Just for fun

Computer Life column for 9/20/97 by
Richard Gordon

Time to do the cyber-equivalent of kicking off your shoes and frolicking through the Web.

Want to learn how to do something? At Panmedia's Learn2.com site (www.learn2.com), you can find "2torials" on a wide range of topics: how to fake Spanish or French, tie a tie, have a garage sale, make a paper airplane, remove old wallpaper.

I wish I'd looked at the 2torial on ironing shirts before a certain Thanksgiving dinner.

Alan Watts' Web-A-Sketch site (www.digitalstuff.com/web-a-sketch/) can provide hours of innocent fun. Make complex or simple single line drawings and, if you like what you did, submit your work to the site gallery.

Some of the drawings are phenomenal. But when I tried to draw a butterfly, it came out looking like a bow-tie with a suitcase handle.

Interested in the history of names? Visit Mike Campbell's Etymology of First Names site (www.engr.uvic.ca/~mcampbel/etym.html). Includes a spot to vote for your favorite names. Noah was leading last time I checked.

Geekspeak

I find myself returning over and over again to two computer-related sites. One is John Bayko's Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present (www.cs.uregina.ca/~bayko/cpu.html).

It's not the most complete history of computing on the Web; it's just sort of cool in a geeky sort of way, talking about most of the microprocessors used in computers and calculators since the 1970s.

A lot more useful is Denis Howe's Free On Line Dictionary of Computing. With mirror sites all over the world (e.g., nightflight.com/foldoc/), this document now contains over 11,000 entries. It is a good source for succinct definitions of everything from gigaflop to CPU.

Mad Scientists

Need proof that there is a lot of 7th-grader left in people who really should know better?

I found myself howling with laughter when I came upon the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. project (www.owlnet.rice.edu/~gouge/twinkies.html).

Two Rice University students, Chris Gouge and Todd Stadler, were bored during the 1995 finals week and conducted a series of experiments "to determine the properties of . . . the [Hostess] Twinkie."

Each of their experiments was conducted with rigor and has been written up in a very fine parody of labspeak.

Todd also summed things up with a series of very bad Haiku. For example:

twinkies don't burn well
unless doused in alcohol
then they make good fires

Thirty years ago, I ran across the Journal of Irreproducible Results, a satiric scientific journal. I used to dream up topics for papers to submit but never did. Well, those folks have now become AIR, the Annals of Improbable Research (www.improb.com).

I'm so glad there's a venue for papers on such as "The Taxonomy of Barney."

AIR also hosts the annual Ig Nobel Prize contest for silly science. Some researchers are flattered to be recognized, others are horrified, adding to the fun.

Among the most spectacular of the Ig Nobel contest-winning work is that done by George Goble, winner of the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for Chemistry (ghg.ecn.purdue.edu). Goble sees fit, from time to time, to ignite barbecue grills with liquid oxygen.

The results are a perfect advertisement for "don't try this at home unless the fire department is standing by."

Closer to home

What could be more like Delaware than the Lewes Punkin Chunkin (www.lewes-beach.com/LS-PUNKINCHUNKIN.html)? Includes snapshots from recent contests and information about the 1997 event.

I usually drive around doing errands on Saturday afternoons. But I get so frustrated when I get to the grocery store in the middle of a cool tune I don't know.

Fortunately, "Rural Free Delivery," the show I listen to on WVUD, has a web site (www.sas.upenn.edu/~jlupton/rfd.html) that features a weekly playlist.

Write if you want me to do this again, or if you have a web site to nominate.

Copyright © 1997, The News Journal Company

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