a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

i've been reading xkcd.com for the past few days, and it's been so full of awesome comics, i'm not passing individual links to my friends anymore. case in point:


so yeah...check out xkcd.com - it will leave you laughing. i promise.

toilet humour

for reasons i just can't fathom, i've never looked at the inside of the door to any of the stalls in the restrooms at my workplace. till today, that is. what i found definitely kept me amused for the duration of my stay on the throne today :P. either someone was very bored, or my coworkers haven't been sufficiently toilet trained, or both :D

i quote verbatim:

important

please ensure that this toilet is flushed after use

leave the surrounding areas clean, and dry always

ensure that you use toilet paper provided

always remember you could be the next user

seats are to sit and not squat on. this is a western style toilet. use it like one.

ensure the above is followed.

on an even lighter note, someone farted with gusto while i was pondering the rules that now governed my only (i thought) place of freedom :D - i guess that's one of the few things still allowed, for now :P

new ways to get to work

i usually need to reach my workplace at 9:30am. as a result, i end up taking a rickshaw at around 9am, and pass the same places at almost the same time. now that wouldn't really be that big a deal, since most of the things i see on my way to work are either things that stay put (buildings, trees etc) or moving things that are unremarkable and probably don't make the same trip at the same precision as i do. there are just a few noticeable exceptions, namely a company bus and school bus that i usually see or pass on my way, and...a dredger!!!

that's right, someone drives a dredger everyday from don bosco, borivli (atleast that's where its route meets mine) all the way to croma, malad (where i take a short cut off the main road to dodge the last couple of signals on the way to work) - and at pretty much the exact same time every day!

there could be many reasons why someone would drive a dredger every day on the exact same road at the exact same time, but the most obvious one to me is the same as why i take a ric at the same time and on the same route every day: to get to work. so i now know of someone who literally dredges his way to work :D

super funny historical descriptions

i usually don't post jokes here (unless they're incidents from my life, which is almost entirely a joke :P), but i gotta make an exception for this one. no description required. just read on and laugh away :)

• Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.


• Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.


• Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.


• The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.


• Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.


• In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.


• Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: "Tee hee, Brutus."


• Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw.


• Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted "hurrah."


• It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couple. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet. Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.


• Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backward and declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.


• Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.


• Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large.


• Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.


• The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbits. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered the radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.

kristopher's hierarchy of knowledge

just as the quest for fulfillment of needs led to the postulation of maslow's hierarchy of needs, my thirst for mindless trivia has led me to put forward my hierarchy of knowledge. since i have only one claim to fame so far (and approximately 5 people know about it, including myself), this is also another (hopefully better received) claim to fame. this also being the first piece of philosophy that actually bears my name it its title, it should also make my name more popular - it's currently ranked 392, down from 134 when i was born :(

btw google's current acknowledgment of my existence is limited to corrections of my (easily misspelled) name. thanks to saurabh's bubble-bursting postulate, that isn't a very good thing in any case. it'll be great if google associates me with something nicer, like "metaphilosophical absurdities" or "deranged ranter" or... (insert choicest derogatory adjectives with geekish connotations here)

ah, i get distracted easily. not again.

so, back to the hierarchy of knowledge. in the same vein as maslow's hierarchy, you could arrange it as a typical pyramid. and now for the exciting climb to the peak:

• level one: awareness

  
  this is when you know what something is. at this stage you should be able to identify it with some reasonable degree of confidence, either by its characteristics, behaviour or any creative means of identification you can think up (i for example, can identify my cellphone by the crunching sound it makes when i sit on it. hence, i have attained level 1 knowledge about my cellphone.



• level two: functionality

  
  this is when you know how to use the thing. this obviously doesn't imply that you should know *all* uses of the thing (for example, i consider myself a level 2 paper cup user, but i never knew that it could be used to boil water over a flame - and since this is my theory i've decided to refer to it as a characteristic rather than my ignorance). this is also restricted to primary functionality (refer aforementioned characteristic vs ignorance principle). a more esoteric functionality may be substituted for the primary functionality, but it should be related to its primary functionality (eg, burning stuff using a projector and a magnifying glass qualifies, but using a mousetrap as a means of projectile propulsion does not)



• level three: aesthetics

  
  this is when you know enough of something to be able to customize it to your likes and dislikes, and hence use it exactly the way you feel like, possibly combining the primary functionality with other secondary functionality



• level four: the knowledge equivalent of self actualization

  
  this is a level that my vocabulary and sense of expression/creative naming hasn't reached yet, as the title suggests. this is when you gain knowledge that neither helps you gain additional functionality, nor does it add to it's aesthetics. this is what i regard the supreme peak of knowledge, usually characterised with a feeling of geekish nirvana (not to be confused with the buddhist one, but close enough to not be able to tell the difference :P)

damn...this is just a couple of screens!!! i hope it's long enough to get me famous...do your work, people!!! link here if you can!!! :D

unproductive but geekishly fulfilling things to do at work part 2 (a.k.a. how to almost break a chair)

my new job doesn't involve products with code names, and telnetting into external websites doesn't work anymore (and there is only so much satisfaction you can get out of pretending to be a browser, given that most webmasters are incompetent, lazy or both ;)), so i've been forced by boredom and pure geekish innovation into new avenues of discovery.

