I love a good hoax

Last year, there were reports of a man giving birth to a healthy female child.

  (Kristian Dowling/Getty Images)

Except that the story wasn’t completely true. The man concerned was in fact a transgender person who still retained his/her female reproductive organs.

More interesting were reports of a man, Lee Mingwei who was carrying a child despite having no female organs.

This one really was a hoax. Going to the website www.malepregnancy.com leads you to the elaborate world of the fictional RYT Hospital and the Dwayne Medical Centre at the non-existent Dwayne University.

Here you have links to a wonderful selection of medical research marvels – nanotechnology robots which operate within blood and tissue.

Genochoice, which enabled prospective parents to create their own genetically healthy child online

Clyven, the mouse engineered with the same intelligence as a human by implanting human brain cells

And of course the pregnant man.

This very professionally produced site is full of pseudo-science and appears very credible. Except it is not. It is a wonderfully carried off hoax.

Two questions remains though. Why and who is paying? Unlike the April Fool’s jokes I wrote about in April (when else?) which were advertising stunts, there seems no obvious commercial return for the RYT pages. Perhaps I have become cynical and assume that there must be a financial component for everything on the web. Clearly that is not true. I do this for the fun of it. But the RYT site is so elaborate and clearly a great deal of time went into it. It is reasonable to ask why.  

Incidentally, UK Internet consultant Phil Bradley has a wonderful list of other hoaxes on his website.

Reine, Reine Gueux E’veille

A joke entry in this week’s Guardian Weekly ‘Notes and Queries’ column , the motto of the French navy – “a l’eau, c’est l’heure”, reminded my of a book that I had forgotten about for the last 30 years which makes similar use of homophones.

The so-called, d’Antin Manuscript entitled Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames was published in the late 60’s and purports to be a set of ancient French poems.

 

The one I best remember went -

Et qui rit des curés d’Oc?, De Meuses raines, houp! de cloques.

The first time I read them, I laboriously tried to understand the French, until it was pointed out that I should read them out loud. Then the penny dropped.

Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.

Another well-know one is –

Un petit d’un petit, S’étonne aux Halles, Un petit d’un petit, Ah! Degrés te fallent

Each poem is accompanied but a straight-faced translation of the French.  “Et qui rit des curés d’Oc? De Meuses raines, houp! de cloques.” is translated as “he who laughs at the curés of Oc will have frogs leap at him from the Meuse river”.

The whole thing is a wonderfully witty read, as I have rediscovered this week.

D’Antin is in fact one time architect and later Hollywood actor Luis van Rooten. Mexican born Van Rooten was a master of languages and accents and found films roles that made use of this skill. 

But what does it taste like?

I have never quite understood why fancy Chinese meals are supposed to taste better if they are accompanied by a bird carved out of a carrot, or elegant meals are somehow more elegant if the butter is shaped like a rose.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but be impressed with things that people with food in the name of art and have posted examples before – http://cyberslacker.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/do-play-with-your-food/

I can’t say that I much like these watermelon carvings by Francesco Scravaglieri but I do at least admire the endeavour.

How cynical can you get?

Although the main use of the Internet would seem to be for the distribution of erotica and pornography  (apart from its other use as a means of pirating copyright material), I have not been in the habit of writing about it. But as this blog is dedicated to the quest for the absurd and the odd, I cannot refrain from passing comment on this hilarious find – courtesy of Reuters (Shannon Stapleton).

 

This is from the tryouts for the Lingerie Football League. Yes that’s right. An American football competition between teams such as the Dallas Desire and the San Diego Seduction.

I suppose it is one way of livening up such a dull game. The exercise is so cynical that it does make me laugh though.

Polymath

Now we are getting somewhere! Having looked at music and maths, art and food, art and science I have finally found a trio – art, maths and food.

George W Hart is a sculptor and mathematician with a special interest in geometric scupltues. He is the author of the online Encyclopaedia of Polyhedra, in case you are interested in exploring the exciting field of Stellations of the Rhombic Triacontahedron and other such delights, and is a research professor in a computer science department.

So, art and maths. But what about the food?

Although it is hard to see in this picture of a mobile entitled  ‘No Picnic’ , these three pieces are made of plastic knives, forks and spoons

Cute huh?

Another set of quasi graphs

I am delighted to have discovered someone who clearly shares my love of the distinctly odd use of science. In this case Venn diagrams again.

The delightfully whimsical Raynor Ganan, who describes himself as a wackademic on his website  Ratbag, has suggested the above as part of “man’s quest to muck about with the natural order of things”.

He also offers a somewhat less fanciful classification of cutlery

Somewhat familiarly, Raynor seems to write about anything that catches his fancy. An approach to blogging I heartily approve of.

Gifts For Geeks

You’ve got to love a website dedicated to supplying tee-shirts and other gifts specially designed for geeks.

I particularly like the maths geeks ones.

 

 

 

There are some other fun ones.

 

 

 

More at Gifts For A Geek.

Little People

For some reason which I now don’t fully remember, I took a series of photographs back in the early 70’s of a tiny toy man I had found on the ground. I must have thought it amusing to record him in different situations.

 

So what a delight to find that someone is doing for real.

Photographer and website designer Vincent Bousserez has taken a series of photographs called Plastic Life. 

 

Some of these have been used in magazines including Esquire, Geez and Le Figaro.

More of Vincent Bousserez work can be found either via his flickr pages or on the galerie Bailly site.

April Fool?

We lived in the UK for a long time and were regular readers of the Guardian newspaper. I still remember their wonderfully elaborate April Fools joke in 1977 when they published an entire lift-out supplement on the fictional islands of San Serif.  

This hoax was so successful, it has been reused a number of time over for other April Fool’s jokes. See the Museum of Hoaxes article for details,

I (like many others) assume that the IKEA car, the Leko which is due for unveiling on the 1st of April is also an April Fool’s hoax.  Let’s hope it is memorable.

 

In passing, I have been introduced to an extraordinary man – Donald Knuth. Knuth is clearly a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist. I had vaguely heard of him in connection with computer publishing and typesetting but hadn’t realised the full extent of his interests. Relevant to the San Serif hoax, Knuth is responsible for the Bank of San Serif which lists the fictional credits made to people who spot typographical errors in his books. He used to pay a finders fee of a hexadecimal dollar (256 cents) but has stopped doing so to protect his bank account details.

Aside from books and papers on serious computer topics,  Knuth has also written an article on the complexity of song. Deriving mathematical formulae for the degree of repetition of words and refrains in popular song. He writes “It is known that almost all songs of length n require a text of length ~ n. But this puts a considerable space requirement on one’s memory if many songs are to be learned; hence, our ancient ancestors invented the concept of a refrain. When the song has a refrain, its space complexity can be reduced to cn, where c < 1″. He then goes on to derive formula for songs with repetition such as Old Macdonald Had a Farm and  The Twelve Days of Christmas.

The full article can be found at The Complexity of Song

This is a slightly more academic approach to the subject of mathematics and music than my previous post and probably worthy of Tom Lehrer.

Graphing song titles

These graphed song titles appeal to the mathematician and musician in me.  Inevitably, some are cleverer than others. (Mostly from Graphic Jam.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Graph Jam also has a wonderful set of other funny graphs. Such as -

 

 

and my personal favourite