Irrelevance Glorified

As stated earlier this year, I feel this web page is a great place to reveal my latest obsessions. It is now one of those times. The latest focus of my attention is Sporcle, a mostly user-generated database of timed quizzes. The great thing about Sporcle is how easy it is to do one of the quizzes. Just hit the green “Ready? Click To Start” button and start typing. For most of the quizzes, you don’t have to answer the questions in order, just type for answers. That works best for stuff like “Name the 3-Letter Body Parts.” Sometimes, you need to click on the blank that you want to fill, and then type in the correct answer. That works best for things like “Can You Name the Listed Country From Their Name Origin?” They have a large amount of user-generated quizzes, and then every day the Sporcle staff fact-check some of the best and post them as “official” Sporcle tests. All in all, a highly enjoyable distraction.

If I find a quiz I enjoy, I’ll just share it. Today, the quiz is “Can you name the city that each metro/subway system is located in, based on the names of three of its stations?“. For this one, you’ll have to select the blank that you’re trying to answer, since otherwise you could just start spamming famous cities. The reason I found this one interesting is that I got 28/32 correct, even though I had only ridden on 10 of them. You can tell a lot, just based on the names and character set.

I’m a man of obsession. Obsession over stupid things, mostly, but obsession nonetheless. My latest obsession has been Top Gear. I don’t claim to have discovered this show, of course; Top Gear is a British car show that’s been around for decades. They had a reinvention of sorts at the turn of the century, though, and became quite a bit more eccentric. I had seen some clips of the show on YouTube, so I was aware of the crazy stuff that they did, but it wasn’t until I caught Series 10 on Netflix streaming that I realized just how often they did awesome, hilarious stuff.

As I watched that series (originally aired in 2007), I came across this segment, where the Top Gear crew pay an homage (of sorts) to the quality of British craftsmanship. It’s four YouTube videos (32 minutes total), and it’s just about the funniest thing I have watched in the past six months, perhaps even the past year. If you aren’t laughing hysterically at some point in time while watching this, I’m afraid that we can’t be friends.

Over the past weekend, I caught this video up on Fark’s video page. I had never seen it before, and I have to say, I find it positively entrancing. I watch once a day, often more. It’s Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol , this video is from roundabouts 1973, and there are few things I don’t love about it. I love the beat and the growl of the guitar. I love the choreography and the outfits. I love the disco-dancing blonde (Should I have been a child of the 70’s? Perhaps. Without the internet, I probably would get a lot more done) Heck, I even like the horns, and in general I hate horn flourishes in songs (you can thank the ska fad of the late 90’s and early 00’s for that). It’s like something Tarantino would put in his movies.

However, the most fascinating thing about this video, in my mind, is that fact that it’s gibberish. He isn’t speaking Italian (except at the very beginning of the video). He isn’t speaking any language. But it’s not unreasonable to think that it’s supposed to sound like English, with its bluesy edge and faux-American accent. And because of this, your mind starts to try and make sense of and form intelligible words (as has been done with great success in some Bollywood videos). The Japanese have a word for it : Soramimi : mishearing words in one language (or in this case, no language) for another language. The intralingual equivalent is mondegreening, like all those people who thought Jimi Hendrix was saying “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.” Since Adriano is singing in something close to an American accent, it also makes me wonder if non-English speakers hear their own language or just assume that it’s English.

I am an ignorant American; while I know a bit of German and a slight amount of French, I couldn’t really carry a conversation in anything other than English. But I’ve always thought that if you had me listen to people talking in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian for one minute, I would identify 6 out of 6 at least 90% of the time, just based on what I know about the languages. What this video makes me wonder is that if I had each of those people pretend to be speaking in one of the other languages (Assuming it doesn’t just devolve into racist stereotyping), would I do just as well?

Since I consider my Super Power to be the power of the Internet, I had always wanted to just mention weird web sites that I had found. The thing is, I take so long to put stuff up that by the time I want to mention it, the web site in question has gone ‘mainstream’, with national new sites going all Ric Romero on it. So instead of being prescient, I just seem like I’m echoing the talking heads. This is one of those web sites. But it has, for better or worse, clouded my view of the world, so I’ll talk about it anyway. Continue Reading »

The internet is quite the disruptive technology. I can hardly imagine how people wasted time before it existed. I suppose there’s TV, but TV is so limited and passive. Perhaps people just stared at the ceiling? Anyways, as a highly advanced Internet user, I would like to share some of my knowledge with you, the three people who read my website. So this is the first of a multipart series on ways to waste time on the internet.

