Absinth Dragon

Thanks, miso!

Bogus Paper

MIT students pulled off a nice prank on behalf of the "World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics" They worte a program that generated research papers, complete with analysis and graphs and everything. One of the fake papers actually got accepted to be presented at the conference, even thuogh it was complete gibberish. They tried to point out that the conference's sole purpose is to make money, not giving a shit about scientific value...

"Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access
Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation...."Rooter" features
such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four
independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible
modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our
scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically
pipelined extensions."
(Link)

The holy grail of greeking-bots has been unearthed! :-0

Links (the submitted paper(pdf), research paper generator)

Veggie Pasta

Yesterday was a good day. I went swimming in the morning, then took advantage of the great sunny weather and took a walk through Prague. It was surprisingly quiet, almost no tourists (later I found out they were all standing under the astronomical clock in the Old Town square, hundreds of them). I felt really hungry though, so I went to Billa and bought some stuff. I didn't want any meat, perhaps owing to the the fact of having seen Skritek(here and here) recently:) This is what came out of my resolution to make myself a healthy meal:

1. Ingredients: Tomatoes, zucchini, white yoghurt, corn, green olives and pasta.



2. Boiled water with a bit of oil and salt
3. While it boiled, I have let the corn thaw in the microwave and cut the veggies (I like bigger chunks:)



4. After 10 minutes the pasta was ready. Took them out and cooled them with cold water. Supposedly it prevetns them from sticking to each other...



5. Then I mixed the pasta with a little bit of the youghurt and a lot of basil (forgot to mention that withthe ingredients:)



6. Added vegies and voilá!





It tasted better than it looked...

Note: I admit I was quite bored :-)

Later I went to meet Zaba, Matus and Ivan, they were rock-climbing on Petrin...I'll post some pictures later...

Update: No takze cestoviny sa vraj nemaju prelievať...(Link)

Lorem Ipsum

Ever stumbled upon this text?:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

I have been searching the web for good looking page layouts, and saw this text on quite a few of them. Since I don't understand as much Latin as I would like to, I got curious enough to do a little research.

Supposedly, "Lorem Ipsum" is a passage from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero, making it more than 2000 years old (2010 exactly)! It has been used since the 1500's as a dummy text designed to keep the viewer's attention on the type or layout instead of the actual content. This actually has its own term, it's called "greeking" (although the text is obviously latin NOT greek). In the process, I have found a couple of nice "lorem ipsum" or "greeking" generators:

This one lets you "greek" in various styles, such as Matrix, Marketing, Metropolitan, Pseudo German and Techno Babble. Here's an excerpt of hillbilly greeking:

"Gritts fussin' her ass yer co-op, done mashed, me hoosegow yippie mule cain't. Shootin' guzzled truck bacon mobilehome rustle, preacher jest jail. Beat, pickled, wild muster up afford. Mobilehome skinny greasy caboodle soap catfight, reckon her said country hoosegow askin' got damn..."

This one actually spits out quasi intelligible english text:

"Just the good ol' boys, never meanin' no harm. Beats all you've ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born. Straight'nin' the curve, flat'nin' the hills. Someday the mountain might get 'em, but the law never will. Makin' their way, the only way they know how, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow. Just good ol' boys, wouldn't change if they could, fightin' the system like a true modern day Robin Hood."

It seems to contain passages from real literature, e.g. Knight Rider, A-Team, The Dukes of Hazzard and even Ulysses. Which maybe makes the text too intelligible and thus contrary to the aim of greeking. It's fun nevertheless.

There are tons of greeking bots out there. My favorite is http://ungreek.toolbot.com. It lets you greek using the U.S. or Canadian constitutions, Immanuel Kant, Charlotte Bronte, the Dada Manifesto, the GNU Public License in Swedish or esperanto (and more!):

"Mondskalaj lingvokomunumoj kies parolantoj estas senescepte du aux plurlingvaj Cxiu komunumano akceptis la! Pri la lingvo Ni estas movado por lingvaj. Lingvon ekmastras gxin Plena posedo de Esperanto eblas ecx per. Movado por lingvaj rajtoj Lingva diverseco La naciaj registaroj emas konsideri la. Estas unu el malmultaj mondskalaj. Kaj pritaksi aajn solvojn al la lingva malegaleco kaj lingvaj konfliktoj Ni asertas. Kondamnas al formorto la plimulton de la lingvoj de la mondo Ni estas. Kaj neoficialaj kunvenas sur neuxtrala tereno dank' al la reciproka volo kompromisi Tia ekvilibro? "

Translation of Lorem ipsum at www.lipsum.com

I have to do some (i.e. a LOT) schoolwork today as it is due tomorrow...Hopefully I'll overcome my laziness. At least today...

Google Sightseeing

I love this blog. Too bad it's only USA Google sightseeing though:-( My favoites are the plane graveyard and the Large Type section....

http://www.shreddies.org/gmaps/

Area 51

check out the famous Area-51 in Nevada!! Thanks to google:-)

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=groom+lake,nv&ll=37.272835,-115.798731&sll=36.518555,-115.561924&spn=0.060081,0.085402&sspn=0.127029,0.120678&t=k&hl=en