Kill Ugly Radio | Frank Zappa & Elsewhere: Frank Zappa news, weird links, lumpy gravy. Wanna bun?

It’s the “I Got A Little Bored On This Dull Monday So I Took An Online Test” Post: The Myer-Briggs Test For Programmers! ‘t Would appear I’m an INTJ which I suspect is psycho-babble for “stubborn asocial nerd”.

Posted in Randamonium, Science | 6 Comments »

Oh what a world we live in:

When Jim Stauffer of Petaluma saw a chicken crawling out of a mound of compost like the living dead, he knew something had changed at the egg farm next door. “We called them zombie chickens,” Stauffer said. “Some of them crawled right up out of the ground. They’d get out and stagger around.”

Posted in Bizarre, In The News, Science | 4 Comments »

The super-stimulus theory:

The main idea of the theory is that music is a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality, where “musicality” is actually a perceived property of speech. “Musicality” refers to the property of music that determines how “good” it is, how strong an emotional effect it has, and how much we enjoy listening to it.

The book is available as a free download. (via)

Posted in Music, Science | 2 Comments »

Using a Nelson Riddle orchestral arrangement of “You Make Me Feel So Young” [...], Wolpert had a professional singer perform the melody. Then she used a digital multi-effect processor to create two bitonal versions of the accompaniment: one a full musical step higher (G when the singer was in F), and the other a step lower (E-flat). She then played the “music” for 40 nonmusicians and 10 professional musicians.

You can see where this is going, right? (via)

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A great debate in which I myself would opt for fingers.
Also: earwax and smegma. Good morning!

Posted in Music, Pop Cult, Science | Comments Off

Says Gary McKinnon, who was arrested after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks:

Old-age pensioners can’t pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy.

Tinfoil Helmet Alert? Time may tell… (via)

Posted in Pop Cult, Science | 1 Comment »

Are you an uptalker? You know? Like when everything you say sounds like an interrogatory statement?

I had no idea that a change in the “intonation contour” of a sentence, as linguists put it, could be as contagious as the common cold. But before long I noticed a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation in my own speech. I first heard it when I myself was leaving a message. “This is Jim Gorman? I’m doing an article on Klingon? The language? From ‘Star Trek’?”

Posted in Pop Cult, Science | 2 Comments »

Oh-oh… Said to be the first pyramid on the European continent. See the pictures also.

Posted in Amusing, Science | 5 Comments »

A scientific study into the effect of pr0n on male fertility, at last!
“Gentleman, would you like to know how to improve the potency of your semen? Do you need a good excuse to give your significant other when she catches you browsing porn sites? Do you want another excuse to sneer at those pompous business types who flaunt their fancy cell phones? Here’s the study for you.“

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Doing ‘brain exercises’ such as watching Countdown, playing Sudoku or taking a shower with your eyes closed can apparently make us all up to 40 per cent cleverer within seven days. I don’t get the “shower with your eyes closed” bit but then, I’m probably not clever enough.

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May I suggest you print this out and show it to your boss the next time he complains about that absent stare into infinity of yours:

Idlers, loafers and layabouts, listen up. A new study suggests that the times when we sit around twiddling our thumbs could in fact be vital for learning.

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As with many things, our appreciation of a given piece of music is largely influenced by what others think of it, New Scientist reports:

…participants [in the study] who could see how often a song had been downloaded tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.

Posted in Music, Science | Comments Off

You stick it to them Native ‘mericans, Debbie!

… But the study also found that “Native” Americans have dry ear wax and body odor similar to Asians, proving they migrated here from Asia. So whom did THEY steal the land from? Somebody else, obviously. Yet, no “Dances With Wolves” and “Into the West” from Hollywood about that.

Good grief.

Via the oft-entertaining blog.zog.org.

Posted in Amusing, Science | 2 Comments »

Well, who knows?…

A map due to be unveiled in Beijing and London next week may lend weight to a theory a Chinese admiral discovered America before Christopher Columbus.

Posted in Amusing, Science | 9 Comments »

What people in the world are known for, according to Google. Typical: poor old Argentina doesn’t get a mention since its place on the map is overlapped with a little square needed to describe Brazil! Belgium, quite fittingly, simply disappears underneath the G of Germany.

Posted in Randamonium, Science | 3 Comments »