Opening a fruit stand!

For some reason I find it a fun idea to open a fruit stand. Wouldn’t it be nice to be surrounded by fresh-fruit: watermelons, oranges, apples, pears, cherrys, grapes, kiwi-fruits, perhaps even some exotic fruits from madagascar. Perhaps the fruit could come in colourful creates from a boat and you’d need to wait down at the docks at 3am when it’s cold and foggy and you’d load the crates onto your ute and drive it into town, and crack open the boxes with a nice old crowbar.

Come to think of it, it reminds me a bit of Rocky. Perhaps Rocky would even run past your fruit stand and you’d yell out to him and throw him an apple.

Perhaps the fruit stand could have wheels, and you could walk it around town, meeting locals and selling delicious fruit.

It seems to me that there are many ways to enjoy a fruit stand (of course, you’d need to be operating in the right town and various other factors).

You read very fast, yet accurately!

I find this feeling funny, and nice, in a self-referential sort of way. The sentence itself can’t know how fast you read it, but it does assert that if you have read it, you’ve done it accurately. You may argue that it can’t know how accurately you have read the sentence, but I think it would be hard to prove that conclusively (until we have an ability to talk to sentences). It’s even more amusing that if we were ever to device such a scheme (bear with me) then we’d almost certainly have to use sentences to do it, and that would afford the sentences a pretty privledged position in any such “discussion”.

In an attempt to stay on topic, my advice for anyone who wants to trivially improve their reading speed (probably well-known, but nevertheless):

1. Don’t read the words to yourself

2. Try and read only “core” components of the sentence; flick your eyes to the middle of a sentence and you can probably figure out the and then the rabbit just grabbed the fish and left the market.

Apologies for that last joke. I promise this blog will get better once I have more practice. Anyway, if you are into self-referentiality, and interesting books in general, I highly recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. As someone interested in AI and definitions of Consciousness, it’s quite interesting.

Your team winning!

At the time of writing this, the World Cup final is in two days. Spain and The Netherlands are playing. For me, it is quite a beautiful situation. I love Spain, and I am Dutch. I am quite looking forward to it, though I do expect that the Dutch will win. Either way, however, I can claim that “my team” will win, and will be celebrating.

By the time you read this, however, the result will be well-known. Was I right?

On a semi-related note, I’d like to state something I’ve been getting wrong for quite some time now. “Holland” is not another name for “The Netherlands”. Infact, Holland is an area within The Netherlands. It just happens that Holland is far easier to say than The Netherlands. I suggest that there should be some shortening of The Netherlands that we can call it. I don’t know what it is, but perhaps there is such a word in Dutch; so hopefully some Dutch-speaking commenter can inform us of such. The Dutch even have an article devoted to the topic.

Though something interesting to note is that when you are guaranteed to have one of your teams win, it’s less exciting when they do. I suppose on the night I am going to need to pick a team, and that will be The Netherlands. I will say I am not a massive Roben fan; he works hard but falls over too easily. I suppose we can all agree that suspense is a critical component of enjoyment.

Todays feeling hopes to solicit within the reader the thoughts of a very suspensful game in which the result is not known or predictable, and in which the the winning thereof will be quite beneifical. I think we’ve all had a moment like this.

Baby ducks all walking in a row!

Relevant photo on Flickr (Flickr Search for baby ducks).

Ducks are pretty cute; specifically baby ducks. It also appears that the cuteness of baby ducks is directly proportional to how ordered their arrangement is. This is in contrast with most art (excluding modern art) when it is appropriate to have the paint non-uniformally distributed in both location and colour (otherwise the result would be brown). I’ve attempted to graph this relationship below:

Cuteness vs Position Graph.

It can be observed that the cuteness increases dramatically (exponentially) with the more ordered the ducks become. I don’t dare graph what would happen if a duck was to become President or at least hold some sort of formal meeting (perhaps a conference). The measurement scale is the general sound of ‘Aww’ you would here if you were in the area of the occurance; it is a combination of your own ‘Aww’ and the surroudning and resulting ‘Awws’ the image would produce.

If you think about it more, it seems that anything that we may consider something as beautiful or cute if it is “difficult to order” and happens to be in an ordered state. This applies to algorithms, dresses, dances, furniture, and – apparently – ducks. Maybe it also applies to other animals, say, bears, but an ordered group of bears is more likely to be scary than cute. Clearly more anaylsis of this phenomen is required. In the mean time, I hope you enjoy the ducks!

This is the blog of the world-famous “Box of Good Feelings!”. A Box of Good Feelings is an item that you may purchase from us, and send to a loved one or friendly acquaintance! It is a device by which you can express your true emotions and feelings of good-wishings to those around you! They will receive a beautiful box full of thoughts of happiness and fun, which will brighten their day!

On this blog we shall be discussing specific good feelings that can be found in the boxes, and any other items that are of relevance to us. We hope you join in the discussion and share your comments and thoughts!