Miscellaneous

from Prairie Home Companion…

Doctor Jokes from PHC

Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles (1950):

Life is a miracle. Art is an expression of that miracle. Science is an investigation of that miracle.

(via Great Geek Manual)

The 'My Dog is Cool' campaign seeks to prevent the very preventable deaths of pets left in overheated cars.

(via hardknoxfirst)

Lifehack suggests 6 Steps To Remove TV From Your Life.

2. Remove your cable subscription.
Being subscribed to the cable TV makes you feel compelled to keep watching, so as to maximize the value of your subscription. If you’re serious about removing TV from your life, unsubscribe immediately. Forget about the line-up of shows on cable – not only do you get a big chunk of your life back, you also save money in the process.

Later today I will be having dinner with a lovely young lady who collects eggs. So I started to wonder, on this day set aside to celebrate the founding of our nation… does she know this little ditty about turkeys, eagles, and eggs from the film '1776'?

My beautiful and scary-intelligent sister-in-law is a physician specializing in the brain. So, naturally, when I see a list of 18 Beautiful Infographics About the Human Brain, I'm going to have to post it here.

If you are interested in seeing what the different regions of the brain are responsible for, this infographic is quite enlightening.

It offers a look at what goes on in different areas, such as the fact that reading and comprehension take place in the parietal lobe, near the occipital lobe. You can also see that sensory speech goes over more than one lobe. Color coding makes it easier to identify different regions.

Five years in, the new Doctor Who is an unqualified success. For those who may have yet to discover the series, here are my two favorite stories thus far:

Series 1: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances

The Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper) follow a mysterious spacecraft to London during the Blitz, only to encounter an equally mysterious — and terrifying — child:

Series 4:Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead

The Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) visit the biggest library in the universe, and discover another mysterious child and a deadly danger lurking in the shadows:

Series 5: Preview

Matt Smith portrays the Eleventh Doctor in the current series. I haven't seen all the episodes myself, so instead of a favorite, here is a BBC preview. You might want to find something to hang on to…

The gorgeous Christina Hendricks portrays the most voluptuous android in the universe in the video for the Broken Bells' 'Ghost Inside':

I think I'm in love…

The first computer I ever owned was one I had built myself, from colored beads and little tin cans. I'd found the instructions in an article in Scientific American by the great Martin Gardner, who passed away last week at the age of 95. Watch a documentary about this remarkable man.

The Geek Alphabet lists the ABCs the way they were meant to be listed.

via Neatogeek

Here's one…

Read the rest.

(via The Great Geek Manual)

Born of Hope, a non-commerical film made by fans of The Lord of the Rings, is a testament to the power of Tolkien's myth.

This hour long original drama is set in the time before the War of the Ring and tells the story of the Dúnedain, the Rangers of the North, before the return of the King. Inspired by only a couple of paragraphs written by Tolkien in the appendices of the Lord of the Rings we follow Arathorn and Gilraen, the parents of Aragorn, from their first meeting through a turbulent time in their people's history.

"The Ifth of Oofth" [PDF] is a very strange science fiction story by mainstream novelist Walter Tevis, who wrote the stories that became the films The Hustler and The Color of Money.

The thing, upon examination, appeared simple: a more or less cross-shaped construction of several dozen one-inch cubes, half of them of thin, transparent plastic, the other half made of thin little sheets of aluminum. Each cube seemed to be hinged to two others very cunningly and the arrangement of them all was somewhat confusing.

Finally, I said, "How many cubes?" I had tried to count them, but kept getting lost.

"Sixty-four," he said. "I think."

"You think?"

"Well—" He seemed embarrassed. "At least I made sixty-four cubes, thirty-two of each kind; but somehow I haven’t been able to count them since. They seem to… get lost, or shift around, or something."

"Oh?" I was becoming interested. "May I pick it up?"

"Certainly," he said, and I took the affair, which was surprisingly lightweight, in my hands and began folding the cubes around on their hinges. I noticed then that some were open on one side and that certain others would fit into these if their hinging arrangements would allow them to.

I began folding them absently and said, "You could count them by marking them one at a time. With a crayon, for instance."

"As a matter of fact," he admitted, blushing again, "I tried that. Didn’t seem to work out. When I finished, I found I had marked six cubes with the number one and on none of them could I find a two or three, although there were two fours, one of them written in reverse and in green." He hesitated. "I had used a red marking pencil." I saw him shudder slightly as he said it, although his voice had been casual-sounding enough. "I rubbed the numbers off with a damp cloth and didn’t… try it again."

(via MetaFilter)

An email is circulating that claims that telemarketers will soon start calling cell phone numbers, and that everyone should rush over to the National Do Not Call Registry and add their cell numbers. Well, you can do that if you like, but Snopes.com reminds us that it ain't necessarily so.