Feb 22, 2011

The revenge of Comic Sans.

History, English and science students performed better in the relevant class assessments when the study materials were printed in Comic Sans Italicized, Haettenschweiler or Monotype Corsiva than did the pupils who learned from the original teachers' fonts.


Feb 21, 2011

Many Consumers Believe 36 Months Is Longer Than 3 Years.

Remember, remember...
...the arbitrary nature of the unit in which information is expressed.

Feb 18, 2011

Brains.

Even cheaper than printer ink.

Feb 17, 2011

Terra incognita.

"A library or a single book can be compared to a virgin land that can be reached by some colonizing organisms that behave like pioneer species on a nude soil."

Feb 16, 2011

Professor Badass by himself:

In 1958, B.F. Skinner and Erich Fromm attended the same California symposium. Skinner found that Fromm “proved to have something to say about almost everything, but with little enlightenment,” and “when he began to argue that people were not pigeons, I decided that something had to be done”:

"On a scrap of paper I wrote ‘Watch Fromm’s left hand. I am going to shape a chopping motion’ and passed it down the table to Halleck Hoffman. Fromm was sitting directly across from the table and speaking mainly to me. I turned my chair slightly so that I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He gesticulated a great deal as he talked, and whenever his left hand came up, I looked straight at him. If he brought the hand down, I nodded and smiled. Within five minutes he was chopping the air so vigorously that his wristwatch kept slipping out over his hand. (...) It was an unfair trick, but Fromm had angered me — first with his unsupported generalizations about human behavior and then with the implication that nothing better could be done if ‘people were regarded as pigeons.’”

From Skinner’s 1983 memoir A Matter of Consequences.

Feb 15, 2011

Mammalian strategies...

..were adopted by the Transformers.

Dec 9, 2010

Stimulus Generalization:

Humour made it simple.


Telling the bees.

“And he said if a man owned a beehive and that man died, the bees must be told about it before sun-up next morning, or else the bees would all weaken down and quit work and die. Jim said bees wouldn't sting idiots; but I didn't believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn't sting me.”
Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn.

Nov 24, 2010

The plural of u is us.

Taking the "it's complicated" to a whole new dimension.

Nov 23, 2010

Another step towards the future world domination by cephalopods:

Flying squids.

Photo by Bob Hulse

Nov 22, 2010

And you know why mama elephant does not like lizards?

Bad manners. She does not like theirs.

Photo by Martin Nyfeler

Nov 19, 2010

This is the Eye of Providence.

Peacock mantis shrimp eyes' are capable of serial or parallel vision; possesses trinocular vision (WTF?!) and depth perception; colour vision from ultra-violet to infra-red using at least 16 different photoreceptor types (you, my friend, only have 4); detection of polarized light and circular polarized light (you don't even imagine what this is, right?).

Nov 18, 2010

The anatomy of the kiwi.

You know this was bound to happen.

Nov 17, 2010

Proboscidea Herpetophobia.

Mama elephant does not like lizards.

Nov 16, 2010

Meta Flamingo...

...is now available to do Olympic opening ceremonies, dictators' birthdays, weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Nov 15, 2010

A world of PDF's.

Even AI's will not be able to fight against the scientific referencing contingencies.

Nov 12, 2010

The weird converter.

1 African elephant weighs as much as 110 Jennifer Aniston’s.
The length of 1 T-Rex is equivalent to almost 126 flaccid penis.
106 humans producing saliva during their lifetime will fill 1 Olympic swimming pool.

Nov 11, 2010

Migration.

Do it at least once.

Nov 10, 2010

The data output of human ejaculation.

If a human sperm cell contains 37.5 MegaBytes of genetic information (Similar to a CD capacity), and in a milliliter we have 100 million sperms (Roughly the population of Mexico), and on average one ejaculation releases 2.25 ml of sperm (Half of a teaspoon), that means an average ejaculation represents a data output of 1687.5 TeraBytes (The equivalent of the collected data of 10 U.S. Library of Congress).

Nov 9, 2010

Literary mimicry.

And then the photometric and radiometric parameters came along and spoiled all romanticism.

Glo-Glo le poisson rouge. Luce et Pierre Morel, 1946.