I Was Curious

It looks like this :

Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Profile

I was surfing around Amazon and got curious about those “Badges” that you sometimes see. They’re the ones that say “REAL NAME” or “TOP 10 REVIEWER”.

Well there’s also a badge called “THE”, as in THE Steve Jobs as opposed to the fake Steve Jobs or one of the other legitimate Steve Jobs that surely exist.

So I thought, “I wonder what Jeff Bezos profile looks like.” Then I found you can select “People” from the Amazon search dropdown. Sure enough, there he was.

What do we discover about Jeff from his profile?

“”Work at Amazon.com. Known for my laugh. That’s me in my Austin ‘Danger’ Powers Halloween costume.”

And he doesn’t review many things - 9 reviews in the last 8 years. His most recent was in 2006 and is actually quite funny, especially the comments in response -

Jeff Bezos’ review of milk

Other than that

• he’s tagged a few things including a lotr chainmail shirt
• hasn’t created any listmania lists nor created any how to guides
• but has created a wishlist

It would be curious to see what his response would be if you bought him something on his wishlist. Anyone game to try?

Where are all the jokes about atheists?

Do a search for jokes about men, women, christians, muslims, jews, gays, irish, french and you’ll get hundreds of jokes ready for your amusement and/or heckling of said people-group.

What about atheists?

I spent 2 hours scouring the google results for atheist jokes and how many did I find?

7

That’s it!

What’s up with that? Where’s the love?

Come on people - even a minority like vegans get more jokes than that!

I propose a call to arms - atheism should be neglected no longer as a subject of hilarity!

Bring on those stereotypes! Get passionately creative! I’m sure we can do better than 7.

PS There are actually more than 7 - there must be all of about 20 - woohoo! But most of them are too lame to repeat. Here are the 7 better jokes I could find.

• What do you get when you cross an atheist with a Jehovahs Witness?…. Someone who knocks at your door for no apparent reason.
• One day the zoo-keeper noticed that the orangutan was reading two books, the Bible and Darwin’s Origin of Species.
  Surprised, he asked the ape, “Why are you reading both those books?”
  “Well,” said the orangutan, “I just wanted to know if I was my brother’s keeper or my keeper’s brother.”
• A young lady came home from a date, rather sad. She told her mother, “Jeff proposed to me an hour ago.”
  “Then why are you so sad?” her mother asked.
  “Because he also told me he was an atheist. Mom, he doesn’t even believe there’s a hell.”
  Her mother replied, “Marry him anyway. Between the two of us, we’ll show him how wrong he is.”
• Why did the atheist cross the road?
  He thought there might be a street on the other side, but he wouldn’t believe it until he tested his hypothesis.
• How many atheists does it take to change a light bulb?
  Two. One to actually change the bulb, and the other to videotape the job so fundamentalists won’t claim that god did it.
• A Jew, A Catholic, and an atheist are rowing in Lake Erie when their boat springs a huge leak. The Jew looks skyward, and says “Oh, Adonai, if you save me, I promise I’ll sail to Israel and spend the rest of my days trying to reclaim the land you gave us.” The Catholic looks skyward, and says, “Oh, Jesus, if you save me, I promise I’ll fly to the Vatican and spend the rest of my days singing your praises.” The atheist says, “Oh, guys, if you pass me that one life preserver, I promise I’ll swim to Cleveland.” “And how will you spend the rest of your days?” the Jew and the Catholic ask. “Well,” says the atheist, “I’m not sure, but I can tell you one thing: I’ll never go rowing with other atheists.”

• An atheist was taking a walk through the woods, admiring all that evolution had created.

  “What majestic trees! What powerful rivers! What beautiful animals!”, he said to himself. As he was walking along the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. When he turned to see what the casue was, he saw a 7-foot grizzly charging right towards him. He ran as fast as he could. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the bear was closing, He ran even faster, crying in fear. He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer. His heart was pounding and he tried to run even faster. He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up, but saw the bear right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising his right paw to strike him.

  At that moment, the Atheist cried out “Oh my God!….” Time stopped. The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped moving.

