Duane

I know a lot of our readers are probably younger than us, so I think it’s time I dispense some sage advice that you all might have heard before but have not truly taken to heart. So come on, take an eSit on Pappy Tony’s eKnee (this is the internet you cannot actually sit on my knee, it does not work that way and I am sorry.)

Nobody knows what they’re doing. People who are older than you, they may know more than you, but they are clueless. Everything we know is built on the decaying infrastructure of dozens of generations before us. And the longer things go on, the more there is to know and the fewer people there are who actually know it. The average person truly “knows,” like, maybe two or three things. Everything else? Weird-ass cultural hand-me-downs.

We are all sad, stupid, ignorant people. So treat your neighbor with respect, because he’s just as dumb as you.

T

28p01 is a post from: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone! Enjoy your hot dog.

Okay, I need some sleep now. Sleep! Oh man.

Not Invented Here collections now available in ebook and good-old-fashioned paper versions!

Eliza's connection to reality grows more tenuous every day. She's almost ready for upper management.

Support Lunarbaboon on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com

This is fun. Tyler Vigen wrote a program that attempts to automatically find things that correlate. As of writing this, 4,000 correlations were found so far (and actually over 100 more when I finished). Some of the gems include: the divorce rate in Maine versus per capita consumption of margarine, marriage rate in Alabama versus whole milk consumption per capita, and honey produced in bee colonies versus labor political action committees. Many things correlate with cheese consumption.

I did some 3D car animation for the latest Cyanide and Happiness short. Ch ch ch check it. 

(Click to enlarge)

The Paycheck Fairness Act, recently torpedoed in the Senate, addressed some glaring problems that have generated less discussion than they should. This useful post ("Why Do Bosses Want Their Employees' Salaries to be Secret?") by Michelle Chen on The Nation  explains the need for protections for workers who discuss their salaries:

Lily Ledbetter had been a loyal employee of Goodyear Tires for nearly two decades before she discovered she had been underpaid for years. What angered her most wasn’t the lost pay but the betrayal of her economic dignity.

“When I was hired they let me know that if I discussed my pay, I wouldn’t have a job. So I had no way to know,” she said in a 2012 interview on One Thing New. When the 60-year-old Alabama mother realized (thanks to an anonymous tip) that she had been paid less as a plant supervisor than male coworkers, she recalled, “I felt devastated. Humiliated…. It just really made me sort of sick that all this time I had been getting awards and being told I was doing a great job, and no one had ever said I wasn’t making what I should be. I had no idea how much less.”

...

The struggle for fair pay isn’t captured in wage statistics; it’s part of a struggle against the asymmetry of knowledge that divides management and labor—and fundamentally, a struggle for a democratic workplace.

The National Women's Law Center has a handy PDF about what the Paycheck Fairness Act would actually do.

Get a signed print of this cartoon from the artist. You can also follow Jen on Twitter and Facebook.

I learned a great new word from Daniel Dennett recently, one that I can see myself using rather a lot from now on (you’ve been warned): deepity. Deepity is the quality found in a statement whose author takes a failed stab at profundity. It seems deep at first glance, but it’s actually squishy and meaningless when you examine it. Deepity is probably the most useful neologism since Stephen Colbert‘s “truthiness.”

Here’s some deepity for you:

You and I are beings of the totality; we realize that this life is nothing short of an ennobling fusion of life-affirming conscious living, and that innocence is an ingredient of unbridled energy.

It’s the kind of empty bombast that was inspired by the likes of Deepak Chopra. You can find more of it on two newish websites: Seb Pearce‘s New Age Bullshit Generator and the equally droll Wisdom of Chopra (by an anonymous creator).

There’s a kind of Turing test on the latter site where you’re supposed to distinguish between actual Deepak Chopra quotes and ones that are generated by a computer script. I only got 4 out of 10. You?

(Image via Shutterstock)

Tom the Dancing Bug, by @RubenBolling.  Be the FIRST to see the comic every week by joining the INNER HIVE!

