Interesting Salon interview with the author of a book on the history and philosophy of jokes (via The Morning News).

Dan’s recent post on hoverboards, combined with Tony’s recent addition of an entire blog category on cake, has made me realize something: If Doombot is ever to be a destination on the web for hoverboard enthusiasts (as our keyword referrals and 14-page Google position indicate may be our destiny), we need an entire category on hoverboards. So I made that, just now.

Now, on a tangential note, I’d like to tell you about the grassroots campaign to get Nike to mass produce the McFly 2015, also known as the sneakers Michael J. Fox wears in Back to the Future II.

At Online Fandom, Dr. Nancy Baym notes that her earlier post on the shoe was one of her most read posts to date, suggesting that the popularity of hoverboards among internet surfers may well extend to this futuristic shoe. (Perhaps I should retitle this category, “The Year 2015″..?) More recently, she offers an update to comment on how Nike made a shoe sort of like the one in the movie, but not enough like it to appease fans.

Nevertheless, I find this news promising. Sooner or later Nike will move on from these “Hyperdunk” sneakers and get the self-lacing McFly model correct; then, we might see self-drying jackets; and finally, after this, functional hoverboards. Cross your fingers, everybody (for seven years or so, just to be safe).

Something Awful offers a fuller list expanding on Asimov’s three laws of robotics (not to be confused with Ellis’s revisionary three laws). Sample laws include:

10. A robot, when given contradictory orders by two human beings, and assuming those orders do not violate the First Law, must decide which order to follow based on which human being has a deeper voice.

18. A robot must be very careful when tickling a human being, because a robot does not know what it is like to be tickled, and therefore cannot safely apprehend when it is no longer funny and it starts to become cruel.

23. A robot must shut up around girls and let me, Isaac Asimov, do the talking; however, a robot may bail me out if things start to go haywire.

(Link via Boing Boing.)

I went to the dentist the other day for a root canal and a filling. The cavity that I got the filling for was so deep (that is, close to the nerve) that they prescribed me penicillin to make sure we took care of any infection that might have found its way in through the tooth decay. This led to something of a quandary, however: Was I allowed to drink tonight, at my weekly bar night, while on antibiotics?

Being in my twenties, I decided that I may not be entitled to the same foolish notions of immortality common to teenagers, but I believe I’m close enough to justify feeling nigh-invulnerable. So, I had some beer first, then came home slightly tipsy, and then checked the internet to see whether I was going to die.

Good news! I should be fine. However, it was difficult to find a source that sounded even semi-reputable from mere googling. You see, when you search for “penicillin” and “alcohol,” you get some folks saying it’s a bad combo, and others saying it’s fine, but the top results are still random strangers on the internet more often than, you know, doctors (who presumably still use telegraphs and smoke signals as their preferred means of communication). Moreover, the top sites for answering questions along these lines seem to be the kind of sites where someone asks a question and then everybody votes for a favorite answer. I appreciate that two Yahoo! Answers readers took the time to vote on which answer seemed most plausible (or at least desirable) to them, but I’m nervous about accepting medical advice from someone identified only by the email address “cute_blondie_angel@yahoo.com.”

That’s not to say that this isn’t good advice, of course, or that the cute and blonde are incapable of dispensing useful medical wisdom. After all, it seems that cute_blondie_angel actually is training to be a prenatal doctor. I mean, I guess you could say she “claims to be” training, but that seems like a weirdly specific thing to claim. Moreover, one could make the argument that she’s no less authoritative than the (supposed!) transcript from a TV show I first linked to as somehow acceptably convincing.

In conclusion, the internet may or may not be full of lies, but I’ll forgive it as long as it offers semi-convincing packaging for the lies I prefer to hear.

If you enjoyed the TV show Get Smart, don’t get your hopes up. The characters here lack any similar chemistry, the zaniness is usually an entirely different sort of zany, and you will just be as disappointed as I was. In some ways, I actually think that Austin Powers was a better spiritual successor to that series than this movie, which had a few chuckle-worthy moments (certainly more for others in the theater than for me, I suppose). Generally, though, I thought the jokes were dull and uninspired, and I found all the major characters—Max, Ninety-nine, even the Chief—generally gratingly foolish rather than lovably silly.

I really enjoyed this movie. The sheer absurdity of its action sequences reminded me of Equilibrium and Shoot ‘Em Up (in a good way), but it actually has a better story than either of those. It was pretty straightforward as a “lovable loser becomes kickass” summer action flick, but had just enough new material to make it feel new and worth watching. It’s a little longer than it needs to be, maybe, but I didn’t mind. Basically, if you think you’d like seeing a movie where people shoot bullets that curve mid-flight from moving subway cars, check it out.

People responded a little too favorably to flipsiding for it to be very useful as an alternative to Rickrolling. I mean, heck, I knew I adored the Kidd Video theme song (“Video to Radio,” now the #1 Google result for “flipsiding”), but how could I have known that you lovable denizens of the intertron agreed with me?

And heck, even Rickrolling seems a little too good-natured to work as a prank, as far as I’m concerned. It’s like sending someone a postcard that’s secretly a candygram. In the tradition of pranks and jokes I grew up with, however, you send a candygram filled with black ink or electric eels. Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down? Enough of this touchy-feely BS.

Thus, in an attempt to effect more mischief, I have uploaded to YouTube the most heinous music video I have ever witnessed in my entire life. When I confronted this … this … thing with my comrades, I was overtaken by a sudden sense of illness. Dan was forced to shield his eyes. I think Tony blacked out the memory of the experience entirely. Its evil is so thick and viscous that I dare not even allow its name to ooze from my mouth. Let’s just say that witnessing this Lovecraftian spectacle, in a darkened room surrounded by parents and their innocent babes, made me fear the prospect of ever bringing a son or daughter of my own into a world where such a thing could be created.

Use this with extreme caution, and may God have mercy on my soul.

I’m not a fan of Christopher Hitchens, who is a supporter of disastrous American foreign military policy, and a divisive and intolerant ass in matters of religion and organized atheism. But I have to give him props: When he implied that waterboarding is not torture, and critics suggested he try it, he took them up on it—and changed his tune pretty quickly. Too bad our politicians don’t have the guts to do what a writer volunteered for. (I’ll leave it to you whether that refers to the “simulated” drowning or just admitting a mistake.)

Update: A video of Hitchens’s waterboarding, and the whole article in Vanity Fair.

The New York Times reports that Costco and Wal-Mart are ready to start carrying a newly redesigned gallon of milk. They seem pretty awesome, except not. Here, let’s quote a bit:

The jugs are cheaper to ship and better for the environment, the milk is fresher when it arrives in stores, and it costs less.…

But if the milk jug is any indication, some of the changes will take getting used to on the part of consumers. Many spill milk when first using the new jugs.

“When we brought in the new milk, we were asking for feedback,” said Heather Mayo, vice president for merchandising at Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart. “And they’re saying, ‘Why’s it in a square jug? Why’s it different? I want the same milk. What happened to my old milk?’ ”

I suspect that different people will have different opinions about what the problem is here. Some—like the those behind these milk jugs—are saying that people are just too stubborn and need to learn to change with the times. Others—like those who dislike spilling milk, cleaning milk, or having to pour milk for children who can’t lift the redesigned jug—might contend that the problem here is that you ask for feedback before you design the damn jug.

I think it’s great that designers have begun taking things like environmentalism into consideration. But I also think that, at its heart, all product design is fundamentally about the creation of interfaces (according to people who are way smarter than I am). Making a milk jug which saves costs and materials is great—but if it doesn’t function as something people can recognize and use, well, then it’s a failure.

Mind you, this doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Maybe you remember the new prescription bottle designed by a grad student at the School of Visual Arts. The thing is brilliant: more usable and more environmentally friendly. (Shame on the FDA for ignoring the thing, and kudos to Target for realizing what a step forward it is.)

Whereas the starting point for the redesign of this milk bottle was likely an economic concern, the pill bottle started with a human concern. Namely, the designer’s grandmother took the wrong medication because all prescription bottles tend to look the same, and usually highlight pharmacy branding and other inessential material over more crucial info (like, say, the actual name of the drug, or who the drug is for). The designer went through a number of different versions to see what would work for elderly people and users with sight issues, and ended up with something simple and more efficient.

Will it be worth teaching people the special trick to pour the new milk bottle? Maybe , in the long run, it will. But what would be smarter would be to get a group of people together to represent the interests of the average milk drinker (and pourer) during the design process to make sure that an important group of stake holders is represented. When people start crying over spilled milk, a good designer doesn’t admonish them for it; we go back to the drawing board.

For some years now, I have only followed three regularly serialized comic book series, and two have been written by Brian K. Vaughan. I suppose that right there is an implicit endorsement for Y, a tale following a 22-year-old escape artist and the women determined to protect the future of his sex after a mysterious plague wipes out all other men on earth. It definitely has its high and low points; the other Vaughan series I read, Ex Machina, has less that feels like “filler,” I think. Also, part of me was kind of disappointed that the author gradually de-emphasizes the central mysteries about the “plague” itself. Still, I can’t help but feel like it ended up being just the story it needed to be. Considered alongside other Vertigo titles, such as Sandman and Transmetropolitan, I think this series represents what “mainstream” comics ought to be: self-contained, long-form stories, started with a specific conclusion in mind, not strung along indefinitely to line somebody’s pockets. (”Unless I’m in really dire financial straits and I have to do an Ampersand the Monkey spinoff,” the author allows. I wouldn’t hold it against him.)