  As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky, “You deny my existence for all of these years; teach others I don”t exist; and even credit creation to a cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?”

  The atheist looked directly into the light “It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask You to treat me as Christian now, but perhaps could you make the bear a Christian?” “Very well,” said the voice.

  The light went out. The river ran again. And the sounds of the forest resumed.

  And then the bear dropped his right paw ….. brought both paws together…bowed his head and spoke: “Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful.”

My friend and I were curious and we can now do the party trick of figuring out what day of the week a birthday falls on.

For the impatient, here’s the formula :

Where d is the day, y is the last 2 digits of your birth year (throw away any remainder of the division) and mlookup is a lookup table :

And the result is 0 = Sunday, 1 = Monday, etc

I was watching a show about Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant, and telling my friend Dave about it. One of the things that the media often focus on is how these savants can calculate the day you were born on.

I’ve always suspected that it can’t be that hard to do - there must be some formula for it - and I said so to Dave.

So we got curious and went to find the formula. Sure enough we found one.

At first it looked a bit long-winded. But after a bit of wrangling, we got it down to it’s bare essence with a couple of shortcuts (ie lookup tables in programmer-speak). Now we can do the calculations in our head. It’s still a bit of mental effort but nothing too onerous with a bit of practise.

We got the original formula from here :

http://www.tondering.dk/claus/cal/node3.html#SECTION00360000000000000000

And you can check your answers here :

http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~sdavnprt/bday.htm

Here is an example - 18th December 1977 gives

(18 + 2 + (10 * 76)/8 + 10 ) mod 7

A quick way of dividing by 8 is to divide in half 3 times, so 770/8 = 385/4 = 192/2 = 96.

18 + 2 + 96 + 10 = 126.

126 mod 7 = 0

So 18th December 1977 was a Sunday!

PS I’m in no way down-playing the abilities of savants - I think they’re amazing! Remembering this simple formula is one thing, doing calculations out to hundreds of decimal places or remembering what the weather was like on a specific date is quite another!

PPS The shortcuts we took only work for birthdays after 1900.

Yes, you too can be a moisture farmer just like in Star Wars! You just need some moisture vaporators, ie devices that take moisture out of the air. I was curious and found these devices actually exist. Ones like this :

Here are some links to companies that make these :

http://www.air2water.net/residential_products_countertop.html

http://www.superiorwater.com.au/

http://www.airwatercorp.com/

http://www.globalrainbox.com/

Now you can start growing your empire. Just be sure to keep a look out for a couple of droids.

I was curious…

…and I stumbled upon this image of the face on Mars :

There’s an even more detailed 2400×2400 pixel image here. There are other pictures of the ‘pyramids’ nearby if you follow the links on the Cydonia wikipedia page.

What’s even cooler is I found the smiley face on Mars, otherwise known as the Galle crater. I just read Chapter IX of Watchmen and thought Alan Moore was having some fun. But the thing actually exists! Here it is on Google Mars.

I was curious…

…and I found out the distance to the edge of the observable universe is about 46.5 billion light years!

“What?” you say - “I thought it was 13.7 billion give or take a bit.”

Well actually, that’s the age of the universe, not the size. The light from the furthest things we can see has taken about 13 billion years to reach us - but that light left those objects 13 billion years ago - and in the meantime we’ve moved and those objects have moved.

So, the best estimate at the moment is that the edge of the observable universe is 46.5 billion light years away. Doubling that gives you a diameter of 93 billion light years.

More info available on wikipedia along with other cool info about super-clusters, filaments, voids, the Great Wall and the Great Attractor!

I was curious…

…and I found a picture of Madonna from her high school year book!

I was wondering “What did Madonna look like when she was younger?” I can’t even remember why I wondered this. I’ve been listening to Confessions on a Dance Floor while coding at work, so that must have had something to do with it.

I did some searches on Google and this picture is the best I could come up with. It’s from an auction for her high school yearbook. For someone so famous I’m kind of surprised. Surely there’s a biography with some childhood photos in it? Can anyone help out?