my subject: my trusty chair.

my chair at work has been promoted from a piece of furniture to a complex system of all kinds of complex machinery, and i've realised (in sparsely distributed moments of wisdom) that there's much more to it than meets the eye.

initial exploration of my chair was limited to getting it to a point where i could sit comfortably in it. now that that objective has been fulfilled, the next thrust of exploration was to get it to a point where i could comfortably sleep in it (sleeping being a close second to sitting when it comes to things that i usually do in my chair, and definitely the most enjoyable...so far :P)

as an aside, just like maslow's hierarchy of needs, i have my homegrown hierarchy of knowledge (kristopher's hierarchy of knowledge, if you like)

a thorough discussion of the hierarchy will have to be postponed to another day (and another rambling, almost-pointless blog post). for now, it will suffice to say that i just attained its highest level w.r.t. the chair :D

so yeah...the highest level: discovering things about the chair that do not affect my comfort (either sitting or sleeping) in any way. this involves finding out what mysterious and highly inaccessible knobs and levers do, since they obviously do something, but were meant to be used by a chair administrator rather than a general user.

for example: there's a knob right below the seat in the centre that adjusts how responsive the backrest is when tilting back/forward. not terribly useful, unless you're particularly malnourished or are too light to muster the force to tilt the chair when you lean (believe it or not, there actually are a few such people in my class...i intend selling this vital piece of information to them for a price :P)

ps: there was supposed to be a punchline here, but i forgot it as this post has been saved in my drafts for over a week. what an anticlimax! i should do this more often :D

oh, god!

after a long period of dull inactivity and tons of debates with incredibly narrow minded people about god, religion, beliefs and (strangely) reality, i finally read something that got me thinking. nothing convincing enough to shake my (possibly irrational) steadfast belief in a single, benevolent god-figure. not even convincing enough to consider it a possibility. (btw, i still haven't figured why i believe in whatever i've chosen to believe in - it's just one of 'those things')

a bit of background first (hmm...i seem to be dragging a 'bit of background' into my posts quite often...wonder why :P) - i read this on the dilbert blog, a place renowned (in my eyes) for debate on things that make you go hmmm (i'm sure the shmoo's going **wheee** over my hmmms right now;)). anyway, so i was saying, the dilbert blog. damn cool place, that. oh wait, that's not what i was saying. i was saying that that's one of the places where god and reality and religion and belief systems get discussed quite often, usually with scott adams doing the equivalent of throwing a lighted match into pre-heated petrol and watching frenzied cognitive dissonants(?) jump into the fire :D. oh and bad analogies are also quite recurrent in the comment section of that blog too (i guess my reading has been teaching me stuff ;))

so much for background. i'm sure you've lost me by now, if you ever had me in the first place (no puns intended ;))

anyway...what stood out was this post that proves god exists. not that i need any proof, having already admitted that my beliefs already are irrational enough to be too hard to explain to any human being, including myself. apparently "some guy on the internet" prove that god exists. that's fine, because i dont really need pr...oh hell. i'm stuck in an infinite lopp here. lemme out!!!

ah...i'm out!!! so i wanted to say (but didn't end up saying) that his proof of god's existence was interesting, first of all because i haven't heard it before, and secondly because it's the only thing that i don't believe that i also don't think is stupid. yeah, i know what that means. i'm sorry folks, but if you ever tried arguing with me about god's existence and i just sat smugly or replied in linguistic monosyllables (yeah...hmmm...i know...hmmm...true...hmmm...what you say...hmm), i was probably thinking you are either stupid or incredibly narrow minded. don't take it personally. being broad minded is probably a bad thing anyway :D

anyway, if you aren't bored enough by now, i quote the blog verbatim:

1. It is impossible for one person to see reality through the eyes of another.


2. By definition, a reality you can't enter via any form of transportation is another dimension.


3. You comprise 100% of your dimension, because no one else can share exactly your perception.


4. If you are the entire universe within your dimension, you are God by definition, since you are everything within your own dimension.

the best part of this theory is that it fits perfectly with my theory of everything (as does every other cool theory :P), other than the fact that what's called 'god' in this theory is called 'anything' in mine :D

anyway, after a very long ramble, i've finally forgotten what i wanted to say.

oh, i didn't (**damn!!!**). read the post. and the comments. and...hmmm...no...i won't say the other thing i wanted to. just read it. you might spot it anyway.