The Cabbages of Doom

From Off the Mark; h/t: WEIT.

Courtesy of sciencegasm. Remember this when you see any cute Easter chicks*...

[*Yes, I know it’s not a baby chicken. Some kind of gull, maybe?]

Normally, the phrase for this kind of thing would be: “It’s funny, because it’s true.” However, being true makes this tragic. (But still funny at the same time.)

And if you missed it the first time, check out Cassetteboy’s prophetic Cameron’s Conference Rap from 2014:

I can’t find the original at thepoke.co.uk but this made me laugh when it popped up in my Facebook newsfeed…

…Down Under, at least.

From whyevolutionistrue, though I am not sure who the original author is.

The hand-dryer in the bathroom of a restaurant we went to recently:

I’m not sure what “fusion” is but it sounds scary. (The drier wasn’t strong enough to make be believe it was nuclear powered.) Who knew it could be so DANGEROUS! (Personally, I close my eyes if I ever stick my face it hot air but maybe that's just me.)

It may have been Australian made but I am not convinced that it was Australian proof-read.

At the end of February, I attended the first day of the two-day Soundwave Music Festival, primarily to see the headlining Faith No More. I’d perused the rest of the lineup before the day but not to the extent of doing any research on the bands that I did not know.

One such band had just started their set when we arrived to check out the main stage in the early afternoon: Steel Panther.

The picture from the Soundwave App (above) probably tells you 90% of what you need to know. The accompanying blurb:

STEEL PANTHER’s latest release ‘All You Can Eat’ fits this rock ‘n’ roll opus perfectly. There are badass riffs aplenty, arena-size grooves, lyrics about sex, drugs, and senior citizens, and the lingering scent of whisky, a stripper’s perfume, and hairspray.

I’m actually a bit of a fan of hair metal, and Steel Panther have a sound that hits the genre perfectly. Lyrically, though, they were not quite Bon Jovi. They were Spinal Tap!

I commented on this at the time but did not realise that they really were like Spinal Tap, being a parody act complete with wigs. From a small dose it was not entirely clear, except in hindsight: they did it very well.

I have since got All You Can Eat from EMusic and, whilst not for the lyrically faint-hearted, it has some cracking tunes on it. I'm not sure that I would consume the whole feast in one sitting but it's a good one to dip into occasionally for some well riffed silliness.

Some Easter levity, courtesy of Jesus and Mo:

Enjoy your chocolate eggs/bunnies!

Despite unsubscribing from a mailing list that I never subscribed to, OMICS Group keep sending me pointless emails to crappy conferences. Today it was “Biodiversity-2015”:

Biodiversity-2015 is specifically premeditated with a unifying axiom providing pulpit to widen the imminent scientific creations. The main theme of the conference is “Share and Enhance Ecological & Geological Conservation research” which covers a broad array of vitally key sessions.

“Biodiversity-2015 is specifically premeditated with a unifying axiom providing pulpit to widen the imminent scientific creations.” Wow! Someone had been over-using their random vacuous crap generator.

Again, no explicit mention of OMICS Group as the organiser was made, although this one did mention “accepted abstracts will be published in the respective OMICS Group Journals”. (For free - they’re so generous!)

At the end of the email, they tell me to:

Have a Great Day Doctor!!

Well, with two exclamation marks, do I have any choice?! What would have made a greater day would have been (a) not receiving the email in the first place*, and (b) having the “To unsubscribe click here” line at the end of the email actually contain a hyperlink. Instead, the “click here” was just text in a different colour!

*I’m not being entirely honest with (a) - I think my day was brightened a little by “specifically premeditated with a unifying axiom providing pulpit to widen the imminent scientific creations”!

One odd thing on our recent holiday was seeing people out in the mountains wearing toes shoes (the oddly-named “FiveFingers” shoes). As the author of a late 2013 article, “Toe Shoes - Beneficial or a Pathetic Fad?”*, put it:

“I’d like to think that one of the benefits of shoes, is to cover up your ugly toes.”

Or, as XKCD put it:

*The conclusion of the article was fad… and “blatant fashion crime”! Sadly, a fad that hasn't yet died.

