Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

Digit wrote:This one's finally decided now. Somehow I don't think the catastrophic downfall the dissenters bemoaned about will materialize.

They already have, funny thing is that a lot of them are saying that they're going to move to Canada now

Shrinky Dink wrote:

Digit wrote:This one's finally decided now. Somehow I don't think the catastrophic downfall the dissenters bemoaned about will materialize.

They already have, funny thing is that a lot of them are saying that they're going to move to Canada now :)

Literal headdesk. FFS

Elder Packer threatened to come back from the dead if his funeral doesn't go the way he wanted it to.

"In that day," Packer said in the BYU devotional, "if any of [the Brethren] who speak talk about me, I will raise up and correct them. The gospel is to be preached."

Oldest son Allan F. Packer, who has been chosen to represent the family at the apostle's funeral, could be worried.

His 90-year-old father, who died July 3 of natural causes, also didn't want the service to run longer than an average Mormon worship service, about an hour and 10 minutes.

I don't understand why anyone would care that much about their own funeral.

I like the bit about it not being long. My dad's favorite quote of Packer's is that it takes a good meeting to be better than no meeting at all.

Don't forget, no jokes! Humor will not be tolerated!!

This morning around 8 AM EDT, a spacecraft launched a little over nine years ago made its closest approach to Pluto.

New words to the Oxford English dictionary (online) include awesomesauce, cat cafe, manspreading, mkay, hangry, and beer o'clock.

Digit wrote:manspreading

o_O not Googling, not Googling ...

apparently it's when you sit on the bus or subway seat with your legs spread wide so you won't encourage people to crowd in next to you.

Interesting. The typeface for Google's new logo is an in-house developed typeface called Product Sans.

I don't love it. It just looks so childish to me. I'm sure eventually it will grow on me but for now I really think it looks terrible.

Catull (the old one) does exude smooth maturity.

This made me laugh.

That's beautiful!

http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/11/why-do ... words.html

"Two experiments supported the researchers' predictions: when comparing the humorousness of pairs of nonsense words, 56 participants consistently gave higher funniness ratings to the lower entropy word, and also when simply rating the nonsense words for their humour value, lower entropy words tended to receive higher ratings. The researchers said these results are entirely in line with the expectation violation theory: "Nonwords [are sometimes] funny because they violate our expectations of what a word is," they said."

Whistler wrote:http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/11/why-do ... words.html

"Two experiments supported the researchers' predictions: when comparing the humorousness of pairs of nonsense words, 56 participants consistently gave higher funniness ratings to the lower entropy word, and also when simply rating the nonsense words for their humour value, lower entropy words tended to receive higher ratings. The researchers said these results are entirely in line with the expectation violation theory: "Nonwords [are sometimes] funny because they violate our expectations of what a word is," they said."

How does one calculate word entropy? I read the article you linked but I can't figure it out, and the actual study is over my head.

I believe in this case (correct me if I'm wrong!) word entropy is more like "letters-in-a-word entropy," or how frequently does this series of letters combine in this ordering to form a word. So while some combination of letters may be common individually, maybe occuring in the same word together is less common, and occuring in a certain order is even less common.

The article had the examples: "blablesoc" (funny!) and "exthe" (less funny!). If we looked up words ending in "soc" in an English language corpus, we'd find that it is pretty uncommon. Words ending with "the" are WAY more common, so that combination of letters in that position has a lower entropy than "soc" in that same position.

I hope that made sense!

Even women think men are more creative than women (Harvard business review)

A terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri. source

False alarm nuclear attack warning on Hawaii. Said one ex defense official: "Thank God the President was playing golf." He was.