I’ll start with webcomics. Unlike their newspaper-based counterparts, webcomics have the innate advantage of having no arbitrary format restrictions, no arbitrary need to appeal to a broad audience, and no arbitrary need to be family friendly. As a result, many web comics are about nerds and video games, and many include swearing. Today is an exception.

Today, we talk about Dr. McNinja. I discovered this webcomic for myself a few months ago, and I was immediately hooked. Dr. McNinja is a ninja, who is also a doctor. His family is also from Scotland. Or Ireland, depending on where the story needs him to be. Dr. McNinja is surprisingly well written and drawn. The stories are quite long, and the plot lines are absolutely, hysterically ludicrous. His receptionist is a gorilla named Judy. He updates three times a week, and the past 1 and a half episodes (one is in progress) are even in full color! You should definitely check out Dr. McNinja, and you should always remember to check out the alt-text on each message by mousing over the images.

Well, in the past few weeks there’s been a lot of turmoil in the markets…you’d have to be living in a cave not to see that. I’m sure all my fans out there wonder what I think of the situation.

Why are you asking me? I don’t know anything.

But I can mention some of the websites that have provided interesting economic information over the past few years. None of them offer stock advice or anything like that — most of the time it’s just opinion, analysis, and explanation of economic data. While I, not being an economist, am not in a position to critically analyze them, I’ve followed some of these websites for two or three years, and history has borne a lot of what they’ve said to be right, and that has to count for something.

First up is Paul Krugman, for both his New York Times column as well as his blog. He is often shrill, and is probably considered a bogeyman to conservatives — oh wait, that’s probably something in his favor. His column is mostly policy stuff, his blog is mostly econ stuff. But again…he’s often been right.

More recently, I’ve been reading The Big Picture, by Barry Ritholtz. I started reading it probably over a year ago, when the sub-prime stuff started to really heat up, because he does a lot of stuff on housing. Anyways, he’s an econ nerd and laughs at stuff that’s really only funny to Wall Street types like him, but everything I’ve read has seemed reasoned and, again, is often right.

Lastly, there is Calculated Risk. Less analysis, for the most part, and mostly just news. When I was waiting for my bank to fail, I was checking this blog a lot, because they were doing pretty regular posting on the wheelings and dealings going on by the various players.

Finally, I just found out about a series of shows on This American Life that have focused on the current economic crisis and what caused it. In particular, you should look at Episode 355: The Giant Pool of Money and Episode 365: Another Frightening Show About The Economy. Both are available streaming for free, and you can download Ep. 365 for free and Episode 355 for pay. I listened to both today and I highly recommend them, as they go through some of those terms you may have heard about like collateral debt obligations and credit default swaps and explain the incentives behind the sub-prime bubble, all in a very accessible and entertaining way, with lots of interviews with mortgage brokers and corporate treasurers that have been down in the trenches over the past five years.

So, frequent visitors and random guests, I hope you enjoy the links. Since The Internet is one of my superpowers, it’s only fair that I give back to the community.

First of all, I’m no business man. I’ve got no MBA degree, I’m just a humble engineer. I don’t know how to, say, take risky mortgages and package them all together into an amorphous mass that, while easier to disguise and thus sell, ends up severing the relationship between homeowner and bank. And I probably wouldn’t think of slicing parts of my company out into thousands of pieces, giving those pieces assets, getting banks to give those “special purpose entities” low interest loans based on those assets, and then getting the S.P.E.’s to lend that money to my main corporation to raise money without appearing to be in debt. I’m just not that smart.
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Well, thanks to the strike, I really don’t have much new Daily Show to post. So I’ll just be forced to make stuff up. It has been determined that if I was a superhero, my superpower would be a heightened ability to search for things on the Internet. It’s just how I’ve been blessed. So today….I will talk about the Internet. Have you heard of it?

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