Why Evolution is True posted this cartoon from lunarbaboon last week:

It’s never stopped me going to work but I’d be lying if I said that something like this (without the shoes) had not delayed me going to bed once or twice.

If, like me, you get a bit annoyed by people who decry “chemicals” (and are usually far too trusting of anything “natural” at the same time), you will appreciate an online paper just published at the Nature Chemical Biology blog, “A comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products” by Alexander Goldberg and CJ Chemjobber.

I think that the message is so important, I have reproduced the entire abstract main text of the paper:

Manufacturers of consumer products, in particular edibles and cosmetics, have broadly employed the term ‘Chemical free’ in marketing campaigns and on product labels. Such characterization is often incorrectly used to imply — and interpreted to mean — that the product in question is healthy, derived from natural sources, or otherwise free from synthetic components. We have examined and subjected to rudimentary analysis an exhaustive number of such products, including but not limited to lotions and cosmetics, herbal supplements, household cleaners, food items, and beverages. Herein are described all those consumer products, to our knowledge, that are appropriately labelled as ‘Chemical free’.

 

 

Exactly.

Yesterday, we went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the last Art After Hours of the year, when the gallery stays open until late on a Wednesday night. We had a look at a few of the pictures before retiring to the cafe for a glass of wine or two. I think my favourite of the perused artwork was Truck and trailer approaching a city by Jeffrey Smart (1999), who died earlier this year. I can’t say exactly what I like so much about it but I find it very appealing.

Less appealing was The Expulsion by Arthur Boyd - that is until I spotted the uncanny resemblance between one of the main characters and Rodge (I think) from the potty-mouthed Irish TV duo, Podge and Rodge:

Rodge in a fisherman’s jacket, expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden

God (right) and his brother Podge.

Dodgy Christmas cracker jokes are a Christmas tradition. Apparently, the jokes are deliberately bad. The alleged psychology behind this is that everyone groans and gangs up on the joke, thus are unified by their common disdain for the poor pun. If, on the other hand, the joke showed true wit and humour then it is highly likely that some people would not understand it and/or simply find it unfunny, thus creating a schism between those who get the joke and those who don’t.

It’s an interesting theory and I am not sure who first told me of it nor from whence it originated. What I am sure of, however, is that even the bad jokes need to be told in the right culture to stand a chance of doing their job. We had our departmental Christmas party yesterday (on a boat in the harbour and very nice too) but the crackers had clearly been imported from the UK and did not work Down Under.

The first one is not so bad. Presumably, Australian birds would migrate north for the winter but I think the meaning is still clear even if the geography is confused. The latter, however, completely fails on the basis that the penguins referred to do not exist here. There is a similar biscuit - the Tim Tam - but it is superior to the humble penguin and possibly why the latter has never taken off.

Even without the carbon footprint considerations, importing your crackers from halfway round the world is not a good move.

I didn't get round to visiting the Liberty Bell during my time in Philadelphia. I did, however, see the Lego version in the airport, which surely counts for something.

Today was my last undergrad lecture - possibly my last ever at Southampton. It was on "Reproductive Strategies" and so I thought a post relevant to animal reproduction was in order.

Although I missed them the first time around, I came across the Rationalist Association's podcasts a while back, including snippets from "The Nine Days of Godless Christmas" from 2011. The best, in my opinion, is Day 6, which features singer and comedian Helen Arney with a love song inspired by the habits of animals. It's well worth a listen.

You can find the lyrics and buy a high quality version of the track at Helen Arney's website. My favourite part (spolier alert!):

"Let’s make love like Angler Fish, yeah
It’s kind of complicated but it’s worth it
You use your highly developed olfactory sense to swim towards me for several days
And then you bite me
That releases an enzyme that then dissolved your skin & your flesh & your… fins…
Leaving only a pair of genitals attached to the side of my body
For me to use
When it’s convenient."

Funny and educational!

