milk it!

makin' posts that don't make sense! There's a connection super-sleuths! Who is that mystery driver and what is she delivering? It's Sarah! And it's milk!

going to the movies tonight?

have fun!

to the hip hip hop, a you don't stop

A song so awesome that just one YouTube can't contain it.

Copyright

Everything you need to know:

Copyright, like most rules governing intellectual property in this country, is way too complicated.

this is what you get for leaving the country

If a chimpanzee carried John's child:



The big changes are fun, but I like the subtle shift. Witness John as an older lesbian:


The University of St. Andrews Face Transformer

Ants

By the time the colony had reached its full mature size, two years after the nuptial flight of the Queen, it contained more than ten thousand workers. It was able, in the following year, to rear virgin queens, and males, and through them to give birth to new colonies. By that time the Queen was producing eggs at the average rate of one every fifteen minutes. Heavy and torpid, she lay in the royal chamber at the bottom of the subterranean nest, five feet below the surface, a distance of four hundred ant lengths. By human scale, the ant city was the equivalent of two hundred underground stories. The mound of excavated soil capping the nest added another fifty stories aboveground.

The Queen may not have been the leader of this miniature civilization, but she was the fountainhead of all its energies and growth, the key to its success or failure. The metronomic pumping out of fertilized eggs from her twenty ovaries was the heartbeat of the colony. The ultimate purpose of all the workers’ labor—their careful construction of the nest, their readiness to risk their lives in daily searches for food, their suicidal defense of the nest entrance—was that she continue to create more altruistic workers like themselves. One worker, or a thousand workers, could die and the colony would go on, repairing itself as needed. But the failure of the Queen would be fatal.

Trailhead

Dolphins

1.


2. Humans rule, dolphins can suck it

lol whut

Non Transitive Dice

Proceeding clockwise around the circle, the dice with the 6's and 2's on it, called the 6-2, will beat the 5-1, the next in the circle, which in turn beats 4-0, which beats 3-3... WHICH IN TURN BEATS 6-2! Your advantage is that you will win 24 times out of 36 - that is 2 times out of 3, or a 66% advantage. So whichever dice your opponent selects - and asking someone to choose first is part of the strategy - you take the next dice backwards in the circle.

Asset forfeiture

So, you can lose your property without ever being charged for a crime:

Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show “probable cause” that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.

As with the case a year ago involving the girl strip-searched for ibuprofen, that there's even a controversy about this indicates that America's experiment with self-government has finally failed.

Metal Monday

let's get a little... mellow.

people on the river are happy to give

Cyberdemons attack

the 3E website.

Who needs a radio?

Tip the driver

Tip the Pizza Guy

fruit

Past

If Back to the Future were made today, Marty would have travelled back in time to 1980.

Kottke

Also

getting strong now won't be long now

Lectures

If there's anything uniting faculty on different sides of the aisle nowadays it's disapproval of large lecture courses. To the Left, lectures are authoritarian; to the Right, they are lowbrow. Better the egalitarian or members-only atmosphere of the seminar, they say. To anyone who is just "agin' the guv'ment," lecture courses suffer the stigma of administrative approval, because deans and provosts love lectures as cheap and efficient ways to deliver information.

That is, if the courses succeed: many alumni remember only the professor's yellowing notes or the students' back-row shenanigans and not any actual learning. Nor is the future of lecturing bright, according to some experts, who say that nothing so prehistoric as a lecturer's voice could possibly penetrate the digital habits of Generation Net.

But that's not been my experience. Course evaluations--and I've read more than a few--show that students love pointed, provocative well-delivered lectures. They appreciate and respect a master narrative (the Left's bugaboo), if only to give them something to rebel against. They can see through a professor's bias and they don't even mind it, as long as the professor acknowledges it. They appreciate common touches such as references to popular culture (the bane of the Right) as long as they are up-to-date. They want their electronic images, but not without a commanding voice behind them.

I love teaching lecture courses, but then, when I was a student, I loved taking lecture courses. I was a sucker for lectures from my first day of college, because I was already infatuated with the beauty of words, and a good lecture is nothing if not an art form. Efficient communication it may be, but a lecture can no more be reduced to the delivery of information than a Ferrari can be reduced to fuel injection. A lecture aims at imparting not just what is true but what is beautiful.

