Date: 16 Jun 88 18:33:00 PDT (Thursday)
Subject: Life 3.6
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"Hey, stewardess.....would you run through that seatbelt
demonstration a couple more times? It's incredibly difficult!!"
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A Texan in New York City needed to call a nearby community from a pay phone.
"Deposit $1.85 please," instructed the operator. Pulling himself up to full
height and dropping into his thickest Texas drawl, he objected, "Ma'am, I'm
from Texas, and in Texas we can place a call to Hell and back for $1.85!"
"I understand, sir," retorted the operator, "but in Texas, that's a local call."
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One is reminded of the society for the preservation of sea otters whose
motto was "Do unto otters as you would have otters do unto you."
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And then there was Pac-Bell's resident expert on fiber-optic
communications. Sort of a specialist in light conversation.
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One afternoon The Sea rolled into the office of Alfred Werner, clinical
psychologist. The doctor smiled; he hadn't seen his old friend in ages.
"Well, well! Long time no sea! How are you doing?"
"Swell," replied the Sea saltily.
"Then what, Pacifically, is the problem?"
"Well," the Sea swished sadly, "I'm getting tired of just going in and out
every day, in and out, in and out, in and--"
"I understand," Dr. Werner interrupted hastily, "but I fear there's
nothing to be done about it. For you see, my friend, you're just fit to be
tide."
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I've decided to try my hand at art. My first painting will be an outdoor
portrait: a great field, in the middle of which stands a lone gong. A stylized
characterization of the West Wind will be blowing softly over the gong. I will
call it: "Gong With the Wind."
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Canada's prairie provinces are experiencing severe drought and dust
storms. A farmer can wake up to find that all his top soil has blown
onto his neighbours farm down the road. But still some farmers manage
to find humour in this saying, "It's the only time real estate changes
hands without the lawyers getting a cut."
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I have a computer but no printer, so it's not uncommon for friends
of mine to type a paper on my computer, save it on a floppy, and go to the
computer room or library in order to do the printing. One such fellow
came to me today and told me he wasn't sure how to print, could I possible
come to the library and help him out. As we were heading out, he turned to
me and said, "I don't need the disk, do I?"
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A CE from a now defunct company told me that on his previous job he serviced
Turnkey word processor systems. On one machine he had replaced the floppy
drives 3 times because, as the user told him, "Whenever I make a backup I can't
read it". After the third replacement he watched the user make a backup,
he checked the backup himself (just fine). Then while he was packing up
his gear he watched , in total disbelief, as the user put a sticky label on
the diskette, put the disk into a Selectric and typed the info on the label.
He also said that when their software guy asked a user for a copy of a disk
that the user was having problems with he got a Xerox(tm) copy (both sides)
[Well it was a DS/DD drive].
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From: munnari!cad.jmrc.eecs.unsw.oz.au!shand@uunet.UU.NET (Mark Shand)
At a dinner table conversation last Saturday night, the conversation turned [to]
Apple Macintoshes. One novice user exclaimed how confusing the error
messages can sometimes be. She explained that the first time she'd crashed
her MAC and saw the dialog box containing the bomb icon she'd rushed out of
the room, fearing an imminent explosion. "It was the little sparks coming
from the wick of the bomb that really convinced me of the danger."
I doubt WYSIWYG was meant to be interpreted so literally.
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My electromagnetics professor, Dr. Andrew Dienes, defines "trivial" as
"Any problem that can be solved by a Nobel Laureate in less than
24 hours."
You can imagine that I was relieved to hear that my final would be trivial.
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A friend of mine who happens to be British, and has a delightful accent,
teaches chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
A few years back he was complaining about how deadly dull the undergraduates
were. He said that they were so lacking in curiousity and sense of humor,
that he would bet that he could show up for his morning lecture wearing
a "redcoat" uniform like those worn during the revolutionary war, and nobody
would ask anything about it. So he did just that, complete with pointed hat,
boots, and sword. There was a very tense moment at the end of the lecture,
when he asked "Are there any questions?" One hand went up. The student
asked "Will the material on blah-blah-blah be on the exam?"...
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A friend of his had been lecturing on the doppler effect to a really,
really dead class. Finally, in sheer exasperation, he pointed to the
equations on the board, to be more precise, at the (speed.of.sound-
speed.of.object) in the denominator and said: "This particular portion
of the equation shows where the sonic boom comes from. As the speed
of the object approaches the speed of sound in air, is part slowly
goes to zero. Finally, when the object hits the speed of sound, a
division by zero error occurs, reality rips, and all of the air in the
surrounding area pours out into the 4th dimension."
