Category Archives: meaningless

You need this book.

Posted on January 10, 2008 | 3 comments

I have nothing to blog about. Therefore, I must show you this:

That is all.

(Thanks, Galen.)

3 Comments

Posted in animals, bizarre, crackbaby, funny, meaningless

Compelling evidence that I am not insane

Posted on December 26, 2007 | 2 comments

The UK Daily Star confirms that I am not wasting my time with my fruitless pursuits of the Zodiac killer’s unsolved mysteries:

But that’s if [Britney Spears] can tear herself away from the internet where she has been indulging her latest obsession – trying to solve crime.

The star has become fascinated by the unsolved Zodiac killings that took place in California in the late 1960s.

They are the US equivalent of our Jack The Ripper murders. The recent film Zodiac about the case starring Jake Gyllenhaal, 26, captured Britney’s imagination.

She has been spending hours on a website called zodiackiller.com and is convinced she can crack the case as many people believe the culprit is still alive.

Gimme my Cheetos, y’all; We’re gonna crack this thing!!

2 Comments

Posted in bizarre, funny, meaningless, people, tech, toys, zodiac

Zodiac webtoy: Another update

Posted on December 7, 2007 | Leave a comment

I’ve finally made some more updates to the Zodiac webtoy! The biggest change is the addition of simple letter-frequency statistics.

Remember when Ralphie cracked the “secret code” in A Christmas Story?
Ralphie: [Reading his decoding]: “Be… sure… to… drink… your… Ovaltine. Ovaltine? A crummy commercial?!? Son of a bitch!!”

Here is the list of noteworthy changes:

Added frequency tabulations for symbols, decoded plaintext letters, and expected letter frequencies (as specified here). Frequency analysis of this sort might be useful to cracking the cipher. Eventually, I would like to include more n-gram statistics (occurrences of letter combinations of length n) to make this more useful.
Added the 408 cipher, which has a known (and creepy) solution. Click on the “Switch to 408 cipher” link to see it. The known solution link is below the 408 cipher (it is labeled “The correct one” next to “Interesting decoders”).
Fixed some formatting bugs that were causing the columns of the cipher grid to get squashed.

The webtoy seems to be getting much slower in Internet Explorer 6. I’ve not tested it in Internet Explorer 7. But it works pretty well in Firefox and Safari. I am afraid of all the horrible, horrible JavaScript code that I wrote – Please let me know of any problems you find! If you find the new version to be too crappy, you can still use the old version by clicking here.

oranchak.com – new look

Posted on October 2, 2007 | 3 comments

There must be a law of blogging that says you will inevitably get tired of the look and feel of your blog. I’ve succumbed to this law, and the result is I’ve installed the Silver Light 0.1 WordPress theme. Have a look at the new oranchak.com — dig the less gaudy and more simplified layout.

3 Comments

Posted in meaningless

Dry academia

Posted on October 1, 2007 | 2 comments

Despite its rigorous, almost unapproachable mathematical foundations, Doug Zongker’s groundbreaking academic research paper remains one of the most important scientific studies you will ever read.

Doug Zongker himself presenting his paper:

Awe-inspiring.

Source.

2 Comments

Posted in funny, math, meaningless, school, tech

WHAT did you call me???

Posted on August 10, 2007 | 3 comments

My eighteen months of frustrating COBRA insurance coverage is coming to an end, and I recently received a letter explaining the expiration of my coverage. Their choice of salutation is interesting:

Did they just call me a penis?? Ah well. I’ve called them much worse things over these past eighteen months.

3 Comments

Posted in bizarre, funny, meaningless, medical

Creation Science Fair? No it’s not!

Posted on June 22, 2007 | Leave a comment

[16:17] Chris: heh, i am reading this call for a christian science fair entries

[16:17] Dave: omg

[16:17] Chris: they have a bunch of suggestions for entries

[16:17] Chris: “8. How much voltage or current can a human take before he is killed? Could do experiments on a plant.”

[16:18] Dave: lol

[16:18] Chris: i hope they mean plant like a green plant, not plant like a spy

[16:18] Dave: hahaha

[16:19] Chris: “12. Trilobites prove Noah’s flood because they are curled up or not?”

[16:19] Chris: here’s a non-controversial one

[16:19] Chris: “18. Is intelligence influenced by physical attributes. i.e. are blondes “dumb” or does skin color influence intelligence?”

[16:20] Chris: here’s the one ann coulter submitted: “23. Why do we have an Adams apple?”

[16:20] Dave: hahahahaha

[16:20] Chris: http://www.tccsa.tc/fair/fair_ideas.html

How much for that boring puppy in the window?

Posted on June 6, 2007 | Leave a comment

(via)

Dinner for astronauts?

Posted on May 17, 2007 | 1 comment

While doing research for the final paper for my Artificial Intelligence course, I came across this citation in a paper I am studying:

In several applications, Tang and Fishwich [22] … and many other researchers have shown that ANNs perform better than
ARIMA models, specifically, for more irregular series and for multiple-period-ahead forecasting.
…
[22] Z. Tang and P. A. Fishwich, “Backpropagation neural nets as models for time series forecasting,” ORSA Journal on
Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, pp 374-385, 1993.

Tang and Fishwich. What an awesome name that would be for a new Adult Swim cartoon.

1 Comment

Posted in bizarre, computing, funny, meaningless, tech