Category Archives: Humour

Hydrographic humour

It’s good to have something to make you laugh at the start of your day.  Today, I was particularly taken by this article on a UK government website:

 

It wasn’t the headline that made me laugh, of course – that’s pretty serious.  No, what caught my attention (thanks to mhoye on Mastodon) was further down, where they offer the general public some advice on how the they can help mitigate the situation:

Fabulous!  Yes, it’s those emails from granny that are really emptying the reservoirs!  Free up some hard disk space and the rivers will flow freely again! I particularly like the use of the word ‘pressure’.

So I’m now left contemplating a set of possibilities, in increasingly worrying order:

  • This was put in as a joke, to test whether the editor actually read the article before publishing it, or…
  • The article was actually written using ChatGPT, or…
  • We actually have people this foolish working for our government agencies and publishing recommendations on their behalf.

Mmm….

 

Does this man never stop producing wonderful stuff?

Bill Bailey, a couple of years ago, though some of his comments are rather poignant today:

(Direct Link to YouTube)

W. Heath Robinson

We have some Heath Robinson cartoons which we still very much enjoy, but for which no longer have the wall space, and so have given them away.

I thought, though, that other Status-Q readers might enjoy them too. (Click for larger versions.)

Plucky Attempt To Rescue A Family Overtaken By The Tide

Some Occasions When A Gentleman Is Not Expected To Give Up His Seat To A Lady

A Surprise Packet For The Cat Burglar

Christmas Classics

The oral tradition has long been an important part of preserving human culture, and it is perhaps especially at this time of year that we’re conscious of works of music and literature that have been handed down through the ages.

While I was showering this morning, for example, I found myself singing a cheerful seasonal song which my brain had kindly preserved for me, almost intact, for more than half a century, but I just couldn’t remember the first line.  It was only as I was towelling myself down, that it came back to me.

Christmas, Christmas, in Smurfing Land

Anyone else grow up in the 70s?

Cross-format poetry

Continuing the theme of Good Stuff Spotted on Mastodon, this comes from Natasha Jay:

There was a young man
From Cork who got limericks
And Haikus confused.

The Geek’s Prayer

From Phil Giammattei‘s Mastodon feed…

Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention,
the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

(Thanks to Rupert Curwen for reposting.)

The opposite of pudding?

This cafe in Zutphen, Netherlands, is of my way of thinking…

Stressed desserts.

All the world’s a garden centre

All the world’s a garden centre
  And all the men and women merely customers.
They have their checkouts and their entrances,
  And one man in his time plays many parts,
His visits being seven ages.

                                        First, the infant,
  Yelling and crying in his all-terrain stroller.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his gameboy
  And scowling morning face, bored by all he sees,
  Until the animatronic reindeer arrive in mid-September.
And then the lover, sighing like a furnace,
  With a woeful text to his girlfriend about
  How his mother had to stop on the way.
Next, the influencer, seeking a sausage roll
  And a power tool for his next ‘unboxing’.
Then the PR consultant, now behind the stroller,
  Feigning an interest in his wife’s roses;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
To the retiree, whose rose garden is his pride and joy,
  His wife mostly absent at the golf course. Last scene of all
  That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and such oblivion
  That you take the bus to the garden centre to shop for clothes.

Meta-Schrodinger

Spotted on Mastodon, by Michael Marshall:

Schrodinger’s cat is now so ubiquitous a reference that it’s often used by people who don’t actually understand it or what it even means.

And you can only tell if they really do understand by waiting to see what they say next about it, to see if that demonstrates any further understanding.

But until that next thing is said, it’s impossible to tell. So they essentially exist in a superposition of both getting and not getting the reference.

I before E, except after C

Spotted online:

I before E. Except when your foreign neighbour Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.  Weird.

The AI Ballad Of John Henry

Friends this side of the Atlantic may not be familar with the story of John Henry, but you can read about him on Wikipedia.  John Henry, the story goes, was a ‘steel-driving man’ whose prowess with the hammer was formidable.  

At one point, he took on a steam hammer, side-by-side, and won… but the effort also killed him.

It’s not quite clear whether John Henry was ever anything more than a legend, but he has inspired statues, books, animations, compositions by Aaron Copland… and almost everybody seems to have recorded musical versions of the story, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Lonnie Denegan, Harry Belafonte, Woodie Guthrie… to name but a few.  For a brief version, here’s Tennessee Ernie Ford, or I rather like the slightly longer story as recorded by Johnny Cash.

My friend Keshav, of course, asked ChatGPT to write a version, which also covers the threat posed to traditional skills by the coming of machines.

 

 

In case you were wondering…

I’ve been trying to get ChatGPT to do some recursion, using prompts like “Write a letter explaining how to use ChatGPT to write letters about how to use ChatGPT to write letters”, but the results, though coherent, are not very satisfying.

So instead I tried confusing it with, “Give an example of the kind of question you would be unable to answer, and then answer it.” It did well on the first bit… but ignored the second.

OK, I thought, I’d better stick to something simple, like the question that all hyperintelligent machines should be able to answer.

The ultimate question and its answer are not specified in the information available to me. However, the concept of an "ultimate question" and the search for an "ultimate answer" has appeared in various forms in literature and pop culture. For example, in Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked to find the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, and ultimately determines that the answer is 42. This is meant to be humorous and should not be taken literally.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser