The Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) is one of the top venues in computer science. In this year's edition SODA'10, there is a paper by Flavio Chierichetti, Silvio Lattanzi and Alessandro Panconesi: "Rumour Spreading and Graph Conductance".

In the paper, there is a very interesting footnote in the front page:

For the role of the Italian Ministry of University and Research please see the Unacknowledgements.

This is what you find at the end of the paper (emphasis added):

Unacknowledgements: This work is ostensibly supported by the the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the FIRB program, project RBIN047MH9-000. The Ministry however has not paid its dues and it is not known whether it will ever do.

I hope the Ministry will pay now!

In one great scene of the film The Invention of Lying, Mark Bellison (played by Rick Gervais) addresses a crowd in front of his home and millions around the world following his speech through TV.

Mark lives in a world were nobody has ever told a lie, but has discovered that he is able to tell lies. After telling her dying mother that she was going to a "better place", people push him to tell them everything he knows about afterlife. He makes up an explanation in the form of a list of 10 things that he writes in two pizza boxes.

Number one: there is a man in the sky who controls everything.

Number two: ...

Man 1 [interrupts]: what does he looks like?

Mark: tall, big hands for making stuff, good head of hair.

Man 2: what ethnicity?

Mark: he is a new ethnicity, he is a mixture of all our ethnicities.

Man 3: does he live in the clouds?

Mark: no

Man 1: can we see him?

Mark: no, he is high in the clouds, too high to see him.

Man 3: so he lives in space.

Mark: no, not that high.

Man 2: so he is in the thermosphere?

Mark: sorry people, we have a lot to get through here. Man lives in the sky, you can't see him, controls everything ...

Number two: when you die, you don't disappear into an eternity of nothingness. Instead, you go to a really great place.

Number three: in that place, everyone will get a mansion. (the crowd cheers).

Man 4: what kind of mansion?

Mark: the best mansion you can think of.

Man 5: damn!, I was thinking of a horrible mansion.

Mark: no, no, it is the best mansion ever. Not the one you are thinking of right now, but whatever the best mansion that you like, that is the one you gonna get.

I wanted to recommend a couple of funny books for Sunday afternoons or sleepless nights. The first one, "The Deeper Meaning of Liff" written by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in 1983, is a dictionary for things that have no name (yet)". In "Liff", for instance, a "Fring" is defined as "the noise made by a light bulb that has just shone its last", and "Ahenny" is "the way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves": The second is about"101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions, written in 1998 by Kenki Kawakami, and it is devoted to the Japanese art of Chindogu. It describes invented gadgets that seem to solve a problem perfectly, but that turn out to be absurd and unusable. One of these devices is this knife with markings at different angles to obtain a high precision when dividing a cake or pie:

Via: Free thinker + Pharyngula

Prehistoria

Estas me las sopló mi abuelita, yo no cacho ni una.

• 19XX botecito "yo quiero tener un bote para salir a pasear"
• 19XX Ukelele
• 19XX Garibaldi era una fiera
• 19XX Barrilito de cerveza
• 19XX Bailongo
• 19XX Tropile

Era del blanco y negro

El festival de la una, el Jappening, ...