Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

That’s what the US Postal Service claims, on its tracking website.

October in Sweden can get (I’m told) pretty darn chilly–is it unpatriotic to hope that no “Foreign Customs” will hold up my cozy longjohns very much longer?

More from Shamus Young’s “DM of the Rings”: Gimli and Legolas as D & D warriors.

Aaargh! I can’t believe I read the whole thing! Saving throw against finding anything else so geeky and funny!

“DM of the Rings” is a wonderfully comic rework of Lord of the Rings–images from the movie with cartoon dialog from a bunch of guys playing the story as a D & D game. Just for example…

• Frodo aka “Dave’s character”: Do we all have to be hobbits? My stats are rubbish!
  Aragorn: I’m not a hobbit. I get to be a ranger!
• Sam: Look at those guys! I’m going to need a stepladded just to stab them in the knees.
• Legolas: My character is a man!
  Aragorn: Your character portrait says different-Meow!

Really fun, really silly–and I swear I’ve played D&D with every one of these guys. Heck, I remember when was one of these guys!

Thanks, Akma, for the great link to nerdiferous humor–and happy birthday, Akma!

2007 My little sister Ri and her little white dog

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

• “So the fairy godmother rewarded the good little puppy by giving her a magic box that would always be full of dog biscuits.”
• “And then the beautiful princess said, “Who wants to come with me? I feel like going for another walk!”
• “Once upon a time there was a handsome but clumsy prince who couldn’t help dropping food onto the floor.”

Thanks to my sis for that last line, and to her dog for lots of inspiration!

Fusilli “waves and particles” – Photorecipe

Originally uploaded by funadium

Here’s something I haven’t seen before, over on Flickr–a “photorecipe” that combines food instructions with helpful pictures of each different stage. And, in this special case, with a physics flavor!

The creator, Funadium teaches both cooking and photography in Italy, close to France, but with lessons in English.

Judging from these fusilli, those courses would be delicious.

Wonderful Tshirt hand-painted for Frank

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

what the back of this Tshirt says?

Thanks to Luis and Cinzia for Frank’s new favorite Tshirt.

This could have been avoided if Segways weren’t so darn annoying:

Wild turkeys went after Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory technician recently as he rode his Segway to the office.
They chased him and pecked at him according to a local television reporter who witnessed the entire incident.

You have to admire how Burson-Marsteller or somebody very like them has kept this from being a Segway story and turned it instead into a local LBL story.

Finalists — Strictly no flour!

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Sign of the times–said times being final exams for Oxford University students.

The Turf Pub welcomes said students, but not food fights or silly string.

But if they behave–“Well done and enjoy your day.”

Elsewhere in the Turf Pub, a sign claiming that it was their own terrace where Bill Clinton tried marijuana but didn’t inhale.

Here’s a fun science mystery with surprising ways to catch bad guys and metadata flavor–which makes it hard to know where to begin this blogpost…

Bad guys are juicy–suppose that you’re a bad guy. Suppose you want to fake bookkeeping data or election results. Well, bwa-ha-ha, bad guy, you’re going to leave a mathematical “bad-guys-R-us” slimy trail–because fake random numbers like yours don’t obey Benford’s Law. Real ones do.

Benford’s Law describes–oddly, nobody understands why–many if not most huge collections of numbers.* Baseball statistics, lengths of rivers, areas of counties. Half-lives of radioactive isotopes. And vote counts, when those vote counts aren’t tampered with.

Big numbers have nine choices for their first digit–1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9. Right? So you’d expect that one-ninth of all big numbers would start with each of those digits.

Bzzzt, wrong! Almost 1/3 of Benford-law-following numbers start with 1–just for example. Naive human fraudsters, on the other hand, create fake numbers that mostly start with 5 or 6–poking their inventions into what they imagine is anonymity’s forgiving middle.

Now for the dirty math books–I knew you were waiting–Benford’s Law was found, independently, in 1881 (Simon Newcomb) and 1938 (Frank Benford). Lisa Zyga at PhysOrg.com says:

Benford and Newcomb stumbled upon the law in the same way: while flipping through pages of a book of logarithmic tables, they noticed that the pages in the beginning of the book were dirtier than the pages at the end. This meant that their colleagues who shared the library preferred quantities beginning with the number one in their various disciplines…

Yes, dirty library-book pages! Important pre-Google metadata about what people before you found interesting.

Bad guys who created fake election data imagined that they were just creating new data–but Benford’s Law meant they left metadata behind. Forensic teams who want to find election fraud can use Benford’s Law to find out which sets of data have bad guys behind them.

Now, as for you good guys, for deeper insight into metadata, I recommend David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellanous. Meanwhile, for you bad guys, one message of both David Weinberger and Frank Benford is paraphrased clearly in Matthew 10:26:

…there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.

Uh-oh. And I consider my own self a good guy.

* p.s. Not all data sets follow Benford’s Law. Both Wikipedia and Zyga give counter-examples, such as (to quote Zyga) “data sets that are arbitrary and contain restrictions..For example, lottery numbers, telephone numbers, gas prices, dates, and the weights or heights of a group of people.”

Cats talking babytalk (e.g. iCanHasCheezburger) are no longer the silliest thing on the web. Today’s Invisible Lawnmower Prize for Inanity goes to this list of top-ten corporate reputations. Excuse me, Cision (formerly Delahaye Index), but even Numo the hedgehog would look down his little nosicle at your selections–

# 1 on your list is…Microsoft????

Ummm–the security holes in their software, year after year? The ongoing antitrust mess? The embarrassment known as Vista? Heckuva job building that reputation, Microsoft!

# 6 on your list is… Exxon Mobil????

After spending millions of dollars for multiple years to
create fake public doubt about global warming, ExxonMobil declared in 2007 that they will be changing their tactics. Instead, they’ll now be funding doubts about what we should do to address global warming. I don’t think this really makes them good corporate citizens.

# 8 out of 10 is… Wal-Mart Stores????

Wal-Mart’s giant PR blunders in 2006–including the loudly-outed fake grass-roots-iness of Working Families for Walmart–may give some small support to the idea that in 2007 they’re doing better. But–in the top ten of corporate reputations????

lol PR guyz. You can has cheezburger, but you look like m0r0nz.