Humor

♪ Humor & Philosophy ♫ Missing Octave HOME

A New Range of Perspectives in * Science & Technology * Music * Innovation & Ideas * Learning & Leisure * Entertainment & Education

(7/29/08) Science gives you the keys to the car, you have to decide where to drive it.

A great example of confusion of cause and effect: You can give 100 people a placebo pill to take, then sort them out by how careful they are to actually take the pill each day. Call them the "careful" and the "careless" groups. Now take statistics -- I've a hunch the "careful" group will have better health, fewer accidents, and so forth. The error comes in saying this is BECAUSE they took the placebo pill. You see this sort of error in reporting technical matters all the time.

Parking lot sign: Witch Parking -- All Others will be Toad. Author unknown, but one of my favorites.

What exactly would it be if you had an OUTER-section? Or, for those of you who recognize that the opposite of "inter-" is not "outer-" but rather "intra-", whate exactly is and INTRA-section? I believe this word is self-redundant.

(12/29/06) A highway safety concept -- lens-shaped cars. Any time there is a collision, one car just slides over the other... like a jump ramp.

(12/29/06) Company slogan seen on trucks, "Quality without Question". How can you develop quality without asking questions?

(9/15/06) Wal-mart and the Anti-trust laws. Sensitive subject, yes? The current laws were put in place after companies discovered they could use their size to put others out of business, capture a monopoly, then recoup their profits by raising prices to recover their previous losses. The idea is that it is a GOOD thing to put people out of business with PERMANENT low prices --verily a service to the general public -- but not to "cheat" with artificial prices. I'm sure that Wal-mart got where they are today without violating the letter of these laws. But what if you reinterpret this with today's word "value" instead of yesteryear's "price"? My experience with Wal-mart is they came in with a high level of services, expert "Associates" who knew their products and could restock what people wanted, and gave good "value" while driving out their competition. Then, the professionals disappeared and the "Associates" became fewer, and worse they didn't know their products, didn't know when the poorly depleted inventories would be refilled, and had no control over the process. The price may have been the same, but the quality of the items offered and the shopping experience, i.e., the "value" offered by Wal-mart had dropped, while their costs looked better and their profits climbed. Wal-mart had driven out their competition using an artificially inflated value proposition -- extra service -- then dropped it once they had established as close to a monopoly as they could. In other words, Wal-mart grew to be the biggest corporation in the world because they found a loop-hole in the anti-trust laws. When will the critics of Wal-mart figure out what happened, and fix the anti-trust laws? Why were they so slow?

I was struck (metaphorically) by a pickup truck that had one of those toolboxes across the back of the cab that you have to scramble up into the bed of the truck to access. Odd thing was it was sporting Handicapped plates. I find it hard to believe anybody who can get into such a toolbox needs a privileged parking space. We must assume that more than one individual uses this vehicle.

And a pet peeve -- heavily perfumed hand soap in restaurants -- so cloying you still smell it when you are trying to eat your meal. What were they thinking?

(7/30/06) What do you mean, "Americans aren't getting enough sleep?" They sleep behind the wheel, at their desks, in church, in front of the TV, and a dozen other places in their lives that get low priority (i.e. low excitement index).

(2/1/06) There is a point of view that can allow you to not feel under siege by spam. The latest crop seems to have subjects randomly generated by stringing together phrases. These can be a source of creativity and amusement. Think of them as your "word for the day", "Ouija board oracle", or badly written "Chinese Fortune Cookie" insert. This lets you cheerfully read 'em, ponder their omens, and delete without getting your panties in a wad. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Who knows, one of those subject lines may yet produce a million-dollar idea for somebody...

(8/5/05) Favorite Buttons: "Beware the Alpha Tribble!" and "Help! The Paranoids are after me!"

(5/10/05) Balance can be a good thing, especially if it is synergy rather than compromise. Synergy is more common than you may think. Commerce occurs because the independent activities of the two parties are synergistic, each providing value to the other that is increased by the trade. Even daily life is a synergy -- sleep all day and you get nothing done; never sleep and you are ineffective and won't remember what you've done. Rest plus action get things done. A Taoist would argue that this dynamic tension between opposites is the root of all evil; a westerner would say it makes the world go round.

(1/25/05) Linear extrapolation gets you in trouble quickly because it projects conditions beyond those in which the shaping observations were made. The stock market is down today, predict a depression; the market is up, predict a golden age ahead. Better to look for feedback mechanisms that predict an oscillatory behavior, because such can occur over a long time without leaving the range of your original observations.

