Isotropic is …
... my personal blog. Anything I write here is simply my personal, probably ill-formed, opinion and does not represent the views, beliefs, positions, or opinions of any other person or entity.
Category Archives: humor
16 Jun 2019
The Honorable O
A final riff on the quirky (mis)use of my name…. Way back in time, either through mistyping or bad OCR, the “Horn” in “Larry O. Horn” got turned into “Honr”, which led to some interesting mail. That “Honr” became “Honorable”, so I received mail addressed to: Larry O the Honorable with the affectionate salutation Dear […]
07 Jan 2010
Top N Effect
“Unfortunately, our cognition is not perfect, and there are certain judgment errors that we are prone to making, known in the field of psychology as cognitive biases.” —Nikki, Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought, Listverse Nikki left off #11: Top N Effect – the tendency to believe that items are more important, profound, or […]
01 Jan 2010
January Holidays
Some of the holidays coming up in January: Festival of Sleep Day, Play God Day, Peculiar People Day, Blame Someone Else Day, and Escape Day. I’m torn. A lot seem to be concerned with food. Specific days are for Bean, Hot and Spicy Food, Popcorn, Buttercrunch, Eskimo Pie, and Cornchip. The whole month is devoted […]
28 Oct 2009
Neither rain, nor sleet, nor infinite loops …
This message is becoming an old friend: This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients after more than 2448 hours on the queue on [deleted]. [… cut info about message …] No action is required on your […]
24 Oct 2009
Why TV robots are dumb
A funny bit of synchronicity — I found this xkcd comic, “More Accurate“, in my feed reader last night, right after I finished watching the final episode of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles“. Such a shame TSCC was cancelled after only two seasons. When we’re fighting high technology, we have to do more than just […]
19 Sep 2009
A dark and stormy night
I’m pretty good at that “willing suspension of disbelief” thing, being able to fall down a rabbit hole into a world where the laws of physics (and physiology) don’t quite work right, cause and effect are capriciously violated, people miss the obvious and interact in ways that, in the real world, would have me slowly […]
10 Sep 2009
Grammatical dark matter
Like the gravitational influence of dark matter in the universe, there is a hidden force in the Web that causes too many bloggers, who should know better, to make contributions to the my-pet-grammar-peeves meme. This is the same force that compels commenters to make hypercorrections to posts, even to the extent of hijacking threads completely […]
26 Aug 2009
I’m psychic
It is totally worth it. I’ve on several occasions, inadvertently as well as intentionally, pulled a stunt like this. For example: once long long ago, when I was a teenager or just after, some friends and I were cruising around looking for some mischief to get into. Me: Let’s listen to some Pink Floyd … […]
21 Aug 2009
Personal Satellite
I want one of these. I’ve no idea what I’d do with it, but still … my own personal satellite in LEO, if only for a few weeks. Interorbital Systems has this cool TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit for only $8000, which includes launching it into low earth orbit. Briefly, what you get is “the satellite’s […]
01 Aug 2009
Radiant Orange Soda
Usually I drink only coffee — lots and lots of coffee. Recently, however, I’ve been on a Sunkist orange soda binge. I don’t know why; maybe it’s the caffeine, or the unique taste, but I suspect that it’s as much due to the color as anything else. Every time I look at a glass of […]
