h a l f b a k e r yThe embarrassing drunkard uncle of invention.
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There once was a fellow that my friends and myself knew who had a habit of making irrelevant comments during normal conversations. We never managed to work out whether it was deliberate or just some kind of accidental superpower, but that's not really relevant right now.
Anyway, I propose a scoring
system for irrelevant comments made in all good faith in normal conversations. The score goes from zero (completely relevant) up to 12, for a reason that isn't important right now.
A cunning point is that as soon as someone makes a fairly irrelevant comment that attracts a high irrelevancy score, any immediate attempts to try and better the score are then in fact pertinent to the discussion, and attract abnormally low scores. Calculating exactly when the background relevancy of this situation dies down is left to the experts, but I expect it has a half-life kind of like radioactive material.
The grading of Rods Tiger on this score is left as an exercise for the reader.
Exactly what pmillerchip is talking about
http://www.aae.wisc.../future/dairy24.htm
[Jinbish, Oct 02 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]
Aubergines
http://www.halfbake...con_20Fax_20Machine
I reckon that's worth about 5 points, not entirely irrelavent, but def. off topic of bacon [Zircon, Oct 02 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]
Irrelevant link
http://www.arwenian.net/fc/
[FarmerJohn, Oct 02 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]
Halley's Comet
http://seds.lpl.ari...planets/halley.html
Due to return in 2061 [DrBob, Oct 02 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]
Know your Dynasties
http://emuseum.mnsu...ial_china/tang.html
T'ang Dynasty [Wes, Oct 02 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]
I win!
http://www.halfbake...20comment_20scoring
Redundant, yet completely irrelevant. [RayfordSteele, Oct 02 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]
Price of tea in china
http://www.beprepar...cles/Butterfly.html
Or, maybe not [Mr Burns, Oct 02 2002]
Irrelevant
http://www.digitalw...me=BorgComply%2Ewav
[Amos Kito, Oct 04 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]
College Roomies From Hell
http://www.crfh.net
look through archives for the nonsence contests. they're everywhere. [xtraspecialzero, Oct 17 2004]
[link]
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Yes. [+]. Any supposedly irrelevant coments posted here should also attract a very low score by dint of their relevance to the idea. |
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Is there any distinction drawn between an irrelevent comment and plain gibberish? What if a response to an irrelevant comment is itself irrelevant... AND is unintended? It isn't pertinent to any discussion and stands alone as an irrelevancy. |
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Also, one would require to forget this idea to make any subsequent irrelevant comments available to score well. |
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Or you could just press the delete button. (;-) |
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the boil on my dogs backside is clearing up nicely. |
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How about some real-life examples of high scoring conversations? Or is that too boringly relevant? |
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Class link, Jin, but what's that to do with the price of fish? |
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Hmmm, wonder what the weather in Tasmania is like today? |
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in pastry with a creamy white sauce. |
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Where HAVE all the flowers gone? |
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Let one not go to inverness, make egg pastry and some suculent Irish new geese. |
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<relevant comment> [UB] That's mental, your anno wasn't up when I stated writing yet we both managed to mention pastry, this site is insiddiuos </relevant comment> |
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I think you'll find the aphorisms one somewhere else. |
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I think it best to address the energy crisis now, before another one of us experiences the hunger of the third world! |
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My shadow and my inner child are missing. |
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"I believe that every human being on this planet, at least once in their life, experiences a moment of divine synchronicity." ... blissmiss, Mar 21 2002 |
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I never really cared for the taste of Tang that much. Much too artificial. |
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you don't hear the name Much much |
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My mother told me to choose this very 1. |
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1% is only 99.8 percent pure. |
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How do I change my mouse pointers in Windows? |
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cheese, I forgot the feckin' cheese |
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You're all insane (or is that highly relevant? I never can tell here). |
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kaz, milk? no sugar. then back to bed - my love. yes your mother is coming at the weekend, please take this doctored sugar lump. |
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I was wondering why the scoring went up to twelve? You said in your post that the number was not important at this time. I was wondering if there was a future date on which it would become important and how important it would become?
My aunt Sophie had twelve fingers and it was often important to us all especially when she used them to count the months of the year or check off the number of eggs that where left in the carton. Sadly Sophie had the gout and her monkey refused to clean the house when she had a particularly bad attack. It would just lie around, eat and steal the ring from Sophie’s extra finger while she was sleeping. How that monkey loved to swallow the ring! I remember as a child the way Sophie would bribe and cajole us to retrieve her ring from the monkey’s littler box. I hated that bastardly monkey!!!! |
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Please score the above I was thinking of applying for a scholarship majoring in irrelevance theory and want to see how I stack up. The scales a great idea I vote yes! |
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Too right, like orange plated cups of keys, or sectarian non sequiturs. |
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My 3 year old nephew said to his mommy one day, "Mommy, do you know where I was when you were getting married?"
