I love monsters that breathe no fire, guard no treasure, live in their own creepy ways, are unharmed by heroes or capitalism –

Baku, for instance, is a monster that feeds on dreams. Headless Xiantian turns his nipples into eyes and navel into mouth, dances with a shield and an axe. A drowned girl turns into a bird, called Jianwei, which drops pebbles into the ocean to fill it. The songs of Sirens lead the sailors astray. The singing Mermaids, riding seaward on the waves, would not sing a song to J. Alfred Prufrock.

All these little creatures are more lively, more curious, more fascinating than the saliva dripping Aliens of Hollywood or a Tamagotchi in monotonous pixels and beeps.

Georges Perec, the silly and brilliant French author (who, among other things, writes a novel without any use of “e”), discusses jigsaw puzzles in the Preamble of his masterpiece La vie mode d’emploi (Life A User’s Manual) thus:

“…despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.”

Perhaps interaction design is also a form of puzzle-making. A good puzzle should be neither too obvious nor too frustrating. How puzzling!

The spirit of a silly thing is always more delightful than the nonsense wrapped in a grand package. Would you rather use a Chindogu or read a business report?

Chindogu means a strange tool in Japanese, which is suitably useless (or unuseless) to the strange modern life indeed. Yet, according to one of its tenets, a Chindogu must exist — in order to be useless, it must first be. Ah!

Perhaps a Chindogu aims not at solving a particular problem, but at exposing the perplexity of human existence — a geeky adaptation of Zen koans.

Cervantes told this “interactive” story in Don Quixote –

While waiting for dawn, Sancho entertains his master Don Quixote with a love story between a shephred and a shephredess.

One day, the shephred sees the lovely shephredess on the other side of the river, and asks a fisherman to ferry him and his 300 goats to her. The fisherman, having only a small boat, can only carry one person and one goat each time — Sancho then reminds Don Quixote to keep count of the goats, or else the story will end — and so the fisherman carries a goat, returns, carries another, returns to carry another, and so on…

“How many goats have already passed?” Sancho asks, after a while.
“How the devil should I know?” answers Don Quixote.

And thus the love story abruptly ends.

William Blake said, ‘To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower.’ It sounds much like an advance version of WinZip or StuffIt indeed. Is it possible to see the world in a grain of sand?

Find a grain of sand that weighs a very specific value, say 0.4374284729… gram. Then with a very accurate machine we measure its weight very very accurately. Then we read that specific value, position by position, and convert the value in each position to binary numbers. For example, from the value of 0.4374.. we will get, 0, 100, 11, 111, 100, etc. Appending the values one after the other, we will get a very long string of 1 and 0.

Now feed the string into a Turing Machine (computer), and generate all the digital sound and fury, that signify nothing, hidden in a grain of sand.

Imagine a big lump of protein grows hair all around itself, and asks you in a shrieking voice to comb its hairs so that it can be a pretty and smooth hairy ball, with no “parting” to be found.

This is a topology problem about “vector fields” on a sphere. The best one can do is to comb the hairs to make everywhere smooth except one point on the ball. Remarkably, the meteorologist then deduces from the hairy ball that there must be always a cyclone somewhere on earth.

Concepts of Modern Mathematics has a lively discussion on the hairy ball.

A silly job interview question: Which person in history would you like to meet most?

To which a good answer will be: Joseph Pujol, the Fartiste

A normal man with one very special talent, Pujol farted most wisely and became Le Pétomane. The gas from his abdomen swept Moulin Rouge, entertained kings, and suffocated women in corset.

How hilarious and disgusting it must be to hear the sound of a bride on her wedding night (small noise)… the morning after (loud rasping noise)… a cannon (loud thunder)… and towards an impression of San Francisco earthquake!

“Why?” The interviewer may ask.

To which I shall reply: Because farting wisely is a rarer talent than talking wisely.

Have you heard of the Thompson Lamp, which turns itself on for one hour, then turns itself off for half an hour, then on again for 1/4 hour, off again for 1/8 hour, on for 1/16 hour, and on and on until the time has been exactly two hours since the beginning? No one knows whether the lamp is on or off after 2 hours.
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I prefer Josef Scharl over Pixar studio. His illustrations first appeared in the 1944 edition of Brother Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. What fantastic drawings for fantastic tales — simple, bold, and quaint. Never had I seen chickens so thoughtful, frogs so sensual, dwarfs so spirited, dragons so sleepy, and princesses so strange!

Since 1986, The Economist magazine has been running the light-hearted Big Mac Index to measure exchange rates. Based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), Burgernomics finds out how much a Big Mac costs in different countries, and thereby deduces whether and by how much a country’s currency is overvalued or undervalued.

The rational minds might object that the cost of a Big Mac cannot reflect exchange rates, as it is much influenced by number of KFCs, number of obese citizens, number of mad cows, or the existence of certain Monsieur Jose Bove. Nevertheless, Big Mac brings a vivid and fatty touch to the dismal science.