So everyone has heard of the Bacon Number. It’s that fun little game where you take an actor and try to find the shortest path to Kevin Bacon.

For example, let’s take Megan Fox. Megan Fox recently starred in Transformers with Jamie McBride, and Jamie McBride starred in Beauty Shop with Kevin Bacon. So Megan Fox has a Bacon number of only 2.

Well, yesterday I came across something even more intriguing — the Erdős-Bacon Number.

This mishmash number is the sum of a person’s Bacon Number and their Erdős number. Paul Erdős is a Hungarian Mathematician who is used to determine a persons worth at writing mathematical papers. Interesting cross, eh?

More surprising is some of the people who actually have relatively low Erdős-Bacon numbers. Among them are Natalie Portman, Danica McKellar (aka Winnie Cooper), and Mayim Bialik (aka Blossom).

So I got to thinking — who is the center of the Blogosphere? Kevin Bacon is actually not the center of the Hollywood circuit. In fact, analysis by the University of Virginia shows that Rod Steiger would actually be a better center.

So why Kevin Bacon? It’s really a mix of a lot of things I think. Kevin Bacon is prolific, famous, and also slightly infamous.

With those three criteria in mind, I hereby deem Wil Wheaton to be the center of the Blogosphere. Mr. Wheaton is definitely prolific, unquestionably famous, but also undeniably infamous.

I mean this as no offense to Mr. Wheaton, of course. He’s both a scholar and a gentleman in my book.

But how do you make the ties in a virtual world without the clear bounds of mathematical papers or big-budget movies?

I think it works like this. In order to have a Wheaton number, your blog has to have been linked from a post of someone who was linked from a post of Wil Wheaton’s, etc, etc.

As far as I know, I have no Wheaton number at this point in time but if I were to catch Mr. Wheaton’s attention with this (for example), then sites such as Cryptomundo, Screen Rant, and The Technonaut would all gain a Wheaton number of 2 (assuming they didn’t already have a Wheaton number of 1).

Let the games begin! Kudos to the first person who can post here who actually has a legitimate Wheaton number.

So, a little meme that’s been going around the Warcraft world (haha!) lately has been to take class abilities that can’t crit and then say what happens the one time they did.

I’ve gathered up some of my favorites for this post. I’m even gonna give links for all the abilities so you lay-Warcrafters can read what the ability actually does to hopefully aid in the funny, though some of them actually play off of the name of the ability instead of the ability itself.

One time…

• Blessing of Protection crit and I became sterile.
• Polymorph crit and it gave me a stack of wool.
• Magma Totem crit and Hawaii was lost.
• Curse of Elements crit and I killed Captain Planet.
• Revive Pet crit and it was Pet Semetary all over again.
• Blessing of Freedom crit and I invaded a Middle Eastern country.
• Blessing of Sacrifice crit and I became a Messiah to millions of people around the world.
• Intercept crit and I ran it back for a touchdown.
• Tremor Totem crit and California broke off of the mainland.
• Detect Traps crit and I realized that the new Death Star was a fully functional battleship.
• Feign Death crit and I became lootable.
• Water Shield crit and I caused a flood.
• Cleanse crit and I cured cancer.
• Perception crit and now I can see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
• Mind Control crit and spawned the People’s Republic of China.
• Vanish crit and my wife forgot about me.
• Sprint crit and I won the Olympics.
• Bear Form crit and I prevented forest fires.
• Aimed Shot crit and Lyndon B. Johnson became president.

And the one you’ll wish you could say to me by now:

• If my Curse of Tongues crits will you shut up?

Being a cat owner, I can’t not like the lolcats Internet craze.

It’s a simple concept. Take cats in funny positions (or even ordinary ones), add mildly amusing text in a sans serif font, and boom — instant Internet gold.

There are a variety of flavors of lolcats. These include:

• I’m in your X… Ying your Z
• Oh Hai… something mundane
• Anything about Cheezburgrz
• Invisible X
• X cat is Y

I’m sure there other fringe flavors, but those are the ones I see most frequently.

So where am I going with this? Well I’ve got cats. I’ve got a camera. My own lolcats were an unavoidable eventuality.

So with a joint effort of my imaging editing and my wife’s hosting/html writing…

I give you the beginnings of the Havok and Forge lolcats Page.

As I’m sure many of you do, I read xkcd and often get a pretty good chuckle. Occasionally, one strip comes along that is just so relevant to my life (or profession in this case), that it makes me laugh even harder.

Computer Science is a strange discipline in a lot of ways. Programming languages have a wide variety of uses, but learning when to use what features is the hard part.

So teachers take to telling their students that there are certain features of languages that you should just absolutely never use — like the GOTO.

Years of experience in the profession have taught me that GOTOs exist for a reason — as does every feature of a programming language — and there are times that it can be used to great effect.

Alas, no matter how much experience I have or how many legitimate reasons I can find to use the GOTO statement, I can never type those four letters without feeling a little bit dirty.

For the past 2 months or so I have been jotting down sentences I hear from my coworkers that I find funny, especially when taken out of context as they are when you write them down on their own.

They’ve been aware of me doing this, and I have promised not to link names to quotes in order to protect the innocent.

So without further ado, here are the quotes I have collected over the past 2 months.

• “Are there any worms I can summon?”
• “Horse archers are the bomb!”
• “You’re wrong about dinghies.”
• “Can’t believe I didn’t have my guns cocked.”
• “My wife’s at home taking care of the cable guy.”
• “You like K.D. Lang? That’s like drinking your own urine!”
• “I don’t mean to force you into anything you’re not ready for…”
• “If you don’t have the capers, don’t even bother.”
• “I am technopathic. Thank you very much.”
• “A blog without comments? That’s like a refrigerator without food.”
• “And the raccoons peed?”

And a couple of bonus ones that didn’t come from work.

• “It’s really quite simple. You can hate who Jesus hates.”
• “I don’t really feel like chicken or burgers, so let’s go to KFC.”

Time to reset the list and start listening all over again.