Some Books

     Spring break is coming up soon for me, and one of the main things I want to do is to read.(Also sleep, work with my Arduino, make origami, and write a Mobius News post.)

Because I often like book recommendations, I thought I'd give you reader(s) some books that I have found interesting or think might be interesting but have not read yet.

"Rootin' Tootin' Putin": Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Things He's Done

Recently, my friends who do Quiz bowl/Knowledge bowl told me that there was a question asking about someone who rides horses while being shirtless. The answer was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, President of Russia, also known as Rootin' Tootin' Putin by my seventh grade social studies teacher. Anyway I began wondering if he's done anything else, um, interesting. (You know, besides doing stuff as the President of Russia...)


Well, take a look.

1. Maybe he saved a television crew from a tiger... According to The Telegraph, according to Russian media, Putin was visiting the Ussuri reserve to see how researchers monitor the tigers, and suddenly, a tiger escaped and charged towards a nearby television crew. Putin pulled out a tranquilizer gun and shot the tiger. (But it wasn't caught on camera...)
2. He flew with migrating birds in a glider. Dressed in a puffy white jumpsuit, Putin flew in a motorized hang glider and led cranes on their migration path. Fun fact: The cranes were considered by the area's original inhabitants to be gods.
3. While scuba diving, he "found" pieces of ancient pottery. This one was basically a fail. Putin went scuba diving and came up holding pieces of what appeared to be ancient Greek pottery. However, many people were suspicious. After all, he had only gone to water about six feet deep. The chances that ancient pottery had just been sitting there without anyone seeing? Heh, almost none. Soon, Putin's spokesman revealed that it had all been set up.
4. His puppy was named by a five year old kid. (The human kind of kid, not the goat. I'm just clarifying. I wouldn't put it past Putin to discuss puppy names with young goats...) Putin received a Bulgarian shepherd puppy from Bulgaria's head of state after signing some natural gas deals. He asked for name ideas from the public and finally chose Buffy, a name suggested by Dima Sokolov. Later on, Putin gave the boy an autographed soccer ball when he and his family visited Putin and met the puppy.
5. Judo. On his 56th birthday, Putin released an instructional judo video creatively titled "Let's Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin." I'm pretty sure he's the only President to ever make an instructional Judo DVD...

http://imgur.com/gallery/Bj2vb

Wishes

One of the many cliche story plots floating around in the literary world is the wishes-gone-wrong one.
I now know what I would say if someone were to offer me a wish:                                                                I wish that I would be able to do nothing for a day.
This wish is impossible to grant. No matter what happens to you, you will always be doing something. I challenge you. Go and think of a condition where you are not doing anything. Then tell me. If that is a condition where you are not doing anything, I will give you a guest admin-ship and let you kick N's heads off.

Names

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -William Shakespeare


Good question. Last year, our friend Connor (who posts at There's Always a Catch once in a blue moon) introduced me to the Bouba/Kiki effect. Basically, people who spoke different languages were showed a spiky shape and a blob shape and asked to name one of them Bouba and the other Kiki.
For no apparent reason, I wondered whether these "sharp" and "round" sounds carried over to names of people.

 So, let's take a look.

Terrible Logic and More

A certain teacher of mine used horrendously poor logic today. I will not share his/her/its name as not to embarrass him/her/it (hence these pronouns).

Basically, he/she/it told us something like...
That insane murderer did well in school.
You are doing well in school.
You will become an insane murderer.
(Obviously, it wasn't that, but it was close-ish)
(There's more, but then it would be too obvious who the person is... I'm not trying to shame him/her/it.)

Then he/she/it became a dictator of sorts, instructing us on exactly how we should have interpreted the assignment we had just completed that tied in to his/her/its dreadfully wrong logic. After that, he/she/it stated that we should challenge those in power (like dictator-like figures) if we disagree. Disagreeing with both the adamant demand that we all see the same point in the assignment and the appallingly flawed logic, I was just about ready to go against the teacher. But then I realized I cared too much about doing well in school to spend time quarreling with people. Or maybe I just didn't care anymore.

Either way, my point is that I think everyone's perspective is shaped by past experiences and personality. To that teacher, just because your point of giving an assignment is "blah blah blah" does not mean everyone will think "blah blah blah" after doing it. Yeah, you should probably tell us why you assigned something, but no, you shouldn't insist there's only one or two "right" ways to look at it. Maybe my perception of your words was wrong, and if it was, I apologize.
But in all honesty,  I suppose I should thank you for having us do that activity and then saying what you said because I really feel like I now know where I stand (when it comes to some things at least) just from my reaction to all of it. Thanks.

Oh, and one last thing...
 



 EDIT: I have closed the comments. I have also edited the post a little. I think I may have over-exaggerated and showed too little of the other side in this story.

Get a Cat

Why you should get a cat...

Chinese Punctuation

For some reason...

It does not make sense to...

It's that time of year! Time to choose next year's classes!
Anyway, since I plan on taking a foreign language class, I went to the office to get a form. On the first page is a little paragraph about the type of people who should enroll, a list of expectations for students, and a list of expectations for parents.

As I read over it, I noticed a wildly incongruous statement. In the sea of formal and proper language was this...

"It is expected that students will observe the no-gum policy in class. It does not make sense to try to learn a new language while chewing gum."

Okay, okay, it wasn't actually underlined, but it's still pretty conspicuous, right? Right? Right?

*crickets*

Best School Project

Bored in class? Not to worry! Make one of these awesome contraptions.

