Funny websites can be great distractions for stressed out, overworked RPI students who need a break from programming 2000 lines of Java code on their laptops. The weirdest of these websites are usually the most entertaining, because you can stare at them for hundreds of hours without ever getting bored—or falling asleep.
After exploring some of these sites, I decided to share them with the Poly audience, who could benefit from a diversion in between cramming for midterms and starting on final projects.
Did you know that a $25 fine can be levied against a person in New York State for flirting? According to www.dumblaws.com, an old law specifically prohibits any male from turning around at a street corner and “looking at a woman in that way.” A second offense calls for the violating man to wear “a pair of horse blinders” whenever and wherever he goes for a walk.
The Dumb Laws website includes many other antiquated laws like the one about flirting that make no sense in our modern society but are still on the books. In Cheyenne, Wyoming citizens may not take showers on Wednesdays—-even after swimming in a mud bath. In West Virginia, it is illegal to snooze on trains—even after working 10 straight hours. In New Jersey, automobiles are not to pass horse-drawn carriages in the street, and people may not slurp their soup. (Note to the reader: If that slurping law was actually enforced, I’d be in debt because of all the fines.)
The Unlamba Programming
Language at http://www.eleves.
ens.fr:8080/home/madore/programs/unlambda/ is the most bizarre programming language I have ever seen—and believe me, I’ve seen my share of programming languages. Unlamba can best be described as “an implementation of lambda-calculus without the lambda operation,” as the site’s author so eloquently puts it.
Everything in Unlamba is done by applying functions to other functions, and, unlike most modern programming languages, Unlamba does not have any concept of state variables, flow control constructs like loops, or any data structures.
Despite that extremely obtuse restriction, the language somehow—make that amazingly—demonstrates full equivalence to the Turing machine paradigm, the model on which all modern computer systems are based.
Actually reading and understanding Unlamba programs is another matter entirely. Even a simple Unlamba program for displaying the Fibonacci number sequence makes Perl regular expressions look simplistic and organized in comparison.
Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer at http://99-bottles-of-beer.ls-la.net/ showcases computer programmers’ efforts to write the song “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in more than 400 programming languages. Why Oliver Shade chose to build a software archive around that song is beyond me, but I speculate he must have a very strange sense of humor—and a lot of time on his hands.
My favorite versions include the one written for Babbage’s analytical machine—you know, that machine created in the 1800s to model a computational system that never worked—and beatnik, a language which uses syntax based on the 1960s beatnik writers’ movement.
Perusing websites like these has helped me to keep my sanity during highly stressful times. I encourage students to browse through funny websites during a break from studying because laughing is good for maintaing both your self-confidence and health—especially at this point in the year.
