A Petty Blog

An anthropologist went to study a far-flung tropical island.  He found a guide with a canoe to take him upriver to the remote site where he would make his observations.  About noon on the second day of travel up the river they began to hear drums. The anthropologist asked his guide, “What are those drums?”

The guide turned to him and said, “Drums okay, but VERY BAD when they stop.”

As they traveled the drums grew louder and louder.  The anthropologist was nervous, but the guide merely repeated, “Drums okay. Drums not bad.  When drums stop, then very bad!”

Then the drums suddenly stopped.  Terrified, the anthropologist yelled to the guide: “The drums stopped!  What now?”

The guide crouched down, covered his head with his hands and said, “Guitar solo.”

via Mikey’s Funnies

There’s an old sea story in the Navy about a ship’s captain who inspected his sailors and afterward told the chief boatswain that his men smelled bad. The captain suggested perhaps it would help if the sailors would change underwear occasionally.

The chief responded, “Aye, aye, sir, I’ll see to it immediately!”

The chief went straight to the sailors’ berth deck and announced, “The captain thinks you guys smell bad and wants you to change your underwear.” He continued, “Pittman, you change with Jones; McCarthy, you change with Witkowski; and Brown, you change with Schultz. Now GET TO IT!”

THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS:

Someone may come along and promise “Change,” but don’t count on things smelling any better.

Received from GCFL.net.

We had to go back to the store for more candy - How about you?

For all my programmer friends (via The Blomsma Code):

Click here if the video doesn’t appear.

Hmm.   This is different.

I only thought I was a geek.

Someone made sorting algorithms audible - so you can listen to them:

And this guy might be worse - he wrote a song about sorting!
Sung to the tune of Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler:

With all those random pivots, you’re gonna need to be quite lucky.
He said, “You might call it gamblin’, but to me it’s n-log-n”

Two of the feeds I read reported on the same article yesterday.  I found it amusing that both appeared on the same page, and the second (Flowinga Data) captured my impression of the first (Slashdot) exactly, at least in the headline.

OK Cupid is a huge online dating site with a penchant for data analysis.  In this latest release, they found a correlation between sexual activity and smart phone brand (right).

With this summary from Wired:

“According to OK Cupid’s survey of 552,000 user pictures iPhone users have more sexual partners than BlackBerry or Android owners. By age 30, the average male iPhone user has had about 10 partners while female iPhone users have had 12. By contrast, BlackBerry users hover around 8 partners and Android users have a mere 6.”

“Anonymous Coward” at Slashdot concludes that “Numbers Show iPhone Owners Get More Sex.”

Meanwhile, the folks at Flowing Data points out that this is no more than correlation (never to be confused with causation, as every scientist and statistician should know) and that, just as likely, “iPhone users are more promiscuous.”

The whole thing is just packed with interesting discussion points about worldview, bias, and wishful thinking,

There’s more from OK Cupid - your online date will be 2 inches shorter than he claims, will make 20% less than he states, and that picture is at least two years old, especially if it’s good.

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I found this while reading up on how to achieve lifelong happiness.

Flowchart Helps You Decide What Cereal to Eat(I got Grape Nuts - what did you get?)

It’s easy.  See:

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The author spotted this TSA sign at the airport.
Just makes you wonder what happened to prompt this.