There is an extensive explanation for this wild and bizarre sequence at the Muppet Wiki. Here’s a bit of it: In 1957, Jim Henson was approached by a Washington, D.C. coffee company to produce ads for Wilkins Coffee. The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the commercials had to be lightning-fast — essentially, eight seconds for… Read more →
Month: May 2008
Compare and contrast
High culture: Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d Of the Two Worlds so wisely–they are thrust Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust. Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door… Read more →
Explanation
I spent some time last week at a professional conference. For the most part it was a relatively valuable use of my time, but there were significant portions of time where I was stuck sitting in a room with lots of people while a particularly boring speaker was presenting. I was without a computer–the conference expressly frowned on bringing one… Read more →
A Small Challenge
Answer, and explanatory story, to follow. On the off chance that someone comments with the plaintext before I get around to telling the story, I will send them a $20 Amazon gift certificate or something like that. Read more →
What You Need To Know
I have been insanely busy and travelling all week. This will continue tomorrow, hopefully reaching a peak so that things will mellow out a bit into the weekend. The remainder of this post is for the gentleman who, when challenged by me today asked me with a straight face “You don’t need proof that 1+1=2, do you?” For those of… Read more →
Yes, I just made up the term “Doom Constant”
Remember Nick Bostrom? And remember the Drake Equation? Well, the two have met, as illustrated in MIT’s Technology Review this month, in Bostrom’s article, Where Are They. Bostrom suggests, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, that the reason we haven’t met the aliens yet is that Drake’s equation is missing a Doom Constant that models some sort of… Read more →
Crazy religious people have their priorities in order
Tired of paying through the nose, Americans try praying at the pump “Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world,” he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, “We Shall Overcome”.… Read more →
Still true after more than 40 years
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered. Fnord. Read more →
Microfinance, Aggregation, Kiva
One of those concepts that most North Americans don’t run into everyday is that of microfinance. You can read about it at the link, but in a nutshell it’s the idea that even “poor” people need access to financial services. One particular area where this is true is financing for the small–by North American standards–loans that entrepreneurs in third world… Read more →
Eddington and the meta-paradigm
Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: (1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures… Read more →
Memento mori
I had one of those shocking epiphanies today. I realized, seriously, completely, viscerally, that I am going to die someday. There was no hair-raising event, no near death experience, nothing dramatic. Just a realization that hit me during a very long drive, when I had some time to think about what it meant. Harlan Ellison is partly to blame. Obviously… Read more →
A moment of hobo appreciation
I passed a lovely bit of time today reading The American Hobo by Colin Beesley, a British academic paper about a quintessentially American phenomenonThe paper is hosted by northbankfred.com, a site dedicated to trains and the hobo experience. Be sure to browse around and check out some of the other articles, photographs, or if you’re really hard-core, the stories!. I’ve… Read more →
Early Saturday Morning Gallimaufry
And, time to close a few more tabs… It’s lovely that the Internet can bring me an interactive beer and food matching guide. Sadly, it uses a different algorithm than I do–resulting in far more matches with “see through” beer than my scheme would generate. Speaking of beer, I love the idea of beer haiku. My favourite so far: You… Read more →
Hemmingway said some true things too
We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer. —Hunter S. Thompson Read more →
One Damned Thing Over And Over
(This entire post pinched from Andrew Wheeler’s always entertaining blog. I don’t normally do that, but it’s too good, and a link won’t do.) A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land — an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this… Read more →