The class took notes....
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Just to throw in my two cents worth in to the Intuitively Obvious bucket,
when I was a math student at Towson State University we were given a final
exam that involved proving that two N dimesional matrices were related in
a given way. I started with the first matrix and used every theorem that I
could remember trying to reach the second, but I got stuck halfway through.
Working feverishly on a piece of scrap paper, I started on the second matrix,
but couldn't work it back to the first. In a flash of inspiration, I set the
two intermediate results equal to each other and copied the second set of
equations backwards onto the tail of the first. When I got the paper back,
there was a C which was crossed out and replaced by an A, the midpoint of
my equations was underlined, with a note saying - At first I doubted that
this step was intuitively obvious, but after thinking about it for several
hours, I decided that it was.
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Von Neumann and Nobert Weiner were both the subject of many dotty
professor stories. Von Neumann supposedly had the habit of simply
writing answers to homework assignments on the board (the method
of solution being, of course, obvious) when he was asked how to solve
problems. One time one of his students tried to get more helpful
information by asking if there was another way to solve the problem.
Von Neumann looked blank for a moment, thought, and then answered,
"Yes.".
Weiner was in fact very absent minded. The following story is told
about him: When they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing
that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to
MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would
forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down
the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally,
in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in
his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled
some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea,
and threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went
home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there
he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had
moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone.
Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street
and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying,
"Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just
moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young
girl replied, "Yes daddy, mommy thought you would forget."
The capper to the story is that I asked his daughter (the girl in
the story) about the truth of the story, many years later. She
said that it wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his
children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what
actually happened...
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All right, you asked for it. A (possibly apocryphal) story related to me by
a graduate student who had come from a large midwest (Wisconsin?) univ. Seems
that one of his classes was taught by the department emeritus prof who was
very old (in his 80's) and sometimes a bit vague, but at other times incredi-
bly sharp. One day in lecture he was explaining something abstruse and paused
to look at the board for a moment. Thereupon he wrote down a result and said,
eyes twinking, "And this is intuitively obvious..". Whereupon he smiled, looked
out over the class, saw the rows of blank stares, and turned back to the board
to contemplate the statement written there. This went on for about a minute, at
the end of which time he started to wander, rather deeply in thought, across the
stage. This went on for a minute or two, after which the prof. drifted out into
the hall and was heard walking back and forth. People started to, well, look at
each other and smile. A scout was sent out who reported the old boy was pacing
around and muttering to himself. The class, incredibly, remained reasonably calm.
About five minutes after the scout had returned, there was a happy shout
from the hallway, and the again bright-eyed prof. scuttled back in, pointed
to the intuitively obvious result written on the blackboard, turned to the class
and said, all aglow,
"Yes, yes, it IS intuitively obvious".
Same source, different prof. This one happened to not like students coming in
late to the math class he taugth..so much so that he would do any of the
following to the offender: lock them out, yell at them abusively, throw chalk at them.
One day, the prof. was late. Five minutes went by. Silently, one of the studendts
went down and started passing up to the audience all the chalk pieces and
erasers. The prof came rushing in at last, gave no excuse, and began to lecture. After
about a minute, he needed the chalk, and asked "Has anyone seen the chalk?". The
entire class stood up and bombarded him with chalk and erasers. The professor
was said never to have abused a student for lateness again.....
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In article [546@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu] gae@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu.UUCP
(Gerald Edgar) writes:
:Schoolmaster: Suppose x is the number of sheep in the problem.
:Pupil: But, sir! Suppose x is NOT the number of sheep in the problem.
:I [i.e. Littlewood] asked Professor Wittgenstein if this was a profound
:philosophical question, and he said that it was.
]From Walt Kelly's "POGO" comic strip, the Three Bats (Bewitched, Bothered,
and Bewildered ["How do you spell that, Bemildred?"]) trying to determine
if all three of them are present for a meeting, since each one counts only
the other two: (from memory, may be a little off)
First: The way to solve this is with algebra. Here's my old algebra
textbook. It says, "Let X equal the unknown."
Second: The unknown, huh? That would be Snorbert Zangox over in Waycross.
First: He's unknown?
Third: The best! I've never heard of him.
Second: Neither have I. Put me down as one not knowin' him.
Third: I don't know him, either.