In praise of big lectures

Cleverbot

User: I see a little silohouetto of a man.
Cleverbot: Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the Fandango.
User: Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me.
Cleverbot: Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo figraro magnifico-o-o-o.
User: I'm just a poor boy nobody loves me.
Cleverbot: He's just a poor boy from a poor family.
User: Spare him his life from this monstrosity.
Cleverbot: Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?
User: Bismillah! No, we will not let you go.
Cleverbot: Let me go!
User: Bismillah! No, we will not let you go.
Cleverbot: Let me go!

User: Can you play chess?
Cleverbot: Yes, would you like to play chess now?
User: Yes.
Cleverbot: 1. E4.
User: FACE COCK.
Cleverbot: Do you believe in god?

Cleverbot

Linus' thought for the week

Super Mario Saturday

And, best of all, a Chinese knock-off of Super Mario Galaxy.

The internet remains weird

1. Nic Cage as Everyone

2. Running from Camera

3.

Dying Languages

For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of their culture. The stories they tell are creative works as well as communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few indigenous communities – from the Kallawaya tribe in Bolivia and the Maka in Paraguay to the Siberian language of Chulym, to India's Arunachal Pradesh state Aka group and the Australian Aboriginal Amurdag community – have recorded their own languages or ever had them recorded. Until now. Turin launched the World Oral Literature Project earlier this year with an aim to document and make accessible endangered languages before they disappear without trace.

He is trying to encourage indigenous communities to collaborate with anthropologists around the world to record what he calls "oral literature" through video cameras, voice recorders and other multimedia tools by awarding grants from a £30,000 pot that the project has secured this year. The idea is to collate this literature in a digital archive that can be accessed on demand and will make the nuts and bolts of lost cultures readily available. As useful as this archive will be for Western academic study – the World Oral Literature Project is convening for its first international workshop in Cambridge this week – Turin believes it is of vital importance that the scheme also be used by the communities he and his researchers are working with.

The project suggested itself when Turin was teaching in Nepal. He wanted to study for a PhD in endangered languages and, while discussing it with his professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, was drawn to a map on his tutor's wall. The map was full of pins of a variety of colours which represented all the world's languages that were completely undocumented. At random, Turin chose a "pin" to document. It happened to belong to the Thangmi tribe, an indigenous community in the hills east of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. "Many of the choices anthropologists and linguists who work on these traditional field-work projects take are quite random," he admits. "There's a lot of serendipity involved."

The Beckoning Silence

come on baby, bite that sucker

Rockets, space travel, space fighting, etc

The definitive website: Atomic Rocket. Warning: it will eat your afternoon.

Related.

Genius

Has any fake quote ever been more accurate?

Tuberville: But that’s totally what we’re going to run at least thirty times a game. Y’all know I don’t need an offense. We need 22 points, boys, and we’ll play football the way we always have. We’ll hold the ball for as long as possible. If I have to take knees in the third quarter, I will. We’ll get a safety or return a blocked extra point. Seriously, we’ll make no attempt to score whatsoever. There’s no telling what happens when you try to do that stuff.

Tommy Tuberville answers a few questions

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

In wayfarer’s worlds out west was once a man,
A man I come not to bury, but to praise.
His name was Geoffrey Lebowski called, yet
Not called, excepting by his kin.
That which we call a knave by any other name
Might bowl just as sweet. Lebowski, then,
Did call himself ‘the Knave’, a name that I,
Your humble chorus, would not self-apply
In homelands mine; but, then, this Knave was one
From whom sense was a burden to extract,
And of the arid vale in which he dwelt,
Also dislike in sensibility;
Mayhap the very search for sense reveals
The reason that it striketh me as most
Int’resting, yea, inspiring me to odes.
(In couplets first, and then a sonnet brave
As prologue to the tale of this the Knave.
Behold him, then, a-tumbling softly down
To pledge his love immortal to the ground.)
We stray now from fair Albion and from France
And see no Queen of bawdy songs and cheers
And in an angel's city take our chance
For stupefying tales to take our ears.
To war on Arab kings acoast we go,
Needing a man of times, though hero not;
Hear me call him not hero; what’s in a hero?
Sometimes there’s a man, your prologue’s thought.

The rest: Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

Basketball

Play it.

Are you on another bender?

