Category Archives: Further Distraction

this sounds like a bad soap opera:

jesus has returned as Dr. Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda to collect rolex watches and random companies from his followers whilst a bikini girl, one of His exclusive singers, sings about how she loves how her lover knows what she likes in her coffee.

but just when you thought it was safe, it turns out he’s the antichrist. the end is nigh! save yourself latina lovegirl!

maybe latina lovegirl can give us some solace, after all ‘Latina lovergirl is in love with love and loving it–whether she’s splashing poolside in a bikini or shimmying bare-midriff style on a soundstage she’s selling it big time in this infectious, horn-peppered pop.’ Watch it! The apocalypse was never sexier.

via pharyngula

College-Radio DJ Thinks He Has Cult Following

The Onion

College-Radio DJ Thinks He Has Cult Following

CHARLESTON, IL-College-radio disc jockey Jordan Haley is convinced that “Rock Blossom,” his show airing Thursdays from midnight to 2 a.m. on WEIU 88.9 FM, has a devoted cult following, the Eastern Illinois University senior told reporters Monday.

In my post-synapse, pre-Christmas, bored at work phase I really cannot find it in me to blog very critically these days.  Something more serious will come up soon, but, quite frankly, I love Daily Dose of Imagery now more than ever and would rather hang around his beautiful images.

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if you haven’t seen PhD Comics, now’s the time.

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 Just a reminder:  The next Synapse neuroscience blog carnival will be hosted here next Sunday, December 10.  If you have anything you’d like to submit, point your browser here.  Note that the deadline is wrong, the current deadline for submissions is Saturday, December 9 at 9 PM.  Send submissions to:

the.synapse.carnival at gmail.com

or here.  

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I’ve been a fan of marriedtothesea.com for a while now, but this one deserves special mention.

Ceci n’est pas un cerveau-1,2,3 

Mystery is not simply one of the possibilities of reality
Mystery is what is absolutely necessary for reality to exist

Continuing the sexy picture hoarding, I will place this following link to the 2005/2006 Research Images as Art / Art Images as Research competition at UCL.

My favourite picture is the Context-Free Tree.

Mr Brock Craft
UCL Interaction Centre

This tree-like structure contains over 56.8 million distinct shapes and 2.1 million branches, but was produced with only 16 instructions. This reduced-size reproduction, if printed at full size, would be meters across. It was created with software that uses a “context-free grammar”. Context-free grammars are logical constructs in Computer Science that can be used to formally describe programming languages and other complex entities. They are useful because they can very economically describe highly complex processes and structures, such as the one that produced this picture.

In this image, the 16 rules describe how to build the structure rather than describing the location and characteristics of its branches and leaves. Besides generating elegant images, research in complex grammars can lead to more efficient and powerful techniques for computation.

The image was produced as a result of research on Information Visualisation at the UCL Interaction Centre.

(And Jeremy Bentham!!!!)