Agronesia

In Slashdot, one of the biggest software/computer news site, one popular kind of joke in the comments is the Soviet Russian joke. The premise is simple: The majority of readers on sites like Slashdot are American. Russia is of course a country with a supposedly very different culture, so everything there must be different! Therefore, to make this kind of joke comment the news or reply the last comment with “In Soviet Russia …” and insert something very absurd there.

Let me teach you. I’m a Slashdot lurker so I feel I’ve got some expertise in this area…

A: In Thailand, one Indonesian student threw a trash on the road and got fined!
B: Well, in Indonesia, even the police throws trash anywhere.
C: In Soviet Russia, the trash throws you!!!

The key is just to make some absurd statement

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Here’s a command for a set of questions from my brother’s elementary school math workbook (original language is Indonesian):

“Enter the most correct answer!”

And here’s one of the questions:

(1) “A fraction which is equal to 3/5 is …”

OK. So, 6/10 is obviously a correct answer to (1). 12/20 is also correct. Even 24/40 is correct.

Here’s the million dollar question: Which is the most correct?

Of course it’s a silly question. The answer to (1), mathematically, is either “correct” or “incorrect”. And among those many correct answers, neither is more correct than the others.

So, the wisest path is for the book writers to change to command to

“Enter a correct answer!” or even more simple and beautiful “Answer these questions!”

Or perhaps not answer anything at all, since we cannot find the most correct answer :).

I just got a stomach problem some days ago, and that made me think about the types of stomach problems that exist, and ones that could possibly exist! The principle that I will use here is the inherent symmetry in the universe. On the large scale, we have day and night, male and female (OK, OK, female and male!). Going deep down we have G with its pair C, and A which loves T (sometimes U comes to wreck their relationship though). We even have the electron and positron pair! Whew…

OK, first we have nausea which causes vomiting:

See, the food goes out from the stomach through your mouth. Do we have its counterpart? Of course, that eating!

(If you can see where where this conversation is heading and doesn’t feel comfortable, please do not continue)

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When you switch to a Linux distribution, you might be a little frustrated by how hard it is to get a virus running on your system. However, don’t worry because once you familiarize yourself with building a program from the source, it’s actually not difficult.

Get the URL to download the virus source code (Google it!), and then type these commands:

wget http://malware.agronesia.net/virus/rontok.tar.gz
tar xzvf rontok.tar.gz
cd rontok
./configure
make
make infect

Some distributions like Ubuntu makes it easy by using a package manager. Go see their documentation!

(idea from the comments at Slashdot)

What if you tried your best in this world, but your sins still outweigh your good deeds and you got thrown into hell? Worry not, my friend, for Google Maps has it’s answer!

According to Google, the journey from hell to heaven is only about 4 hours and 19 minutes! And how amusing it is that both hell and heaven are in the USA!

But anyway, it’s an amazing piece of technology. It can even schedule your JR trips!

Midroad in Jakarta, I saw a deviant writing on the wall:

Susah
Bensin
Ya
Jalan
Kaki

Which means “If fuel is difficult (expensive), just walk!”. The funny thing is that the words are designed so that it can be abbreviated to “SBY-JK”, the current leaders of the country (Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono-Jusuf Kalla). It’s certainly a form of protest against the recent price increase in fuel.

By Anonymous coward on Slashdot, with some modifications:

Teacher: “Did you write this whole thing yourself?”
Student: “Yes, of course!”
Teacher: “Are you sure”
Student: “Yes, 100%”
Teacher: “Well, a huge chunk of your report is straight from Wikipedia. I already checked it.”
Student: “Um, yeah, well, um I wrote that Wikipedia page.”

Luckily in Wikipedia we have complete log of edits, so that claims like that can be checked :).

I just added an image to Gravatar so that it will appear as my avatar when I comment on blogs. It’s just exactly my old WordPress.com avatar, the mathematical integral image. When adding, I met this amusing screen midway:

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