Posts by Dr. Boli
CORRECTION.
Mr. Donald Trump did not accuse all Frisians of being genetically inferior to rhesus monkeys, according to a statement from the Trump campaign. His remarks, as reported in the Dispatch, were taken out of context, and the Dispatch has been assured that in context they were courteous and complimentary to the great Frisian people who have contributed so much to our civilization. Furthermore, Mr. Trump did not threaten to disembowel the Dispatch reporter and dismember her entire family and feed them all to crocodiles. According to the Trump campaign, those remarks came not from Mr. Trump but from his lawyer, who meant them in the technical legal sense.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: How do potholes form? —Sincerely, Mike Gable, Director, Pittsburgh Department of Public Works.
Dear Sir: When a glacier meets the sea, the end of it begins to float on the water, forming an ice shelf. Sooner or later a crack will appear in the ice, and then a chunk will break off. And that is how potholes are formed.
No, sorry—those are icebergs. Icebergs are easy to explain. Potholes are not. No one knows how potholes are formed. Disreputable scientists will attempt to lull you into complacency with tales of freezing and thawing cycles, but those scientists have all been suborned by Big Asphalt and will tell you anything to keep you from the truth. Evidence from traffic-light cameras and convenience-store surveillance tapes shows a suspicious pattern of activity, with executives of major asphalt companies being sighted repeatedly in locations where potholes are found the next day. Is it coincidence? Dr. Boli will make no pronouncement; he merely presents the facts, and you must make the judgment yourself.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
Advertisement.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
AMAZING, CLEVER, AND HORRIBLE THINGS GOOGLE DOES WITH PHOTOS.
We shall all belong to Google sooner or later, unless Google, like Microsoft, clings to outdated technology once it is clear the world is headed somewhere else. So we might as well know what it is like to live in the Google world. Since he manages Father Pitt’s little corner of the Web, Dr. Boli has been privileged to observe firsthand what Google can do with several thousand pictures and a few clever algorithms. We have already seen the dancing mushroom and the nodding statue. But there’s more! So much more.
By continuing to read, you agree that you accept the risk of animated GIFs, and take full responsibility for whatever they may do to your computer or your soul.
HORROR OF THE DANCING MUSHROOM.
Addendum: See also the Nodding Faceless Statue below.
Experimenting with Google Photos, our friend Father Pitt discovered that Google will automatically do certain things with your pictures, especially if you have a lot of similar pictures. Father Pitt always takes several of the same shot, just to make sure he gets one usable photograph in the bunch. The secret to being a good photographer is to take hundreds of pictures and expect to use a dozen or so of them. (And Father Pitt never throws out the failures, because—who knows?—they might be useful for something.)
Sometimes Google decides that what you wanted was an HDR version of the image. HDR—“high dynamic range”—images use more than one photograph of the same thing to capture detail both in the shadows and highlights; in sunlight, for example, one might otherwise have to settle for either featureless white highlights or featureless black shadows.
But often Google decides that, since the pictures are only subtly different, what you wanted was an animation. So it dutifully animates your multiple shots of the same stationary object. The result is usually just a jiggly picture; but every once in a while, Google’s automatic animations come out, well, terrifying. And you may see an example of the latter only if you promise not to hold Dr. Boli responsible for your psychiatrist’s bills:
UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA.
There are ten hereditary monarchies in Europe today, even though no one has yet succeeded in finding a use for hereditary monarchs.
When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the peak of Everest in 1953, they found a program for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal sitting on a rock with a hand-painted sign beside it saying “TAKE ONE.”
Scientists observing the New Guinea crow in 2013 discovered that the species has evolved the ability to order a pizza through GrubHub.
The North Pole is actually Lithuanian.
Astronauts in the Gemini 7 space mission reported hearing tapping on the outer shell of the capsule, apparently spelling out a message in Morse code. The message was transcribed by astronaut James A. Lovell, Jr., as “BORMAN IS A WEENIE.” Not until 1996 were details of the incident quietly released by NASA.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: Your editorial entitled “More Research Needed on CPT” strongly implies that, as you put it in so many words, “the jury is still out” on the benefits of Cranial Percussion Therapy. This demonstrates an almost incredible level of ignorance about the origin and history of CPT. Unlike Western so-called medicine, CPT has been trusted and applied for thousands of years in ancient cultures all over the world. It has a proven millennia-long record of success that no supposedly “scientific” treatment can match. Every mother who has ever taken it upon herself to smack some sense into her child has administered CPT in its most ancient and therefore most effective form, making a record of literally billions of case studies unmatched by any other therapy.
Clearly your editorial writers are in the pay of the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry, whose profits are threatened whenever a simple alternative to expensive chemicals enters the popular consciousness. Most humans are gifted with two good hands, which the benevolent Creator clearly designed for the effective administration of CPT. For stubborn cases, good stout sticks are easily found in any patch of woodland, where their very abundance shows that Nature intended them to be taken up and used. These tools are freely available, and need only a properly licensed Cranial Percussion Therapist to administer the treatment at $429.95 per twenty-minute session. That is why the profit-motivated pharmaceutico-medical industry fights CPT tooth and nail.
Yet somehow I expect better from a paper of the Dispatch’s glorious history and once-sterling reputation. It disappoints me that even your paper, which fearlessly uncovered and reported the great Styrofoam-cup procurement scandal in the prothonotary’s office in 1975, would swallow the treacle doled out by the evil drug lords who control our allopathic medical establishment. I don’t know who this “jury” of yours is, or why they would still be “out” on an issue where the truth is so clear as to be undebatable, but it’s perfectly obvious that they could all use a good smacking.
Sincerely,
Raymond Purblind Oxenfarmer,
Baldwin Township