You might have heard of the Garfield Randomizer. Turns out a similar thing exists for Dinosaur Comics. I actually came across Dadasaurus Rex a couple of weeks ago. It lends itself very well to the treatment since not only is the panel layout the same in each strip, the art is the same as well. Here's a rather excellent one I got: A fairly accurate depiction of what happens when you don't get enough sleep, I think. :)

The title of this entry (if you take "buffalo" to be 1) the obvious noun with identical plural, 2) capitalised, the proper noun referring to the American city, and 3) a verb meaning approximately "bully") is a grammatically correct sentence of English. (I first came across it in The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker, but was reminded of it recently.) In fact, according to Wikipedia, for any n ≥ 1, buffaloⁿ is a grammatically correct sentence, if you disregard capitalisation. ("Buffalo!", "Buffalo buffalo", "Buffalo buffalo buffalo", etc.) Don't you just love natural language?

Being the functional programming nut that I am, I couldn’t help but chuckle at this.

Here are this semester's exam results:

• Functional Programming 2: 49%
• Designing Algorithms: 62%
• Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: 71%

AI was the one I spent the least amount of effort on, so getting a first in it is pretty surprising. Even more surprising though is the third for Funky 2, especially as I feel as if I've been eating and sleeping Haskell the last few months (my project involves it). Mind you, Dr Sharp (the director of teaching in the CS dept, and incidentally also the lecturer for that module) says that kind of mark, close to a boundary, might get revised upwards. And anyway, it was a truly evil exam :) Incidentally, the piece of paper I picked up from the office had a mark on it for Computer Graphics 2, which I didn't take (wasn't even enrolled for it), and it didn't have a mark for Funky 2. It took me about half an hour to sort this out, but apparently there was a glitch with Dr Sharp's mail merge which gave the wrong module code and title, though the mark and the actual records were correct. He eventually printed me a new piece of paper with the correct words on it. On a totally unrelated note, I just remembered something I found out over the holiday: apparently Prof Thimbleby used to go to the same church as my cousins.

Having received the shocking news that Elsmorian has never heard Tommy, I went back and listened to it again myself. While I was listening I read the Wikipedia article, which says "Townshend's later interest in synthesizers is foreshadowed by the use of taped sounds played in reverse to give a whistling, chirping sound on 'Amazing Journey'". I thought "really? never noticed" and listened to it once more.

It's funny when you revisit things you've listened to casually before and discover new depths. I only even noticed these funny chirpy sounds when I listened to them again just now, while they add a wonderful other-worldliness to the song, reinforcing the idea that it's all a vision inside Tommy's head. They sound great even today, but it was only when I realised how fantastic they must have sounded in 1969, when the album was released, that I could appreciate it properly. Bear in mind that I've been brought up in a musical culture where synthesisers are mundane (we call digital ones keyboards now) and sounds like that are trivial to create with the audio equivalent of the universal constructor, the waveform editor. I think it's rather sad that my appreciation of it is jaded by having heard similar sounds hundreds of times before, as just another instrument.

It all reminded me of Terry Pratchett's remarks about conjuring in his interview with Stephen Briggs in The Discworld Companion (my copy is the second edition), where he explains that he would probably enjoy a Discworld play, with its improvised, amateur special effects, more than a Discworld film, with big-budget CG:

I suppose I'm saying it's the difference between magical tricks being done by a genuine wizard and by a stage conjuror. The wizard does marvellous things but it's, well, magic and therefore in a sense mundane. Yawn yawn, he's produced another damn pigeon, well, that's magic for you. But when you know it's being done by a conjuror with a hearing aid and a day job down at the building society, and all achieved by springs and elastic and secret pockets, this makes it much more interesting. Any fool can be a wizard, but you have to be clever to be a conjuror.

I think you can say the same for any look back at past innovations. It's difficult to appreciate the cleverness of past inventors when the modern man looks at their inventions and shrugs — to him, they're just a prosaic part of his world, no more amazing than a flint knife would have been to a caveman.

This must be the funniest bug report ever.

http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=41

That woman is spookily like Jo...

Yes, I was bored...

class Gravy extends Sauce throws UtensilNotFoundException {
    public Sauce(Ingredient meatJuice, Ingredient flour) {
        Utensil whisk = kitchen.findUtensil("whisk");
        Utensil bowl = kitchen.findUtensil("bowl");
        bowl.add(meatJuice);
        bowl.add(flour);
        do {
        whisk.whisk(bowl);
        } until (bowl.contentsAreSmooth());
     // try to serve in a jug; if there is no jug handy, just serve it from the bowl
        try {
            Utensil jug = kitchen.findUtensil("jug");
            if (jug.isDirty()) jug.washUp();
            bowl.pourInto(jug);
        } catch (UtensilNotFoundException e) { }
    }
}

Recipe by me, but put in the public domain.

<pre>try {
    work();
} catch (SleepDeficiencyException e) {
    sleep();
} finally {
    go_home();
}</pre>