H. Jon Benjamin as Coach John McGuirk: magic.

It's a Soul Train Saturday

oh god i hope that's a wax museum

which it almost certainly is...

RUSHTFRICA!

Bowl Pick Them 2009: The Chase for .500

Well, we did it. What a horrible season.

Avatar review pt. 2

I will go there solely on the strength of this commercial

a best-selling Sega property

Oh, was there a football game on tonight? I have been reading about Ecco the Dolphin on Wikipedia. Remember that game? Good times.

YouTube Doubler

Have you seen this? See here and here.

two-tone ford explorer

3E fears

Touchdown maker

Do you ever think about how terrible the 1998 Auburn football season was? Do you ever wonder what might have happened in things turned out differently? In doing so, you might wonder what Robert Baker License Plate Maker has been up to lately. Well, wonder no more.

yooooooo this is ya boy shake man. this is 2009 and its time for me to collect on what is mine. i might be late blooming but better now then neva. 2007 was hell for me so right now iam like in the belly of the beast fo real. the world is going in so many direction that all i can do is straddle this fince of what i consider to be life. i feel like my true meaning of being here is to teach yall of what is to come in the furture of our nation and these streets. i have been on both ends of the spectrum man. trust me when i say i have been to heaven and hell and i am starting not to know the difference while iam still alive. i know there is a better place this this i know. so while iam here yall i will spread my wings ova these tracks and show yall how to fly until they shoot me down. i wanna say i love you to my family and all those who know and ride for shake severs and for those of you who hate me i say i love you too. better yet holla at me cause in the end you will see why i came into your life. you cant die if you have lived but you can live if you havent died may 19 2007 and for eva. benji and jante keep ya eyes open and breath easy. one love one heart

Nice.

White Europeans

Too much UV penetrating the skin (too pale-skinned under intense sunlight) increases Vitamin D but reduces folate. Lack of folate causes neural tube defects in the fetus, causing such congenital abnormalities as craniorachischisis, anencephalus, and spina bifida, leading to many miscarriages.

On the other hand, too little UV penetrating the skin (too dark-skinned under dim sunlight) increases folate but reduces vitamin D. Lack of vitamin D causes skeletal neonatal abnormalities (skull, chest, and leg malformations), rickets being the best known. Again, this causes miscarriages.

And so, humans adapt very quickly to solar UV. Prehistoric groups that migrated towards the equator got darker. Prehistoric groups that migrated away from the equator got lighter.

But this explanation fails for Europe. Northern Europeans are lighter than everyone to the south (Mediterraneans), to the east (Mongols and east-Asians), to the west (Native Americans across the Atlantic), and to the North (Inuit, Sammi, Chukchi, Aleut).

Why Are Europeans White?

3E Presents: A Top 21 Things on the Internet: #6 House of Cosbys

House of Cosbys had a relatively large percentage of stinkers, you see, being only four episodes long (struck down in its prime by legal threats). But it's still probably the finest early example of dot-comedy, which is the direction that future television will take (see also Queer Duck, which made the move to Showtime). Without mid-level managers at some broadcasting company getting in the way, online television has two possibilities when it comes to comedy (dramas are going in a different direction): one, independently produced series online are better than what's on "regular" television; two, it forces regular television to be funnier. Both of these have happened.

But enough of that, Theo. House of Cosbys is about a guy who clones Bill Cosby, and each clone has a weird specialty. April Fool's Cosby: the power to play excellent April Fools jokes, Dwayne Wayne. Every tenth clone has superpowers, like Data Analysis Cosby. How can that not work for you?

You're probably thinking that's the title of a stupid horror movie

Population of the Dead

down in Costa Rica

Bowl Pick Them 2009: Ballgame.

Well, I hope this feels hollow and meaningless. .500 is a very real possibility for the both of us, though.

All I expect out of 2010

3E presents: Snatchphrase Friday

You want to be the coolest cat on the block? You've got to have a snatchphrase! With the weekend coming up, 3E is here to help. The next time your party needs the breath of life, just throw on some Family Stone, twirl your cock like a baton, and let 'er rip with:

"Everybody... GET FUNKY!"

Classic!*

Be the lamest coolest guy around this Friday, 'cause it's Snatchphrase Friday.








*not. Also too Snatchphrase Friday is not affiliated with Catchphrase Friday