More Chain Email

I received a piece of chain email, I suppose you would call it.(Here's another post about another email)
I was going to post it here, but I don't know if all of you readers want to read something so fake and bothersome to me....
So here is the link on Hoax Slayer -http://www.hoax-slayer.com/daddy-it-hurts.shtml
The email I received had only the poem text. No photo or little paragraph at the beginning and end. No advertisements.

As you might be able to guess, I am about to rant about how much I dislike this and why.

There are some little things...
This has inconsistently poor grammar and randomly capitalized words:
"I'll try and be nice,
So maybe ill just get"

Why use correct "I'll" in one line and the incorrect "ill" in the next? 
"To not be affected
By this Poem"

Poem is now a proper noun everyone! Not...

Meow?

GM claims cats do not day "meow" or "purr" or make any other noises assigned to cats.
Do you agree? If so, how would the noises cats make best be written?

Stuff I Found This Week

Youtube comments can be surprisingly interesting. Whose side would you take?

Just an interesting piece of music.

Even more interesting music. In case you're wondering, I think it's in bass clef.

Aghhhh! Blargh! Bleh bleh bleh! Grrrrrrrrrr. *pants ferociously* I will make a seperate post protesting this! I will! In the mean time, read this. 
EDIT: Sorry, the picture isn't showing up.... Basically, it's exactly what is in the link below.

http://whynot2000.blogspot.com/2012/08/has-this-ever-happened-to-you.html

   

Really? That explains why a name of Greek origin was used for a Hispanic cartoon character. Or maybe it just happens to also be a Hispanic name.

Aaaand it's gone.

Magnificent idea by the person at Hyperbole and a Half. Explanation here-  http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

--
Discover something awesome online and feel the need to share it with others? Give the link in the comments, and I'll take a look. If I like it enough, I will likely post about it. Or, make your OWN BLOG and post about it there.
-
Disclaimer: None of the above images are mine.

Blog Stuff Again

I tried to restore peace to the blog by making the whole template look somewhat like before, but someone undid my 5-15 minutes of work... Then I thought about the blog description. It's a little, well, non-descriptive to me. As a lover of quotes I feel it would be great to find a suitable quote to add to the beginning of the blog description, an epigraph almost.
If anyone can suggest some quotes that somewhat capture the essence of the blog, I would much appreciate it! Who knows? I might even use it. (assuming N and GM don't object)

P.S. I have this feeling that no one will reply ,something that happened with several other contest type things....

101 ways to annoy People

Here is the rest of it

It's Not Over, Not Even By a Long Shot

So, everyone thinks they have Wendy figured out. But all of you except RF and me are wrong about Wendy's identity. Yes, probably even Nilai.

Why are you all wrong?
Because of this clue:

Sometimes Wendy will be -----------------.
Other times, Wendy might be ----------------.
Wendy might have been ------------- once.
And the rest of the time, Wendy will be ------------.

No, the dashes have no meaning besides the fact they are representing someone's name.

picture

101 ways to annoy people

these are the first 16

*This was made by Ming Ling

Things Commonly Heard in Classrooms

 (Italics=teacher, Regular= student)

• "I have to use the bathroom!"
• "When's recess?"
• "I forgot what I was going to say..."
•  "Where's the hall pass?"
• um...
• "Explain your answer." "Because it sounds right?"

More to come! Maybe even a meme?

Racists

Found this online and wanted too see if RF wanted to do a rant about it

Reply to Statistics and Stuff I've Noticed- Part 1

After reading N's post quite a while ago, I thought, "What do our viewers really want to see?"
Currently we have these weekly-ish posts...

Musical Monday
Voki Wednesday
Ask Wendy
Technology These Days

In addition, we have posts about 

TTD posts get nearly no comments.
The Number Series which have been put on hiatus partly because they weren't that popular.
Voki Wednesdays have varying stats.
Musical Mondays used to be very popular when I took the time and effort to do the ones you've actually heard of with pictures and lyrics. Hmmm...
Ask Wendy has been rather popular as people struggle to figure out Wendy's identity, but that has died out.

Here are a few ideas we've had for weekly posts...

Furry Fridays by GM (You'll have to ask GM about those...)
Sucky Saturdays by Alec if he ever returns
or just random posts, nothing weekly if you really want it that way

What do you really want to see? Is there any topic we should write about? Anything we should get rid of? Anything to add?
---

Now, what I've noticed...
Well, first of all, our readers do not usually comment unless our posts end with a question that can be answered in a word or two. For example, GM's recent post was asking "Who answered?" got 5 relevant comments whereas my Musical Mondays 8 asked for a summary of the lyrics and got 0 comments. Speaking of comments, so many comments have been about wanting to become an author or Wendy's identity. The majority of the other comments are from contributors of this blog.
Also, our readers seem inclined to posts with less words. Let's take a look at our top viewed posts...

Voki Wednesdays 1.5: Has no words
Wendy-ask wendy: 21 words
Feedback!: A whole freaking paragraph!!!!
Musical Mondays 1: Although it included several words, each prase was pretty much followed by a picture. Plus, it was the first in a series.
No contest participants?: This is definitely an outlier. What made it popular is that it gave the requirements for the coveted position of blog author.
 Maybe we should write shorter posts? Darn it, this one is already too long, isn't it...
--

Summary-
Our viewers are not as responsive as I'd first predicted. They also mostly prefer short posts and therefore probably stopped reading this back at the first sentence.

N- technology these days rule
people should read it 
i mostly just rant but seriously just read it and take my advice
APPLE IS STUPID!!!!

RF- I read them! I even write them! Besides...
 "Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it." -Agatha Christie