The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science

I just read a great article on how to maintain healthy skepticism towards what is said to be incredible scientific breakthroughs called The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science. There's a lot of people out there who simply doesn't understand the way scientific research is done or simply wants to call themselves scientists so that they can get more credibility. The advises from this article can work nicely as a guide to when you should have a closer look at what you hear about or even dismiss it.

Planet Haskell

Planet Haskell was launched a couple of days ago and now it is is hosted at planet.haskell.org. It aggregates a couple of Haskell related feeds into one blog. I think this is a very nice idea. It also makes me think that I should start blogging more about programming. This blog I use for all kinds of nonsense so maybe I should start my own programming related blog. When I'm thinking about it I do have quite a lot of things to write about that is programming related.

Fancy Pants Adventure

Via digg.com I found this marvelous flash based platform game called Fancy Pants Adventure. Not only has it really cool graphics, hilarious animations and sweet music, it is also very playable with well designed levels. The game play borrows heavily from Sonic the Hedgehog. The general style of the game when it comes to graphics, sound and humor reminds me of Neverhood, another awesome game although not a platform game.

The only disappointment with this game is that it only features one world with three levels. I played through this pretty quickly including finding all the secrets ("collecting trophies" in FancyPants lingo). When finishing the last level it says that it will be continued. I sure hope that will be the case.

The markings of a geek

OK. I admit it. I am a geek. A true geek.

This weekend me and my girlfriend visited her parents. While browsing their bookshelves my eyes were almost magnetically drawn to one title: Firefox. I felt an immediate urge to read the book despite the fact that I didn't know anything about it. The only reason I had was that I use the browser Firefox for my daily surfing. Now, how geeky is that on a scale between 1 and 10? Well, I don't know but I would rank it pretty high.

Since I'm in the mood for confessing my geekiness I might as well confess another little episode I've had. This one is about perfume, which in itself lowers my geek score but only marginally. Once I was reading the paper and my eyes fell on an ad for perfume for men. Now, these ads don't normally draw my attention but this one did big time because of a single fact: The name of the perfume was π. I was actually quite embarrassed by my immediate urge to buy this perfume, I wasn't wearing that much perfume at all at the time (and I still don't, although this perfume did boost my perfume usage quite a bit for a while). So I resisted the urge for at least two years. But whenever I saw the ad or the actual perfume in some store I felt I simply had to buy it. Eventually I couldn't resist it, returning home with a much too expensive perfume whose name was a transcendental number. I was a fragrant, happy geek.

Piled Higher and Deeper

Since before my previous post I've had a very long blogging slump where I haven't written anything here. So once I got back to this blog I went through a couple of my old posts just to refresh my memory on what I had been writing about before. When I came to the Calvin & Hobbes post I realized it was not right. Apart from Calvin & Hobbes and Zits there is actually one other comic strip that read on a regular basis and enjoy. It is Piled Higher and Deeper. The strip is about a couple of PhD students at Stanford University. Of course the humor is very much concentrated around the life of a PhD student with low salary, long working ours, ignorance from the supervisor and the inability to graduate on time. I don't think it is very well known for people other than PhD students. But as far as I know it is pretty popular among PhD students, at least in the States. So if you're a PhD student I can warmly recommend it. A key element in humor is self recognition and I think you will find a lot of that in this strip.

Completely unrelated: this is my 100th post on this blog. Yay!

Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Yesssssss. Finally! It arrived today. My copy of Wallace & Gromit - Curse of the Were-Rabbit on DVD. I've been waiting for this for several weeks now, almost counting the days.

Now I'm going to watch this movie till the DVD player breaks down. I just love this movie. I gave it 10 on imdb.com. And I was very happy to see that it got the Oscar it so well deserved.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to lock myself in and spend the rest of my life watching this movie.