Special Interest Group on CRAP

Thoughts by Kevin McCurley
Not affiliated with ACM. They have their own crap.

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Entries Tagged as 'Amusements'

Everyone needs a hobby

February 7th, 2008 ·

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Tags: Amusements

How to pronounce FQL

January 28th, 2008 ·

If you are a geek, you know about the SQL query language, which is pronounced “sequel”. Facebook just released a new query language with the acronym FQL. I suspect that this will come to be known as “fecal”.

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Tags: Amusements

Novel Manhole Covers

October 6th, 2007 ·

A recent posting by Bruce Schneier about some beautiful Japanese manhole covers reminded me of something that occurred a few weeks ago. While taking a walk around the Google complex I noticed an unusual manhole cover. As my colleague and I continued walking I realized that this offers an entirely new form of advertising opportunity, [...]

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Tags: Amusements

Whirled Peas…literally

September 29th, 2007 ·

At work the other day, one of the cafes had a theme that exploited the homophones of peas and peace. In particular the menu had a peace sign on it, and they had dishes that used peas in them. One of the dishes was “Visualize Whirled Peas”. Not only do the chefs at Google cook [...]

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Tags: Amusements

Principles of Economics

August 8th, 2007 ·

I’ve recently been reading a lot of economics in order to understand what the big problems are in the field. I could have saved myself a lot of work by watching this.

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Tags: Amusements

Powerpoint at its best

August 6th, 2007 ·

I swear I’ve sat through presentations like this. The graphs looks suspiciously like a power law distribution, which makes it more realistic. Be sure to watch it to the end… If you’re interested there is also the chicken chicken paper.

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Tags: Amusements

Blue screen of death (linux version too!)

June 5th, 2007 ·

I recently took a trip in which I was amused to see two operating systems crash in dedicated applications. The first instance was on Delta airlines in-flight video system, which about an hour into the trip decided that it really didn’t want to finish playing the video, so it prompty gave a kernel panic and [...]

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Tags: Amusements

Spell correction gone mad

February 23rd, 2007 ·

If you search Yahoo for the Journal of Craptology, they silently apply their spell correction to give the wrong result (namely the Journal of Cryptology). Sometimes we can be too clever for our own good in trying to produce recull and precision.

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Tags: Amusements