Mommy asked him, "no, where?"
Nephew replied "I was hiding in the bathroom the whole time!" |
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And besides that, keep the flavored dental floss away from your cats. (Ask [barnzanen].) |
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And so began the great mushroom hunt of '72'. |
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you have to switch the central heating on a couple of times in the summer or it completely seizes up come the autumn, ask any plumber. gawd, I need a plumber.
perhaps not. the last one flooded the bathroom. |
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When the fairies come theres no reason to be alarmed, except if they're carrying apples, then you really need to be firing on all four sponges. |
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they are sharp. love is the drug. |
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Tomato's are the fruit of love. Just ask my granny. |
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You see? No more fun. You've reached the Irrelevent Horizon. |
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Washing in General can weigh a Tonne. |
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Are extra points scored if the speaker remains totally unaware of having caused others mental whiplash? </expecting high score for returning to subject> |
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Hmmm. This doesn't seem to be working. It is too easy to make a comment that is, on the face of it, totally irrelevant to the subject at hand. A bit more structure would help. Taking a word from the previous statement and spinning an irrelevant comment out of that word, as several have done above, helps some. But that is still too easy. What if A makes a comment, and B makes a comment irrelevant to A's comment, and C makes a comment demonstrating the profound relevance of B's comment to A's comment, and D makes a comment that is, umm, irrelevant to C's comment but is relevant to A and/or B's comment, and ... wait. Don't halfbakers do this anyway? |
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Almost all of this page has followed what calum's first annotation predicted. Boring.
Consider this, a genuinely unexpected irrelevant comment from my housemate:
lewis: "Do you want tea or coffee?"
malpass: "Let me look at your arms."
Viola, there is an example of two entirely different trains of thought converging at the moment when the two people converged in physical space - both having a question or command to give the other, neither waiting for the other to speak first. What occurred after that exchange was a full half minute of really puzzled silence. We walked away, walked back and started again. She wanted tea, and observed that I have really prominent veins on my arms. Apparently I would be a great intravenous drug user. Just been listening to Avril Lavigne on the radio. Nice voice.
y'see. there's a difference between a change of subject and a complete irrelevancy. |
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ditto re: the first two sentences. |
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see [DrBob]'s anno. above. |
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I echo the above sentiment. |
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So at this point, pretty much anything that didn't reference a fifth level concurrence should score quite nicely, I should think. Guess this rates rather poorly. |
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Yes, ton80. I wholeheartedly agree. |
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DrBob's analysis is back from the lab - q2fw5zz2 - xxxx4 + erss H2So4 - HDDS |
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all clear Ok ..BugBear from po + |
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Look at this mess. Who's going to clean this up? |
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That's *MISTER* Genetic Engineering to you, thumb! |
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Wouldn't scoring a comment, therefore stopping the previous topic, become a source of irrelevancy? Or would it make the topic of the irrelevancy all of a sudden relevant. That is relevant to the new discussion.
I like the idea, but I think it looks better on paper. Would this be the right time to ask for a raise? And where are the tongs that we used for the salad last night? |
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On the contrary, [ByteMarquis], chocolate spread IS in fact a suspiciously slender alternative to Dial M for Murder, but hey, I'm not the one to dissect (sp?) |
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My elbows are being fried in grease. |
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Who is Rods Tiger, or is it Rod's tiger, and if so, who is
Rod and why does his tiger have a capital T? |
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A thirty watt LED bulb is surprisingly bright. |
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I am not attempting to score points via irrelevant comment, only to seize the opportunity to mention that I just finished explaining the word irrelevant to a person who had english (american english) as a second language. He had challenges with both pronunciation and the meaning. |
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I believe I have now established the normal baseline for this series of exchanges. |
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Given the topic, any irrelevant comment made here
is, in fact, relevant. That does not imply that any
relevant comment is irrelevant, however. In other
words, any possible comment one could conceivably
post here would be relevant to the discussion. |
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I think I just blew my own mind. |
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Did they? I thought that was all just a part of the
herring manifesto. |
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Coin operated, Sir; this is a tray, and two of the starfish won't dance. |
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Never ask a starfish for directions. |
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Extra points for comments that are irreverent as well as
irrelevant. |
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