First: Neither me. Now I adds up how many don't know him, and I gets "three!"
Second: Meaning three of us don't know him, so there's three of us here!
First: Man, that algebra is terrific!
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Los Angeles Times, June 7:
Jim Berkland, chief geologist for Santa Clara County, thinks he can predict
earthquakes by watching the Lost and Found classifieds in the newspapers.
He contends that when the number of ads for lost cats goes up sharply, it
means an earthquake is imminent. Evidently cats can sense the preliminary
stirrings, or something, and they light out. Berkland uses the state's three
largest newspapers for this science, including The Times, so you can check
The Times Lost and Found yourself if you want to know whether a quake is coming.
Marsha Adams, a research consultant and former biologist at the Stanford
Institute, made a study of Berkland's theory and reported that, statistically,
it seemed to work. However, she noted, the earthquake usually occurred on
the same day the lost cats ads reached a peak -- too late to serve as a warning.
She suggested that people who see their cats acting funny ought to have
a "cat hot line" so they could warn the populace earlier. It takes a day
or two for an ad to appear in the newspapers.
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CONSTABULARY NOTES FOM ALL OVER
[From the /Oakland (Calif.) Montclarion/]
April 20: A citizen reported that a red-haired man in a dark coat in the
vicinity of Somerset Road wanted money for nuclear weapons. Police contacted
the man and advised him that he needed a permit.
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Once upon a time, two brothers were rummaging through a garbage
heap when they came upon an old treasure map. They dusted it off and
saw that the directions took them up to the Adirondacks in the dead of
winter. Not wishing to miss a good adventure, they packed up some
belongings, called to their shaggy dog, and were off. Well, the
treasure map was to lead them to a small cabin in the mountains. They
walked happily along... the older brother went trudge trudge, the
youger went stepstepstep, the dog went lumberlumberlumber. At the
end of a grueling day, they found the cabin, kept by a wizened little
old man. They spent the night. Well, round about the middle of the
night, they were awakened by a huge crash! They rose with a start,
but alas, too quickly a large rock fell though the roof and landed on
the eldest brother's foot. Tied to it was another map, but the
brother was lamed. THe next morning, they set out with the new map.
It led down a terrible ravine to a hut that lay at that bottom.
They proceeded slowly, the older brother going trudge OW! trudge OW!,
the younger brother going stepstepstep, and th shaggy dog goign
lumberlumberlumber. At night, in howling winds, they reached the
hut. It was empty, but they were happy that no wind penetrated the walls,
and they dropped on the floor for a restful night. Round about
three in the morning, there was a horribly loud siren noise, wwaking
them from sound slumber. Before they could move, an enourmous screaming
bird tore through the window and dropped a huge wooden beam on the
younger brother's leg. Tied to it was another map. The next day,
they set out once again. The older brother went trudge OW! trudge OW!,
the younger brother went stepdraaaagstep, the shaggy dog went
lumberlumberlumber. At night they reached nothing more than a lean-to,
but this was their destination, so they had to make do. Round about
four o'clock in the morning, they were startled by a huge roar,
and a lion bounded up to them, dropping a massive bone on the dog's
foot. The dog yelped, but tied to the bone was another map. The
next day, the sorry crew set out once again. The older brother went
trudge OW! trudge OW!, the younger went stepdraaaaaagstep, the
shaggy dog went lumbyelp!lumberlumbyelp! It wasn't until early the
next morning that they reached their destination, which was a huge mansion.
At first they were pleased, but when the went inside and saw how rickety
the structure was, they were a bit afraid. They were so tired, though,
that they went right to sleep. It was night time when they awoke.
Slowly, they became aware of a small knocking sound. "rap rap rap"
"rap rap rap". They began to search. On the first floor... nothing.
THey climbed the stairs, the older brother going trudge OW! trudge OW!
the younger brother going stepdraaaaagstep, the dog going lumbyelp!lumber
lumbyelp! The second floor, empty, but still, the sound was louder:
"rap rap rap" "rap rap rap". Well, to make a long story short, they
eventually got up to the attic, wher massive wooden beams supported the
roof. "RAP RAP RAP!" they heard. "RAP RAP RAP!" Excited, they felt
all along the beams, and when the younger brother found the secret
compartment, he held his breath, closed his eyes, and tore it open.
Out fell... rapping paper.
--
Henry Cate III [cate3@netcom.com]
The Life collection maintainer, selections of humor from the internet
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in
overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison
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