Category Archives: Fun

Fun

How to be an Ex-Masturbator

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This is just too awesome for words. Quoted from the page:

When God wants to take His message of deliverance across the globe, there is NO stopping Him.  Check out this feature of the EX Shirts on one of the fastest growing Christian Hip Hop magazines in the US: www.DaSouth.com. Also, hit up their new article, “Masturbation” It breaks down the lies behind masturbation, explains how this is actually a sin, and how we can be freed through Christ.

And if you need even more encouragement, check out ya girl Dameco’s latest blog entry, in which she fearlessly testifies to her struggle and victory over masturbation!

We pray that you will join us in breaking the silence on an issue that has stayed silent for too long. Be the first to boldly rock your Ex-Masturbator shirt and let’s change the world baby! Click below on one of the pictures to order your shirt.

My problem is that I can never tell if campaigns like this are serious or a deliberate attempt at humour. I know, I know, I’m a sick, sick person.

Fun, Politics

Mugabe on holiday in Malaysia

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It seems that the President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is on a month-long holiday in Malaysia. According to the news report, his wife has withdrawn about RM330,000.00 for the trip from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and the couple owns a home in the country. I wonder where it is. Perhaps one reason why they’re here might be because the travel bans imposed on them by the EU and the USA are still in effect. I guess the Malaysian government doesn’t have a problem with them spending their poor country’s money here.

It’s also worth noting that Mugabe’s wife, Grace Mugabe, has often been a target of criticism for her habit of going on expensive shopping sprees while most Zimbabweans are deprived of even the most basic necessities.

Fun, News & Politics

Porn industry asks for bailout

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Since I spotted this both on LYN and QT3, I figured it was amusing enough to post. The adult entertainment industry in the United States has just asked the government for a bailout. The article writes:

“People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in the statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

Obviously, this is a tongue-in-cheek move made for publicity reasons rather than a serious grab for cash, though as one astute QT3 poster pointed out, they certainly wouldn’t say no if any cash were actually offered. After all, they’re only asking for US$5 billion, a mere drop in the ocean compared to what’s been doled out already. Still, it does highlight how arbitrary it would be if government’s simply dolled out public money to companies that complained about being unable to survive a downturn. Companies are meant to compete in how well they deliver to consumers what they really want, not in how good they are at persuading public officials to hand them cash.

Fun

Frosty the Snowman

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It’s Christmas, so I thought I should come up with a suitably Grinchy post for the season. Since everyone already knows that Jesus wasn’t actually born any time even near this time of year, I thought I’d point out a little known fact about another icon of Christmas. The opening lyrics of this particular Christmas song should be familiar enough to everyone:

Frosty the Snowman
Was a jolly happy soul
With a corncob pipe and a button nose
And his eyes made out of coal.

Frosty the Snowman
May the children laugh and play
And were they surprised when before their eyes
He came to life that day.

There must have been some magic
In that old silk hat they found
For when they placed it on his head
He began to dance around.

The interesting fact about this song, first released by Gene Autry in the 1950s, is that the original idea wasn’t for it to be about Christmas at all. In the 1970s, one of the song’s writers, Walter Rollins, confessed in an interview in Life magazine, that it was supposed to be about the consequences of a nuclear winter, with the snowman being brought to life amidst the radioactive fallout and the dreams of children of a world without war. Sounds sinister doesn’t it? Unfortunately the producers ultimately decided that a more childish version of the song would have more commercial value.

A pity because the original version of the song would be just the perfect thing to have on while I play Fallout 3 on Christmas day.

Fun

My photo rendered using polygons

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Okay, this is really nothing more than a cool toy, but it is still really cool! This is made using a simple application by Roger Alsing that starts with a blank slate and then adds some random polygons to it. The result is compared to the source image and if it looks closer then it is kept, otherwise it is discarded. The kept result is then further mutated and compared again and so forth. After a while, it gets pretty close to the original source.

There was a bit of skeptism about this when this was first spread over the Internet, but the creator has since made his source code and binaries available via Google, so go download it and play with it if you’re so inclined. The author originally used the program to generate an image of the Mona Lisa and he managed to get a very good representation after about 900,000 generations and using 50 polygons. Unfortunately I happened to pick a rather more complex photo, and this is what I got after having the computer working at it whole night. As you can see, it’s up to 2.3 million generations and 172 polygons.

The author calls this an example of genetic programming, but I’m not sure if the term is appropriate because usually these things involve a population pool of multiple competitors in each generation while there is only ever one instance in each generation in this program. People have been using this as an example to implement their own versions that do involve competition between multiple mutations though, and it will be interesting to see if they are more efficient at arriving at the source image.