Unless you want a laugh.
Double-rainbow mashup with the trippy ending to 2001 also at YouTube.
You should probably be high when you watch this
Archive | August, 2010
Ask General Kang: What is the penalty for plagiarism on your planet?
Plagiarism is the “act of stealing the ideas and/or expression of another and representing them as your own,” though I can’t remember where I got that quote from — just Google it for the source.
On my home planet of Neecknaw, this is not only an academic offence, but it is also a capital crime.
This stems from the days of Kargnak the Betrayed, one of the great warlord monkey rulers of the ancient days. Legend has it that Kargnak was an impressionable young screen-writer before he became the first in a long line of bloodthirsty intergalactic conquerors from the Planet Neecknaw.
As it happens, he wrote a promising screenplay called, “Planet of the Hairless Hominids”, about a dystopic future in which all good Neecknabian chimps were ruled by self-absorbed, ecologically retarded hominids he styled “humans”. (We had yet to discover the Milky Way Galaxy and your backwards corner of it in those days.) A producer showed some interest in it, but alas, did not buy the manuscript.
And wasn’t Kargnak surprised when the next summer, “Planet of the Humans” appeared at his local Chimpaplex? It was a huge hit, and made millions, and was (of course) based entirely on Kargnak’s original screenplay. He didn’t see a single banana skin for it, and thus Kargnak gave up the writing game for the bloodthirsty and cruel warlord business. At which he was moderately successful, taking over all of Neecknaw and some of our neighboring planets.
Actually, he didn’t give up writing completely, as he penned the Kargnakian Code, which for the first time set out all of our laws in a logical and ordered way. Under the Kargnakian Code, plagiarism is a capital crime, and the condemned are put to death by having all their hairs plucked out (very painful when you’re covered with them), then having a thousand unpublished writers slicing them with the sharpest paper they can find, while lemons are crushed in a massive press above them made of all unpublished writer’s manuscripts. Oh, and hot pokers are inserted wherever paper cuts cannot be administered.
Good god, that’s horrible! What about self-plagiarism?
Self-plagiarism is style, baby. (*)
Next time: What should I say when my girlfriend asks me, “what are you thinking”?
*) Alfred Hitchcock said this defending repetition of his filming techniques in the London Observer, 8 Aug., 1976. Actually, he said “self-plagiarism is style.”
Alltop is 100% original. Originally published November, 2008.
Economics 101
My economics professor told the following joke in class, so you know some of them have a sense of humor and understand theirs is a dismal science:
A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, “Lets smash the can open with a rock.” The chemist says, “Let’s build a fire and heat the can first.” The economist says, “Lets assume that we have a can-opener…”
Of course, you might want to hang out with them, because you might get lucky and score some Blue Light.
Alltop hopes that’s the invisible hand of the market touching it. Found the eco-joke at Prof. John D. Stiver’s pages, and of course the cartoon came from the delightful SMBC.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for Robots
I’m not sure that robots need food, but the rest of this seems accurate, particularly the top.
Alltop is a self-actualized chatbot. More of Lunchbreath’s latest toons here.
The innevitable toaster uprising
Ah, if only it would be so easy to fix!
Alltop is feeling pluralistic about the Singularity. Cartoon by the talented (and acutely observant) Rob Cunningham, and used under a CC license.
Professor Quippy: Writers beware, those rejection notes have a cost
New research at the University of California, Los Angeles, shows that social rejection may increase your risk of developing arthritis.
This explains all the unpublished (or barely published) writers hobbling around with bad knees, out-of-work actors with permanent back-aches, and painters with gnarled knuckles. The cost of all those rejections has caused arthritis. (And a certain amount of existential crisis.)
Actually, I’m just inferring this — the study only looked at social rejection in the context of in-person rejection. (Which would STILL apply to the actors.) According to the New Scientist:
Psychologist George Slavich and colleagues asked 124 volunteers to give speeches and perform mental arithmetic in front of a panel of dismissive observers. Saliva analysis showed they exhibited elevated levels of two inflammation markers. … Functional MRI scans showed this triggered increased activity in two brain regions associated with rejection. Participants with the highest inflammatory responses showed the greatest increases in brain activity.
The research hopes to help understand the brain’s role in conditions related to inflammation (including asthma, arthritis, cardiovascular disease and depression).
Also, it is actively trying to discourage people from going into the arts, because apparently, low pay, parental ridicule and extensive existential crisis aren’t enough.