Japanese Seizure Robots is a staple of those who have lived on the Internet a little too long. It’s a classic.
Sadly it slipped my mind for a few years. Upon return, I was horrified to see the spam crap they appended to it. I just want seizure robots, not a mail-order bride! Well, maybe we could strike a deal between the two.
House flipping and Ponzi schemes can kiss my ass. There is only one way to get rich quick, as I discovered this afternoon.
The Randalls I shop at must have a hypersensitive machine, because it rejected $3.31 in coins (3 quarters, 12 dimes, 18 nickels, 46 pennies), the vast majority of which seemed unobjectionable to my eye. The poor chump that used the machine must have been deaf to not notice the sound of almost 80 coins near his feet. Even if you don’t profit economically, sometimes you get a pleasant surprise in the form of exotic currency. Speaking of CoinStar, more life advice:
This was mentioned on the previous blog, but it deserves a revisit.
Look Around You is a BBC series of short segments parodying 1980s science classroom films to which we’ve all been subjected at some point. The show’s attack is subtle and spot-on. So much so, in fact, that the pilot episode is actually too subtle. The first five minutes are conducted in such seriousness that it does not pass as satire. Beyond that it grows increasingly absurd to the point that, by the end, they’ve achieved maximum British humour per second. Succeeding episodes distinguish themselves much better.
Look Around You has earned a second mention here because Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim has picked up the series for United States broadcast. It airs midnight CST every Sunday night. (Monday morning?)
I could not be happier. It shows that US television is not as xenophobic as I have often claimed. In most cases, if a series concept proved successful in another country, it was adapted for American audiences rather than broadcasting the original. Many of 2008’s new shows were guilty of pretending to be original, made-in-America material. The Office set a precedent for this behaviour, and I insist the series was always worse off for it. Steve Carell is a brilliant man, but his character exudes only predictable ignorance. Ricky Gervais is an entirely different man, producing a slimy and naïve boss personality irreproducible in the United States.
The first time I heard Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain,’ I had a brain fart. This was bad, because it occured on Mopac at 70 mph. Luckily I survived, but the song’s refrain still caused a logic exception in my head every time I considered it:
You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain
I’ll bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you? Don’t you?
I even lost a little sleep thinking about it last night. The wording is odd, and combined with its vague context—Simon still refuses to say who her douchebag ex is—potentially disastrous. After a little analysis, I have reached the conclusion that Carly Simon has inhuman sluttish abilities. Work with me on this.
Until the song’s ‘you’ is defined, I am free to consider every person living in 1973 p capable of being the song’s target (set P). Naturally, I’m not saying she banged everyone on Earth in 1973. ((Probably close. Mom?)) To whittle down the size of P, apply the song logically to every potential p ∈ P. In other words, a Cinderella glass slipper-type scenario. What she is saying is ‘If your vanity is sufficiently large, you think this song is about you.’ ((I had to drop ‘probably,’ because that’s a matter of statistics: what percentage of vain people live in a self-obsessed fantasy world where Carly Simon wrote a song about them?)) Broken down even further, ‘For every p, if p’s vanity v > some arbitrary constant k, then p ∈ P.’
It doesn’t take a mathematician to see that P is a very large set. As in, untold millions of people. Carly Simon is confessing over oldies radio that she made out with entire cities, states, regions. She is either a) a boasting hussy or b) not a logician. I’ll be nice and assume the latter, in which case I’ll help her out.
Her goof is surprisingly petty and easily corrected: cause and effect are swapped. This is why I noted the song’s wording is disastrous. With a simple rearrangement of phrases, all is well. Um, until you try to sing it.
If you think this song is about you
You’re so vain
If you think this song is about you
You’re so vain
Do you? Do you?
Instead of saying every vain person in 1973 thinks they have a song dedicated to them, the lyrics simply claim that every person in 1973 who thinks the song is about them is vain. That’s a fair statement, even applied to any other song. What would you say to a person that boasted that Nine Inch Nails had him in mind when they did ‘Closer’?
Another year, another factor. 2009 is 72 * 41, which is pleasantly compact. Unlike 2008. Maybe compactness is proportional to a year’s quality?
At a friend’s party, I botched my operands and reported it as 7 * 241, which would be the year 15.3 trillion, give or take a few hundred million years.