"My only argument with Ruben B. here is his apologetic tone for asking you to pay money for early access to his very good comics -- that is to say, something that YOU LIKE AND WANT. DO NOT APOLOGIZE, RUBEN." -John Hodgman, Charter INNER HIVE member

Please click HERE for information.

We’re back at the Huzzik Empire’s Supreme Court for another wacky ruling! Next thing you know they’ll be declaring donuts to be sentient and monkeys to be hot dogs.

They may be right about hot dogs.

You know what you should do? You should buy something from our store. Maybe a t-shirt for the warm weather?

KEEP CALM ETC., a photo by Ape Lad on Flickr.

This silly design is up for voting in the latest shirt.woot derby. You can vote for it here, if you're into that sort of thing.
And while you're keeping calm, here's a survey about the future of the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats on blogger: CLICK HERE FOR A SURVEY. The number of responses will help me gauge how big of an issue this question even is. Click to find out what I'm talking about! The answer may surprise you!

rstevens:

I have a deep and nuanced understanding of beer.

When I first saw The Legend of Zelda for the NES, it seemed unbelievably big—an immersive world of mazes, mysteries, and wooden swords. Of course, that was in 1987, when my standards for "immersive" gameplay were lower: Seeing some 8-bit dudes running around was good enough. To bring the game into the modern era, an enterprising programmer has adapted The Legend of Zelda into a first-person 3D game, tailored to the Oculus Rift head-mounted display. The result is truly impressive, looking like a cross between Minecraft and good old Zelda. Have a look (and be sad that you're seeing it in 2D):

If you'd like to see a complete play-through (with commentary), check this out (play starts around 4:10). You'll see that the beta doesn't include all the maps and dungeons yet, but apparently will soon. Behold:

You can download the game for free (in beta form), if you've got an Oculus Rift.

(Via 1 More Castle.)

This year’s “Flame Challenge” is to explain color in terms an 11-year-old can follow. I have opinions on this subject, a background in AMO physics, and access to scientific equipment, so I’m putting something together. In the course of this, though, it occurred to me to wonder how my different portable computing devices process color. And since I have access to an Ocean Optics USB4000 spectrometer, I can answer this question in more detail than anybody needs.

So, I have three principal electronic devices that I use to do computer-type things: a Moto X smartphone, an iPad, and a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop. So, I had all three display a flat white screen, put the spectrometer probe up against the screen, and generated the following graph:

Spectral comparison of my iPad, laptop, and phone all showing white screens.

All three of these show three principal peaks, corresponding to the red, green, and blue pixels making up the display. You can see that the iPad and laptop are pretty similar, but the phone is strikingly different. If you isolate the red component from each, you can see the difference more clearly:

Spectral comparison of my iPad, laptop, and phone showing red screens.

(These are normalized, making the peak intensity the same for all three.) The iPad and laptop have a little bump out in the blue, which isn’t there on the phone. The red light from the phone is also a little narrower, more symmetric, and slightly longer wavelength at the peak.

But the difference is most pronounced with the blue component:

Spectral comparison of my iPad, laptop, and phone showing blue screens.

Again, the phone is a bit narrower and slightly longer wavelength, but the most striking difference is that the iPad and laptop both have double-peaked distributions, with a substantial amount of green light in the blue display.

I was kind of surprised to see this, though I’m not sure exactly why, given that I don’t know what the light sources are for the different devices. A bit of Googling suggests that this is because the Moto X uses an organic LED display, which is directly producing light in three specific bands, while the iPad 2 uses a backlit display with a broadband source and color filters to get the red, green, and blue. This blog post is talking up a different technology, but includes a nice graph of the basic filter situation. The laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 and of similar vintage to the iPad, so probably similar display technology.

Probably the most striking thing about this, though, is how little difference it makes. That is, if I put the phone right next to the laptop with both showing blue, I can see a difference between them, but despite the dramatic difference in spectra, the difference in appearance is really, really subtle. Which just goes to show you the kludgey nature of the way our eyes process color. Which is a good deal of the point I want to make for the whole “Flame Challenge” thing, which is why I was looking at my laptop with a spectrometer in the first place…