Behold!  The original utterance of “That’s what she said,” from a 1992 “Wayne’s World” skit on Saturday Night Live, predating The Family Guy by seven years, and The Office by thirteen years.

That is all.

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s Count von Count from Sesame Street, singing a song in which the word “count” has been bleeped out, with hilarious results.  (The video’s pretty old—maybe everyone has already seen this and they just forgot to tell me about it.)

If you haven’t seen something like it before, this is pretty cool.  It is a hacked Super Mario World level that can be completed without touching the controller.  As far as I can tell, it uses only elements which were already in the game (except it looks like they modified Yoshi egg blocks so that Mario automatically jumps when he hits one).  This one is a really impressive one because it is like 11 minutes long and choreographed with anime music.  Enjoy.

A hilarious blog I discovered a few months ago is Stuff White People Like.  I’ve been meaning to mention it here for a while, but a good post last week, entitled Being Offended, reminded me I needed to share.  Here is an excerpt:

Naturally, white people do not get offended by statements directed at white people.  ...  As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.

Another good one is Knowing What’s Best For Poor People:

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Those are two of my favorites.  Some other good ones to read are Study Abroad, Music Piracy, Organic Food, Hating Corporations, Religions that their parents don’t belong to, and Grammar.

And for a great cross-section of the kinds of idiots that reside on the internets, try to read some of the comments!  (I say “try to” because very few people will actually succeed.)

This fall the music game genre is going to be interesting.  Guitar Hero IV: World Tour has announced that it will be like Rock Band: two guitars, drums, and vocals for every song.  The GH4 drum kit, which you can see here, is pretty cool in that it has two cymbal-like pads on there too, instead of having all the drums in a row.  Not that I know the slightest thing about drumming, but I assume this would feel a little more authentic.  The drum pads are also going to sense how hard you are hitting them, and adjust the volume of the drums in-game accordingly.  (Maybe Rock Band already did this?  From what I read it doesn’t sound like it, but I’ve only played it like twice in Best Buy.)  For the guitar parts, they are adding something I have wanted: open notes (as in, strumming without holding any frets).  They’ll represent this on the screen as a solid bar across the fret board (the same way the kick pedal is represented on the drums).  I haven’t heard much about how Rock Band 2 will be improved yet.  Konami, however, is jumping into the genre that they created ten years ago (but failed to bring to America) with Rock Revolution.  The drum kit for that game just looks wacky.

For me, I’ll probably only get GH4 for the Wii this year, since I already have one GH3 Wii guitar controller.  The downside is that there’s no downloadable content for the Wii (at least not yet).  Mainly due to the fact that there is only 512 MB of memory in the Wii.  I am thinking about getting a Playstation 3 (Gaystation 3 to the haters) soon, so I could get any of the games for PS3, but I’d really like to not have too many plastic musical instruments sitting around my living room.  So I’m thinking GH4 for Wii is my more practical option.

I’m sure you’ve heard that the Happy Birthday song is protected under copyright by the Happy Birthday Nazis, who actively seek compensation whenever the song is used in a movie or on TV.

As it turns out, their copyright claim has never been challenged in court and it may in fact be invalid.  Now we just need someone to challenge it.

I created a Facebook profile.  I sent friend requests to a few people.  If you’re not one of those people, feel free to send me one.  I’m not promising that I’ll use or update it any more than my MySpace; however, the fact that Facebook doesn’t look like the internet threw up on it makes me more likely to log in some as opposed to none.  Plus I think it’ll repost my blog posts from my feed, so that those of you who use Facebook all the time but don’t want to have to check this website (ahem) should be able to keep up with, let’s say, photos of Emma.

You’ve probably heard before that the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see (Wallace 1997).  While that may be the case when mo money is acquired posthumously, statisticians and economists now have evidence that your happiness is proportional to the logarithm of your wealth (see chart below).  In other words, sadness is for poor people!  The corollary is that the more money you currently have, the more you would have to acquire in order to attain an additional happiness unit.  Much like crack cocaine.

See also a more formal paper about this topic.  I didn’t read it because it looked super boring, but the charts at the end are interesting.  For instance, did you know there is a “U-shaped life satisfaction in rich English-speaking countries”? (Figure 5)

Well, not quite.  But I was mentioned in a post on the Freakonomics site, which is now hosted on NYTimes.com.  I e-mailed them a link last week, which they proceeded to blog about.  But I didn’t expect my full name to show up in bold text or anything.  Kinda cool though I guess.

Scientists in Japan have succeeded for the first time in experimentally reproducing traffic jams.  You can read about it here or you can read about it here (both articles say basically the same thing).

You can also see a video of the experiment on YouTube.  It is pretty interesting, but I wish they had done more work to figure out how many cars it takes to cause a traffic jam.  Clearly, two or three cars on the track wouldn’t produce a shockwave.  Ten cars might produce one but it would take longer, for example.  Then maybe they could come up with a general equation to predict the capacity of a section of road.