Friday, August 30, 2013

Clumsy Russian Moose


From reader D. S., we have this video of a clumsy Russian moose.

In Canada we teach our moose at Arthur Murray dance studios.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

I Feel Sorry if Any Boring Arising From This Posting


Recent conference spam:

We feel sorry if any boring arising from this message, you can click to Unsubscribe

2013 International Conference on Intelligent Materials and Mechatronics (IMM2013)

November 1-2, 2013, Hong Kong, China

2013 International Conference on Intelligent Materials and Mechatronics (IMM 2013) will be held in Hong Kong, November 1-2, 2013. The forum aims to bring together researchers, developers, and users from around the world in both industry and academia for sharing state-of-art results, for exploring new areas of research and development, and to discuss emerging issues facing Intelligent Materials and Mechatronics.

And they thought this was appropriate to send to me?

Friday, August 16, 2013

Apparently I am an Expert in Robotics, Too


Received in today's e-mail:

Dear Dr.Jeffrey Shallit,

OMICS Publishing Group successfully publishing quality open access journals with the support from scientists like you.

We are aware of your reputation for quality of research and trustworthiness in the field of "Journal of Advance Robotics and Automation "

and that is why you have been chosen as an Editorial Board Member of our Journal of Advance Robotics and Automation

... We may again assure you of international quality and standards of our articles published in our journals, Using state-of-the-art prominent reviewers and editorial board. We also assure you of our best co-operation always...

Well, you could start by having a grammatical title for your journal.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

An Unusual Hotel


We stayed in a hotel near Providence, RI, with the following strange set of choices of elevator buttons:

There are apparently two different floors numbered 4 -- on different levels -- and no floor 3. And why do the restrooms need their own floor?

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Atheist Elixir


Spotted in a store in Charlottesville, Virginia.

I Get Email


My name is E*** S****** and I am a communication Engineering student from United Arab Emirates. I was trying to integrate some difficult integral and I really spent a lot of time trying to work it out using different software and referring to different table of integrals books, however all my trials failed. So I thought that the mathematicians from the University of Waterloo will help me to work it out, so if you can please help me with this.

The integral is attached as a pdf file ...please have a look at it.

Thank you so much and sorry for the inconvenience.

Hint to students: don't do this! This kind of message is appropriate only if you are addressing a question that is directly in the specialty of the person you are writing to. I am not a specialist in integrals.