Pareidolia strikes

I saw this logo on a truck of an Austin party rental company. Immediately I thought, what a weird logo for this kind of business. The dude's beard and the turban would not indicate an ethnic or religious group that's known for partying. :-) And the spike growing out of his eye... just surreal. Has he smoked too many substances? Is that what the company means by "Keep Austin Partying?"

Then I realized, it's a bird. That's not a beard, it's a wing. And the "spike" is the bird's beak.

It's no wonder I prefer text-based user interfaces to graphic. I never understood why the icons in a graphical UI are so obscure and hard to recognize. At least to me, perhaps less so to other people. When I was learning image-editing programs, people would sometimes tell me to use the "bucket" (a Fill icon), but instead of a tilted bucket, I would see a hand with a mitten. I also couldn't understand why the old-time Windows Control Panel icon was a cat. Yes, a cat. I realize it's supposed to be a bunch of tools, but all those tools look like long, skinny cat's legs.

With faces, it's even worse. We humans are wired to see faces everywhere. So I won't be laughing at the next person who sees Virgin Mary in a toast.

Pipelined motherhood

Not long ago a friend, referring to my second child (who just turned 1), asked me how my second round of motherhood was treating me. He tried to use a computer metaphor for it, so he put it as "how is serial motherhood going?" Then he immediately admitted that this metaphor was inaccurate. It's not really serial, because I'm raising two children, not one at a time. You could say it's parallel, but that doesn't convey the idea of going from one child to two. So, pausing for a bit, he decided it could be called pipelined motherhood. Since I haven't heard about pipelined architecture, which (as a very oversimplified explanation) lets computers run tasks in parallel by starting them at different times, I thought about it in UNIX pipe terms. So I asked: "Do you think I feed one child the output of the other?"

ArmadilloCon: Stump the Panel

Panelists at this event are supposed to come up with mundane and science-fictional uses for objects supplied by the audience. They can also use objects they brought themselves. This year's team is C. J. Mills, Steve Wilson, and Chris Roberson.

Below, left-to-right, are:

1. A pez dispenser in the shape of a character from Ratatouille. Chris Roberson thinks it's an oracle. You ask it a question, and its head tilts back to reveal an answer comes from its neck. The answer will be yes, no, or pez. So you have to formulate the question really carefully.

2. Chris Roberson thinks this neti pot may play a role in fertility rituals. Steve Wilson thinks it extracts something from your brain through your nose.

3. A metallic squirrel that cracks nuts with its tail. Someone in the audience thinks this is a robotic squirrel designed to teach aliens not to molest the local wildlife.

4. Munchkin game pieces. C. J. Mills thinks they are lumberjacks that you rehydrate when you come to the forest. A woman from the audience says they are snacks for a gnome-eating alien.

5. This ethernet hub... You'll just have to click on the image to find out what Chris Roberson thought it was. Beware of a gross-out factor.

6. A cell phone with an cute / evil face on it. It is unanimously decided that this phone isn't really evil, it's just charmingly possessed. It loses your messages, and texts your boyfriend at inappropriate times. C. J. Mills thinks it's a psychic phone that lets you know exactly when opportunity is.

7. C. J. Mills and Steve Wilson hold a cable reel, which, as someone suggested, might be a prayer box for an orthodox giant.

Here is an article about a "Stump the Panel" from the ArmadilloCon 2008, with Rhonda Eudaly, S. Andrew Swann, and Lou Antonelli. And here is an article about a "Stump the Panel" from the ArmadilloCon 2006, with James P. Hogan on it.

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2009 are in my photo gallery.

I knew this first-hand for decades

... but it's always good to hear an authority say it. An authority on humor, no less. And British! Aren't British supposed to be foremost experts on humor. It is thus with a huge sense of validation that I present this news:

From this article on msnbc.com:

The president of the humor society, British sociologist Christie Davies, offered insights Tuesday on the state of humor in today's world.

Among other things, he said, jokes in eastern Europe were a lot better when the communists ran the show.

"Once you have a democracy with free speech, you have fewer jokes," said Davies, an emeritus professor at the University of Reading, in England. "Jokes, in many ways, are a way of getting around restrictions on what you can say. That was a very important factor in eastern Europe."

Overheard at the ArmadilloCon programming brainstorming meeting

At the yesterday's ArmadilloCon programming brainstorming meeting, people were asked to come up with ideas for discussion panels, also indicating who they think would be good on that panel. No ideas were off limits, except totally unrealistic ones -- don't come up with an idea that requires a presence of a person who certainly won't be there So for example, a panel on Pirates with Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley won't be considered. An interview with a dead writer wouldn't work either. To which K replied: why, we could have a "seance fiction" panel with Arthur C. Clarke!