Animal photos, captioned...

Whoo-o loves ya, Baby?

Animal photos, captioned...  A nice collection via my card-carrying, pissed-off, ancient-American mom...

Anemone blanda...

Anemone blanda...  Via BPOD, of course...

Rodney Dangerfield lines...

Rodney Dangerfield lines...  Via reader Simi L.:

My wife only has sex with me for a purpose. Last night she used me to time an egg.

It's tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won't drink from my glass!

Last night my wife met me at the front door. She was wearing a sexy negligee. The only trouble was, she was coming home.

A girl phoned me and said, 'Come on over. There's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home!

A hooker once told me she had a headache.

I went to a massage parlor; it was self-service…

If it weren't for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all.

I was making love to this girl and she started crying I said, 'Are you going to hate yourself in the morning?' She said, 'No, I hate myself now.'

I knew a girl so ugly that she was known as a two-bagger. That's when you put a bag over your head in case the bag over her head comes off.

I knew a girl so ugly... they use her in prisons to cure sex offenders.

My wife is such a bad cook, if we leave dental floss in the kitchen the roaches hang themselves.

I don’t want to say I am ugly I stuck my head out the window and got arrested for mooning.

The other day I came home and a guy was jogging, naked. I asked him, 'Why?' He said, 'Because you came home early.'

My wife's such a bad cook, the dog begs for Alka-Seltzer.

I know I'm not sexy. When I put my underwear on I can hear the Fruit-of-the-Loom guys giggling.

My wife is such a bad cook, in my house we pray after the meal.

My wife likes to talk to me during sex; last night she called me from a hotel.

My family was so poor that if I hadn't been born a boy, I wouldn't have had anything to play with.

It's been a rough day. I got up this morning ... put a shirt on and a button fell off. I picked up my briefcase, and the handle came off. I'm afraid to go to the bathroom.

I was such an ugly kid! ...When I played in the sandbox, the cat kept covering me up.

I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and radio.

I was such an ugly baby that my mother never breast fed me. She told me that she only liked me as a friend.

I'm so ugly my father carried around a picture of the kid who came with his wallet.

When I was born, the doctor came into the waiting room and said to my father, "I'm sorry. We did everything we could, but he pulled through anyway."

I'm so ugly my mother had morning sickness...AFTER I was born.

I remember the time that I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

Once when I was lost, I saw a policeman, and asked him to help me find my parents. I said to him, "Do you think we'll ever find them?" He said, "I don't know kid. There's so many places they can hide."

My wife made me join a bridge club. I jump offnext Tuesday.

I'm so ugly, I once worked in a pet shop, and people kept asking how big I'd get.

I went to see my doctor. "Doctor, every morning when I get up and I look in the mirror I feel like throwing up. What's wrong with me?" He said..."Nothing, your eyesight is perfect."

I went to the doctor because I'd swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. My doctor told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.

With my old man I got no respect. I asked him, "How can I get my kite in the air?" He told me to run off a cliff.

Some dog I got. We call him Egypt because in every room he leaves a pyramid. His favorite bone is in my arm. Last night he went on the paper four times - three of those times I was reading it.

One year they wanted to make me a poster boy - for birth control.

My uncle's dying wish was to have me sitting in his lap; he was in the electric chair.

I'm so old, I could go tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I hope I do go tomorrow... I didn't go today.

What do animals see in the mirror?

What do animals see in the mirror?  A short article on the mirror self-awareness test.  This is a famous test I'd read about several times before, but this article raised several facets that were new to me...

An optimal drinking glass...

An optimal drinking glass...  How can one compute the shape of the optimal drinking glass?  Isn't that purely aesthetic? 

Well, no.  Not if you want to optimize the thermal characteristics.  In that case, you can compute the shape – and that's it, at right.

Programming language popularity...

Programming language popularity...  A fascinating log-log scatter chart (well, fascinating to a programming geek, anyway :) that has GitHub lines of code changed on one axis and StackOverflow mentions on the other.  These are both plausible measures of the popularity of any given programming language, and for the most part they yield fairly consistent results.  Some of the anomalous looking results are explained in the comments; I suspect we'll see an updated chart with those explainable anomalies cured.  Some languages are missing (for example, I went looking for Julia and found it wasn't there).

All the usual suspects are at the upper right – but there were some big surprises for me elsewhere on the chart.  I, for one, would never have expected Forth to be where it is – I thought I was one of the last living Forth programmers.  Apparently not!  And what the heck is Prolog doing in the middle?  And Delphi? Isn't it dead yet?  Scala, basically still in experimental state, ranks just below the top tier – that seems quite remarkable to me, but probably indicates just how desperate the Java world is for some aspects of functional programming and message-based concurrency.

The lower left part of the chart had me amused for a couple hours, as I looked up these languages I'd never heard of before...

Hard Work U...

Hard Work U...  This sounds like such a great idea!  Why hasn't it been copied all over? 

Discrete logarithms weaker than supposed?

Discrete logarithms weaker than supposed?  I can't access the original paper (and I'm not sure I could understand it even if I did!), but if this news report is to be believed, researchers have cast some doubt on the strength of cryptography based on certain variants of the discrete logarithm problem.  Assuming that they are correct, further assuming that this theoretical result could be reduced to practice, and even further assuming that the variant in question is used in common cryptographic building blocks – then this could be a big problem.  If so, I'd expect to hear much noise from the crypto community, pretty quickly...

This is so sad...

This is so sad...  Sudan will soon execute a woman for the unpardonable sin of being Christian.  Before they execute her, she will receive 100 lashes – generally considered a sentence of death by itself, as few can survive that kind of beating.

I don't know of any easy answers for the troubles in that part of the world.  But I can't help but note the inconsistency in our own government's stance on such events.  The kidnapped girls of Nigeria are getting a lot of attention right now (how effective that attention is remains to be seen).  The Sudanese ... not so much.  The Yemenis ... not so much.  The Libyans ... not so much.  I could go on, but I think you see the point.

It surely would be useful, both inside and outside the U.S., for our government to have a consistent strong voice – and policy – for the tragedies of the Middle East...

I think this may be the beginning...

I think this may be the beginning ... of the unraveling of the warmist community's united front.  Some real climatologists are revolting against the likes of Mann and Hansen.

It occurs to me that some enterprising journalist has a real opportunity here to break a big, big story...

Time-lapse movie of the Cocos fire...

Time-lapse movie of the Cocos fire ... as seen from the Stone Brewing Company's roof.

And here's what it looked like to two guys who drove right through it...

Speechless, I am...

Speechless, I am...  The warmist community has been getting a lot of flack because their computer models (which they derive all their dire predictions from) aren't matching the observed reality.  For example, about 10 years ago the IPCC published the results of dozens of computer models.  Those models predicted varying degrees of global warming 10 years (and more) into the then-future, which is right now.  That predicted global warming hasn't occurred.  This is very embarrassing for those computer models, and for most people (including most scientists) it is strong evidence that those models are seriously flawed – that is, they are pretty much useless for predicting global warming.  It also is pretty strong evidence that the dire predictions of the warmists are based on ... not much of anything.

But now one publisher of environmental research papers (including many climatology papers) takes a position that eliminates the issue: they say that to expect the models to be consistent with observed reality is an error.  That's a bit like saying that it is an error to expect the actual weather to match the weather forecast.  If we accepted that notion, then no matter what result the models predicted, and no matter how much they deviated from reality, we should accept them as “truth” on some level.

Orwell has entered the science building. 

I really don't know what to say about this, other than my jaw is sore from where it dropped and hit the table.  Steve McIntyre has a bit more...