My favorite Google easter eggs

Teaching prep is killing me this semester, so I think it's time for cheap thrills. Here are my favorite Google easter eggs:

1) Search for "do a barrel roll"

2) Search for "tilt" (or "askew")

3) Search for "anagram"

4) Search for "recursion"

The last one is my favorite. More to come in t-minus 53 days!

Why movie-playing software has a "repeat" button

Short shameful confession: I had more fun than I can possibly tell you when I drew that last comic. Not only is it fun to create comics visually, but Comic Life makes these adorable sound effects when you resize images, delete them, increase the font sizes, etc.

My readers who are software designers - you seriously need to make more programs have cute sound effects. Can you imagine how much more joyful it would for people when they made a database entry it said, "YEAH!" every time they hit 'commit', or "Vooooooop!" when they resized a column in Excel? Help a girl out, put the FUN back in functional!

Anywho, on to today's post topic, which occurred to me in the wee hours of the morning.

For the longest time, I couldn't understand why movie playing software had a "repeat" button. These days I barely have the attention span or time to sit through one movie, let alone the same movie several times. I thought, well, maybe it's for those always-on televisions in places like hospital waiting areas and electronics stores. The people that work there, forced to watch this same horrible movie repeatedly, are not going to want to get up every time the credits roll. Especially if it's playing on forty TVs.

But, still, that can't possibly explain the design decision for a repeat button.

No, it had to be something else...

Image Description: Top panel, alarm clock says 4:12. Next panel, bright-eyed kid says,
"Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy!". Next panel, bleary-eyed mother. Next panel,
kid says, "Wakey WAKEY, Mommy!". Last panel, an iPad showing "Finding Nemo", with a
magic wand pointing to the repeat control with the words "Magic!"

I remember the first time I saw the magic. It was winter, and my son was at a party with a dozen small children. They were indoors and literally bouncing off the walls. After about an hour, another parent said, "How about a movie?" and all the hyper kids screamed, "YEAH!". He put the movie in. Snap - just like that - immediate silence. Stillness. They were transfixed for hours.

With great power comes great responsibility, speaking of comics. But ParentWars be damned, bright-eyed children at 5am qualifies as the fairest use of television ever conceived.

Prescient spam

I work in area X. I recently wrote a paper on area X_1, and submitted it to a conference. It was rejected. So I revised it and resubmitted it to a more topic-relevant conference, and it is currently under review. There is absolutely nothing in the public sphere indicating that I have done work in field X_1 that I am aware of.

Today I got a spammy email from one of those shady journals that spams anyone who ever published something in IEEE Xplore or the ACM Digital Library, saying:

Dear Dr. FCS,      // Not a bad start, calling me "Dr." instead of "Ms." (or "Mr.")

Our Journal of X has a special issue coming up on X_1. Given your expertise in this area we would like to invite you to submit something. 

Sincerely,

Editor in Chief of Shady Journal

Mostly I am fascinated that they somehow know I am working in area X_1. Looking at the editorial board of the shady journal and the PC of the two conferences this paper has been seen by, I see no obvious overlap.

The funny thing is, this journal never spams me on areas of X_2, X_3, or X_4 (none of which I work in, but they publish in), so this is fairly deliberate spam.

So how did they know about my new professional foray? Clearly this is evidence that they are psychic. Or one of my reviewers blabbed. I'd say it's a 50/50 probability of either.

Dear Randall

You are, truly, the reason why Computer Scientists* make fantastic comic writers. Thanks for making me laugh today.

♥,
FCS

(*) I guess technically you're a physicist, but really, what's a few bits and atoms between friends?

http://xkcd.com/859/

Journal of Universal Rejection

This is absolutely fanTASTIC. I especially love the archives.

About the Journal

The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:

  * You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.
  * There are no page-fees.
  * You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
  * The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
  * You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
  * Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.

PS: I'm really tempted to submit something, just to see what happens.

PPS: The other joke here is, "Q: We're in CS - what about the conference of universal rejection? A: Wasn't that last year's SIGGRAPH?" (Or CVPR? SIGCOMM? Not sure what the snobbiest conference is these days, people love to complain about all of them!)

Your Daily Knuth

I keep meaning to write a script that greets me with a Knuth quote when I log in every morning, but I haven't had time.

Today while looking up something else I came across these two gems, though, and thought I'd share:

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" 

and

"If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy."

I sometimes think Knuth is like the Mae West of Computer Science. Or maybe Confucius. Which I guess makes Stallman... Sun Tzu? :-)

For all the Gleeks out there

This interactive video, 8-bit Glee, is absolutely brilliant, and will bring back memories if you enjoyed playing Zelda back in the 80s. :)