The Independent had a great little articles a couple of weeks ago in preparation for the Mayan non-prediction of the End of the World yesterday: How to prepare for the end of the world: Fit a smoke alarm, leave extra time for journeys, and give your pets a cuddle... "British organisations have been issuing tongue in cheek advice on how to prepare for the upcoming Mayan-predicted apocalypse on the 21st December".

As it happens, I gave one of my cats a good cuddle in the morning because I didn't have to get out of bed early, thanks to an extra day off in honour of The University of Southampton's Diamond Jubilee. My favourite advice, though, had to be from a London Fire Brigade spokesman:

"Fit a smoke alarm on each level of your home, then at least you might stand a chance of knowing that the end of the world is nigh ahead of those who don't.

"If you survive the apocalypse you'll be alerted to a fire more quickly should one ever break out."

[BTW, the glyphs in the picture have nothing to do with the "Mayan Apocalypse", they're from my visit to Xunantunich in Belize.]

This weekend I joined with people from all over the world to witness Olympic history in the making. It was a pleasure to see science and technology celebrated on the world stage and pay a wonderful tribute to the creation of the World Wide Web.

No, I am not talking about the opening ceremony (although I did very much like the cauldron). I am, of course, referring to the #Nerdlympics on Twitter!

I've been on Twitter for a while now and contribute to a couple of trending topics but never got in on one at the beginning and watch it take off before.

Perhaps ironically, I had not really checked my Twitter feed for a while when I logged on last night, Alex Wild (@Myrmecos) had just posted a couple of geeky Olympic event puns with the hashtag #Nerdlympics. ("Star Trek and Field" was one of the early ones.) Never one to resist a good pun (as readers of The Cabbages of Doom could testify!), I tweeted "PCRchery" back (an event to be held in the velodrome with the rest of the thermal cycling). There were then a trickle of tweets, including some of my own contributions:

☺"Modem pentathlon"
☺"Circadian Rhythym Gymnastics" and
☺"Geeko-Roman Wrestling".

A couple of my favourites were tweeted at this time, including:

☺"Periodic table tennis" (@Myrmecos),
☺"Kreb's Cycling" (also @Myrmecos),
☺"Higgs Field Hockey" (@paulcoxon) and
☺<table>Tennis</table> (@gr33ndata).

Then, it suddenly took off and tweets were flying in, causing Alex to tweet:

The good news is, I've finally created my first successful hashtag. The bad news is, it's #Nerdlympics

As I replied at the time - I don't see the bad news here! Top work, Alex - you gave many nerds (including me) an entertaining evening.

It was quite interesting to see the different approaches taken. I was definitely of the "pun" class but there was a clear set of proposed events from an actual Nerdlympic competition. (Alex himself posted both types, e.g. "Synchronized Centrifuging".) At this point it became hard to keep up but here are a few more of my favourites (in no particular order):

☺@artologica: Tenure Track and Field,
☺@SuzeMarsupial: Basketball Galactica
☺@RalphCipolla: Heavy Water Polo
‏☺@skepticCanary: Petri Discus.
☺@CarolMorton: Beach bucky ball
☺@eric_andersen: Angry Birdminton
☺@abdelrahmanG: Spammer throw
‏☺@scientelle: Logarithmic Gymnastics
☺@marvel_matt: TATA-Boxing
☺@JamieBeach: Floppy Discus Throw
☺@JoeyMcMorrow1: Molecular weight lifting

Well done, all! It made me proud to be a nerd.

I am sure that there were some other classics that I have missed. To get a few more, try searching Twitter for #Nerdlympics - the early posts are all events but then later posts start referring to summaries of the event (recursive trending?) - or check out the Storify summaries by Bug Girl and Tarek Amr.

For those who haven't already seen it, the outstanding XKCD comic now has a weekly "What If?" section,

"answering your hypothetical questions with Physics, every Tuesday"

or, as the main site puts it:

"abusing science to answer hypothetical questions".

I prefer this second description as the second question answered ("What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?") does not seem to have much to do with Physics. The inaugarul entry, however, "What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?", has a definite Physics theme and is highly entertaining, complete with great XKCD illustrations. (The footnote at the end is also most excellent but I won't spoil the punchline here!)