Another round of the semi-annual link clearance.

• Academic researchers summarizes their thesis in one snarky sentence on lol my thesis. Mine would be “Tesselation in 3D is much harder than 2D, and you can’t even show the results on a flat piece of paper, so here’s a flip book of some bubbles.” Related (but less successful) is Clickbait PhD, a Web site which gives PhD theses more clickbaity titles.
• Turbulence Without Camera Shake: People with way too much time on their hands take scenes of people being thrown about the bridge of the Enterprise and remove the camera shake. The results will amaze you.
• An unnamed man used a first-class airline ticket to get free meals in the airport’s VIP lounge. English translation. What elevates this to poetry is that at the end of the year, he canceled the ticket for a refund!
• A summary of this survey’s results will be available on or about June 1, 2010. (Checks calendar.) It looks like the summary is here (pdf).
• Mindy Kaling gave the second Class Day address at Harvard Law School (widely misreported as the Commencement Address). You can watch it for yourself or let clickbait sites tell you the best jokes. (It starts out slow, but stick with it through the obvious jokes at the start.)
• Is this the end of Hampton, Florida? The details are in this New York Times article, but I linked to the article on Lowering the Bar because of its brilliant use of the phrase “swamp trauma”.
• “Does it look like a pig? Are you sure?” How to name animals in German. Chinese has a lot of creative animal naming: Two that I can think of off the top of my head are giraffe (長頸鹿) = long neck deer, and squirrel (松鼠) = pine rat. To be fair, English has its own share of pig-centric animal naming: hedgehog, guinea pig, warthog, porpoise (pork fish), porcupine (thorny pig) and aardvark (earth pig).
• On the subject of aardvarks, here’s how a raccoon became an aardvark: As a joke, a 17-year-old made an edit to the Wikipedia entry for coati saying that it also known as the Brazilian Aardvark. That “fact” was repeated in a number of other articles, and the cycle was completed when Wikipedia cited one of those articles as a source, The fact that Wikipedia claimed that some people call it a Brazilian Aardvark caused people to call it a Brazilian Aardvark, at which point a new reality was created.
• Last year at this time, I pointed out How to tell if a “shark in a flooded city street after a storm” photo is a fake. This year, it’s How to tell if a “giant rattlesnake” photo is a fake.
• Armed with a physics engine, years of experience watching basketball games (occasionally from start to finish), and momentary enthusiasm, Jon Bois sets out to create the ultimate basketball video game, modestly titled Jon’s Basketball Game. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go well. “The 400-foot-tall man, as well as the 20-foot-tall pigeons, were leftover elements from gameplay features that were abandoned at an early stage of development.”
• The photo tips blog shares little tips about managing photos, focusing on Office applications.
• Keyboard ghosting explained. Ghosting occurs when a keyboard either generates a false key or ignores a pressed key because too many other keys are already pressed.
• Say you’re debugging some code and you see a cross-thread COM call. Here’s how you can follow the call to the destination thread.
• A link for my own reference: virtual machines for various versions of Internet Explorer, part of the modern.IE browser testing tools. (Announced back in 2013.)

James Mickens section

January 2014: This World of Ours

I have seen a video called “Gigantic Martian Insect Party,” and I have seen another video called “Gigantic Martian Insect Party 2: Don’t Tell Mom,” and I hated both videos, but this did not stop me from directing the sequel “Gigantic Martian Insect Party Into Darkness.”

March 2014: To Wash It All Away

Clearing the cache to fix a Web browser is like when your dad was driving you to kindergarten, and the car started to smoke, and he tried to fix the car by banging on the hood three times and then asking you if you could still smell the carbon monoxide, and you said, “Yeah, its better,” because you didn’t want to expose your dad as a fraud, and then both of you rode to school in silence as you struggled to remain conscious.

And a recorded presentation: Computers are a Sadness, I am the Cure, which is hilarious because it’s true, especially his final security recommendation.