Tag Archives: humor

Linkage

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More content-ful posts to come soon, I swear. I got sidetracked by job applications. ‘Tis the season, you know…

The REAL STORY of Alice and Bob. Classic investigative journalism (h/t Bikash Dey)

Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls gets panned. I should mention that the play was done at MIT my first year there and I still remember it as one of the most affecting pieces of theater that I saw during my time there (and maybe after as well).

Scott McLemee on the poverty of the Rally to Restore Sanity.

Winners of the SD Asian Film Festival “Interpretations” contest. Like contentless scenes from your acting/directing class, but with film!

SAALT put out a report called From Macacas to Turban Toppers: The Rise in Xenophobic and Racist Rhetoric in American Political Discourse (PDF). Reading it is keeping me up past my bedtime. (via Sepia Mutiny).

Completely ridiculous stock photography

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I get the IEEE Communications and Signal Processing magazines electronically to save paper (I find they don’t make for great bus reading, so the print version is less appealing). Every month they dutifully send me an email with possibly the most ridiculous stock images. For example, here’s the one for the Signal Processing magazine:

Happy Signal Processing Dude

Oh man, I am so STOKED to get this Signal Processing Magazine! Wooo hoooo!

First off, who is this dude, and what is wrong with his life such that getting this magazine makes him so happy? Clearly he’s not an engineer since he’s wearing a suit. Maybe he works in finance? Of perhaps government, since he’s walking down some pretty “city hall”-looking stairs. Maybe it’s a courthouse, and he’s been cleared of all charges, thanks to the evidence in the signal processing magazine?

Now here’s the Communications one:

Peek inside Communications

Hey there, want to have some sitcom-like hijinks with 4G communication systems?

Again, who is this woman, and why is she creepily hiding behind the magazine, only to pop around the side, holding the pages shut just as I’m opening it? You scared me, lady! What are you trying to do, give me a heart attack? Or are you some sort of not-so-subtle ploy to lure the predominantly male engineering audience to download the magazine?

Honestly, I wish IEEE would not bother paying for the graphic design of the download image and instead use the money for something else, like defraying subscription costs for developing nations. As it stands, these emails make me take the magazine less seriously.

an old-ish thought

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I just got another email about a “Frontiers in X” conference, so I thought of this. Have you ever noticed how biology and medicine always have conferences that have the word “frontiers” in the title? I guess that’s because they are very high dimensional phenomena, and as we know, the sphere in high dimensions has all of its mass at the boundary.

Of course, the downside is that the volume of the unit sphere goes to 0 as the dimension goes to infinity…