behaved but I miss my emotional space. He leaves on Thursday morning for Pretoria to see his girlfriend again, then home for work on Monday. Hub in town tomorrow night at Sarah's house.
  • @JohnnieGarner Noooooo, you must be mistaken johnny, disco believes the thumbs/up down system is childish he would never use it, that would make him an hypocritical prick and you could never use a word like "hypocritical" to describe 781 LOLOLOL Saying all that though, yes we all know it's him, who else could it be...
  • low low low.....!!!!
  • hahahahahahahaha ahahhah
  • that is not the title. isn't that Kanye West?
  • /watch?v=fbn6YupBO4Q watch this please i nneeed help!!
  • Search: The baroque boyz jealousy! You wont be disappointed!
  • WOW
  • COME TO MY PAGE! ALOT OF ACHMED
  • when i hear this track..... I JIZZ IN MY PANTS !!
  • Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) supports doing away with only being able to buy one gun a month. Support Virginia gun rights for our people. We are mothers we are grandparents and we care about your rights in the US and in Virginia we are with you.
  • the only reason these guys r famous is cuz Disney channel kissed their asses
  • yep and this kinda sucks
  • i really feel pitty for the fans jonas brothers have more haters spaming then any band ive ever heard ... sigh
  • This is the first time I am listening to them as well, and it's alright, but, it isn't my type of song.
  • check out Eminem -Buffalo Bill song
  • aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
  • 107,992,220
  • Mrnumber... The way you write is propaganda against humanity.
  • 4:19 there's a booby painting. 100 million views mystery solved, gang!
  • The rock song was You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC. Is that the one you were talking about?
  • i dig this hairstyle on joe! he looks awesome in it! :D
  • /watch?v=fbn6YupBO4Q watch this please i nneeed help!!
  • @brooklynblitz I agree
  • no its not ^^ it's timbaland ft. one republic.. definitly...
  • she acctuly gave my shivers
  • @discovery781 So dickovery781, why is it you wish failure on this delightful little girl, why do you wish to see a little girl crash and burn so badly. I've noticed Connie is not the only little girl you berate, belittle and bully. So is it just little girls??? do little boys intimidate you too much LOL. Are you actually proud of berating children on a daily basis, does it make you feel good. That's all, you may continue your tirade of obuse towards this little girl (what a man you are).
  • im pretty sure selena gomez fucked all the the jonas brothers by now
  • @discovery781 @prickovery781 So come on tell us 781, why is it you wish failure on a very small child everyday??? Can you not sleep till you've bullied berated and criticised a baby???
  • all of you haters, shut your mouth. as you can see, they've got more fans than you've got brain cells so go hate somewhere else.
  • Wow this video makes my dick so hard ........ i wish i didn't have ribs so i could suck it myself.
  • lol :/)
  • i love this song
  • Watch invader zim 4 free check out my vidz :D
  • yeah man i like that 5*
  • They USED tO not read and write.. before islam then it raised them to be the leaders of the world once upon a time ..but then do u think they were still ignorant and scared. I dont think so .. see its ok if you hate one religion but to hate them all .. I would like to see how Is that working out for you in your personal life ..
  • he talks about love but the girl looks like a whore
  • Sofia comes home after a long day of work. Chat with friends and prepares dinner for her boyfriend. But something happens and is forced to choose between fact, fiction or something that is halfway between both. What you want to hear is a love story about the relationship between fiction and reality.
  • very funny
  • no dude girls have it WAY harder
  • You have a terrible taste of music
  • The pinch harmonics are what really sells this.
  • Click My Name to see the WienerGhost! (ITS AWESOME!)
  • well there's no other way to do it... lol
  • I'm with you AtomSmasher77!!!!! FUCK jonas faggots Go lick Miley's pussy BITCHES!
  • i love this song!!
  • S.O.S help me i have th jb a g, (think jonasbrothers are gay) disease
  • funnny lol
  • cute :)
  • Check out my videos on my profile
  • RATE AND COMMENT ON MY VIDEOS THX!
  • MICK JAGGER BRASILIAN SON IS IN A ROCK BAND IS REALLY COOOLLLLLLLLLLLLL NICEEEEEEEEEE CHECK IT OUT : /watch?v=IMUzryh3-8I
  • 60372794 wow
  • Best site to promote YouTube Channels, Websites, Myspace, forums. It's the best online promotion site! moreviews 。(net) NOTHING TO LOOSE! CHECK IT OUT!
  • whats the name of the song in the end?
  • good bro keep in doing you re thing see you tomorrow in school
  • Don't think I will thnx
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