Category: Oddities

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Oddities Software and Programming

The YAPC 2002 movie

Programming language syntax humor! Fun at the expense of Europeans with silly names! Boobies and Man-tits! All in this short and cute movie made in a Perl conference back in 2002. It’s basically a series of in-jokes featuring people you’ve probably only read of in CPAN. I stumbled across this by asking google why someone wrote in his blog that Abigail was a “he”. Turns out that being called Abigail and sounding a bit flaky (Abigail of the Perl-universe has some passionate rant somewhere about saving sick kids in the third world with standards-compliant HTML) doesn’t neccessarily mean you are a woman; it could easily just mean that you’re Dutch.

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Oddities

100 things we didn’t know this time last year

So now we know that The Queen has never used a computer, that Koalas have fingerprints, that one in 18 people has a third nipple, that one in six children think that broccoli is a baby tree, that you can’t legally reserve a sun lounger by putting a towel on it, that lionesses prefer dark brunettes, and that giant squid eat each other, especially during sex. 100 things we didn’t know this time last year (BBC)

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Oddities short

Falling Sand Game

Falling Sand game (Java) – via digg, via Fark.

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Oddities Resources

World without blood, world without tears

Maclean’s : The end of the period

In 2006, a new oral contraceptive called Anya, developed to “put women in control of when or if they want to menstruate,” is expected to hit the Canadian and U.S. markets. Manufactured by Collegeville, Penn.-based Wyeth Pharmaceuticals — and currently pending approval by Health Canada — Anya is the first low-dose birth control pill designed to be taken 365 days a year, without placebos (the hormone-free sugar pills taken at the end of every 28-day cycle). Early findings report that Anya is just as effective in preventing pregnancy as traditional oral contraceptives (98 per cent). And as an added bonus, since Anya provides a steady stream of hormones, it promises to quash a woman’s usual cyclical fluctuations, virtually wiping out all the irksome symptoms of PMS.

“irksome” symptoms, indeed.
Imagine how they they must be for women.

(Apropos our in-party discussion of “rabbits and menstruation” – I.’s research and Wikipedia say that only primates menstruate; rabbits have “estrus”).

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Blather Oddities

M/F/Non

Seed: Girls Gone Wild … for Monkeys

The researchers found that while straight men are only aroused by females of the human variety, straight women are equally aroused by all human sexual activity, including lesbian, heterosexual and homosexual male sex, and at least somewhat aroused by nonhuman sex.

[via kottke]
This build on research done earlier (by some of the same people) which showed that a man’s sexual arousal correlates very well with his sexual orientation, but women (both gay and straight) get aroused by pretty much any old thing (One presumes that it isn’t an artifact of their testing equipment…)
I found the commentary by the female psychologist at the end of the article entertaining: she’s clearly trying to explain why women’s reactions are normal, and wondering why men react differently:

Barbara Bartlik, a psychiatry professor at Cornell, said she was not alarmed by the women’s response to the nonhuman stimuli.
“I don’t know why this has surprised everybody that women get aroused watching humans and animals,” she says. “Animals, because of the way they function in an uninhibited manner…can be very arousing to look at when they copulate.”
However, Bartlik was surprised that the men did not have the same response as the women.
“I would wonder if the men weren’t concerned about being labeled as homosexual or perverse by being interested in these things, and therefore their erections were inhibited,” she said.

Uh, right. Men restrain their erections because of their stronger inhibitions. Clearly, a statement made by someone who was never on the other end of the penis.
I wonder if male arousal is focused on the actual act of sex, while females arousal is tied to the concept of sex. Men think about having sex, women think about sex in the abstract.
Women. Abstract Thinking.
Now that’s bizzare.