here is a chart that i made, trying my darndest to represent the win-loss-draw relationship between the four teams in each of the eight world cup groups. if there were only three teams per group, this type of visualisation would be relatively straight forward. with four teams (and two spatial dimensions), things get a little dicey and the visualisation turns into a topological math problem. in the end, i wound up with this shield design based on a solution to a similar problem by john venn. i hope it is not overly confusing.

code words for the days of the year

way back in the 18-whatevers when sending a telegram cost a charwoman’s daily wages, some enterprising telegraph operator found a loophole in the telegraph pricing scheme. yo realised that telegraph senders charged per word rather than per character—thus transmitting “it is on” would cost the same as “raynor is maschalophilous.”

anywhoosies, the telegraph operator then went on to invent code words for common telegraphic phrases. morisco refers to “money no object.” crisp is short hand for “can you recommend to me a good female cook?” flank means “a fire is raging here. please send engine,” which is a convenient abbreviation because when a fire really rages, one hasn’t much extra time to waste on frivolous wording when telegraphing for an engine. the resulting book is a real gas. you can peruse it here.

but what really floats my tugboats is that this book offers a code word for EVERY SINGLE day of the year, including leap year. here are some highlights:

• today (june 9) is joker
• may 29 is merkin
• leap day (february 29) is fictitious
• january 20 is <ahem> jaculatory
• the day that i crawled out of my mother’s weeping womb is jester
• and you? what is the code word for your birthday? is it oddness, fiasco, or octogamy?

know your a•or•als

i always figured that amoral was amushroom (and that it was a synonym of immoral) so you can imagine my surprise when i learned that, properly used, it means “having no relation to ethics” (ie. neither moral nor immoral). i suppose that this means no more amoral omelets for yours truly. fiddlestix!

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randolph from the internet suggested that i call this series becklex—after harry beck (the original designer of the london tube map) + lex (the greek word for word). the other posts in the becklex series can be found here.

banksy turtle

well…..i’m back.

know your c••cuses

i’d like to send a big cyber-five to my squash coach, allan who, while getting his hoopty tuned, was able to program me a computer program which—more or less—outputs reams and reams of words which have similar letters in similar places.

now alls i need to do is befriend somebody else who can program a computer program that will add the tube-style, technicolour lines and then i will be able to retire to the south of france and take up a hobby like metal detectoring beaches for tennis bracelets and rare bottlecaps.

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pre·viously, also: i still don’t have a good name for this series. if you do, i’d love to hear from you. i mean, i’d love to hear from you anyway, though naming this series is a convenient excuse for discourse.

f(x) = ½x + 7

it was only yesterday that i realised that the rule of thumb for dating people of different ages (the “half your age plus 7” rule) determines not only the lower bounds for dating but the upper bounds as well—that for each ½x + 7, there is a corresponding 2(x-7). for the last 15 years of my life, i have been ignoring an entire market segment, namely those of the genus cougar.

i decided to graph these equations as a handy pocket guide for when i mack on chicks in the library stacks and a few interesting things soon became apparent. for starters, if one is under 14, it is mathematically impossible to date anybody. let’s say my five year-old nephew wanted to join the scene. according to this rule, he could only date girls older than 7.5 (which he would be down with), BUT the same girls also have to be younger than -4. MATH has prevented my nephew from getting jiggy with anybody!

only when you become 14, does math allow you to begin dating—and then you can ONLY date other 14 year-olds. society will scoff at you if you ask a 15 year-old to your freshman day dance, and don’t even think of approaching a 13 year-old.

from 14 on, your options increase at a linear rate such that by the time you are seventy, you are eligible to date 42 year-olds AND 126 year-olds. so the next time that your seventy year-old auntie introduces you to her 126 year-old paramour, give them each a (gentle) nudge and let them know that you support their union.

know your t•r•ids

know your mo•g•ls

like a crossword puzzle but for the spectrum of food

the royal line

the other day, me and my three handsomest friends and orson went to a trivia night at a local pub. one of the first few questions was, “how many british sovereigns were alive in 1684?” orson, who is an actuary in real life* estimated that five was the maximum overlapage among generations. so we added one for good measure (ie. some sickly pipsqueak who ruled for 12 days, or whatever) and said six even though my other friends (who are more handsome than orson) thought this seemed way too high.

we were therefore quite floored when we found out that the answer was eight. it was at this point that i proposed that we adjourn the trivia game so i could go home and graph out the logistics of how exactly that this was possible.

a: it was a perfect shitstorm of joint sovereignty, the glorious revolution, and lord protectoring.

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* not professionally

fun with authors’ names #2

what’s longer than an 8-author name chain? how bout one that goes on for ∞? and what’s longer than ∞?

3 × ∞, duh.

fun with authors’ names #1

i know, i know, i had to compromise on lewis carroll’s name, but such is the nature of the fun with authors’ names game*. (also, he was a freaky-deeky—just sayin’)

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*this game also works, though is slightly less fun, with the names of musicians and, to a lesser degree, the stars of pornographic cinema.

in hot pursuit of the most deceptively named animal

thanks to a lot of stellar comments, i have been catatonically obsessing over deceptively named animals all weekend long. i built this chart to help determine which animal is the biggest impostor on planet earth. it turns out* it’s the sea cucumber! silly sea cucumber, you’re not even in the same kingdom as the key ingredient of my tzatziki sauce.

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*unless of course, the rules of our pursuit allow us to add up the non-antness, non-lionness qualities of the antlion.

special thanks to the remarkable f+l blog for helping me rethink the size of my footnotes.

not worth your time

when i was on my daily snow jog (making my quads look like those of a thoroughbred stallion), a glint of metal from a tarnished nickel caught my eye. here’s the thing: normally raynor ganan never breaks up his workout routine for any reason, nor does he stop to retrieve anything less than a newly-minted benjamin or a hot wheels rear loading 1969 volkswagen beach bomb—but this time i paused briefly before double-timing it up a hill to make my obliques pop. i am a consumer of luxury brands like banana republic, but what would a member of the gap bourgeois or <choke> the prole navy do in a similar situation*?

i decided to try to correlate the act of retrieving a found coin with the value of one’s time. this chart is the result. the calculations are proprietary, so i cannot reveal them though i should mention that in order to determine the average time that it takes for one to bend over and retrieve a coin, i scattered a sack of pennies outside the local all-girls catholic school and filmed the result from the tinted windows of my van.

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*another metric that i have developed to help one determine one’s class is this: the next time that you are making stuffed peppers, observe the colour of the pepper that you are stuffing. if it is green, you are unfortunately a member of the lower class. if it is red, you have found yourself in the middle class. if it is yellow, you are an aristocrat like me and are thus eligible for a banana republic luxe card.