Global climate changes are usually extrapolated linearly with overly dramatic results, and so not taken seriously by many. Here is an alternative approach. Note that whales give birth in the warmer southern latitudes, but go into the colder northern latitudes to feed. Why is food more abundant in this harsher climate? In touring Glacier Bay, I was impressed by the quantity of fine silt (pulverized rock) that was streaming towards the ocean from the melting glaciers. This must have a fertilizing effect on the ocean fauna which supports a food chain including whales and salmon. So, abundant life comes from receding glaciers. Life creates CO2 and methane and other greenhouse gases, which warm the planet and accelerate the melting of glaciers, ice caps, etc. What happens when the glaciers run out? You lose all that fertilizer and the ocean food chain collapses. The greenhouse gases disappear and we get a new ice age, which replenishes the glaciers and starts the process all over again. This seems to have happened a half-dozen times in the recent past, every 25 thousand years or so. Where are we now? The glaciers are disappearing, ocean life is collapsing, weather is getting erratic, shifting weight of ice packs is triggering earthquakes, and only mankind's industrial production of greenhouse gases is keeping us from plunging into the next ice age. Think real hard; do you really want to just pull the plug on industry given that we're this far down the road? Can man have enough impact on the environment to stabilize the natural oscillation, or are we just delaying the inevitable? I doubt we're just going to keep heating up without limits; something has to give eventually.

(1/14/05) Often a long-standing argument can be resolved by the insight of a different perspective on the issue. Sometimes this comes from a new language or vocabulary that makes a new distinction between positions that had not been articulated before. An example is the application of Computer Jargon to the old argument about which are smarter, cats or dogs. We can now state the difference easily; cats have better ROM, dogs have more RAM.

On the subject of intelligence, you've probably seen those plots of IQ vs. brain-to-body-mass ratio. Plotted for a variety of animal species, you get a straight line with mankind at the extreme, with apes, whales, and dolphins on our heels, followed closely by dogs and cats. Dinosaurs had huge bodies with small brains and are grouped down with the stupid lizard-brains (no neo-cortex). But this begs the question of kinds of intelligence. Not just the male-female classic of humanities vs. math. Apes' principle advance over the monkeys seems to stem from converting a chunk of ROM, that was previously dedicated to 3-D climbing-associated activities, into more flexible RAM. Homo sapiens takes this a step further, able to calculate ballistics but subject to vertigo. Witness the high correlation of visual impairment with math genius.

Let's take this a step further and expand that IQ plot into the two dimensions of complexity and speed. I've seen it done for computers vs. humans, but not for animal species. Dolphins seem to live a hyperactive life with specialized ROM needed to chase fish quickly through 3-D space navigating by sonar. Whales are much more lumbering but have the same brain-to-body-mass ratio -- are they therefore deeper thinkers able to visualize more complex subjects, with mankind and apes somewhere in between them and dolphins? Whales spread news (or is it art?) with rote memorization of incredibly long soliloquies that are passed around the globe from whale to whale. There have been more mass-suicides of whales (by beaching pods) than of humans (a la Massada or Jonestown). Are these acts of mass protest by the whales, valuing some abstract principle above their own lives, with us too stupid to understand? Once you get past the human-animal bias that blinds us to the possibility of a message, what they are saying isn't too hard to deduce.

Another good one is to look down the alleged evolutionary chain at brain-to-body-mass ratios. Neanderthals had it slightly better than us, but it was concentrated in the sensory area instead of the neo-cortex. I imagine you can ascribe the extinction of Neanderthal man (to the extent we didn't interbreed) to inferior ballistics vs. contemporary Homo Sapiens. Homo Erectus came earlier, was stupider, and seemed to have no ballistics at all, from stone tool fossil evidence, but did have fire. Homo Habilius is an interesting one (that's Lucy, by the way) -- half the brain size and half the height. But if mass goes as length cubed, this suggests Lucy had FOUR TIMES the brain-to-body mass ratio of Homo Sapiens. If there was ever a candidate for little green men from outer space, this is it. Little guys with big heads and bulging eyes. They lasted a long time and were contemporary with ape-like Australopithecines and with early Homo Erectus. Could the variety of Australopithecines, and even their emergence from Ramapithicus, been a genetic breeding program that got out of control with the emergence of the savage Homo Erectus? H. H. stopped leaving bones behind at about that point in time, but some folks claim to see brownies, leprechauns, nebbishes, and little green men from time to time, even today. Erich Von Daniken, where are you?

(10/28/04) When big companies come up with "cost savings" as a strategic initiative, watch out! Taken to the limit, this means everybody should turn out the lights and go home -- the business would be better off not operating. It often amounts to an admission by upper management that they can't think of anything new and creative to do, and have let the routine business of managing the existing operations get out of control, such that it is now a "strategic" imperative to do the job that they should have been doing all along.

(10/4/04) The hunt for ancient astronauts.
    How long does it take a culture to develop a space program? It took only a thousand years from the dark ages, and only two thousand years since the peak of Roman civilization. No more than five thousand years have passed since the earliest recorded surge of civilization. Compare this with how long since there been Homo Sapiens on the planet -- identical in DNA to modern man. That figure is a whopping 30,000 years! Men, just as smart as you and I, have been on this planet at least six times longer than it takes to build a space program. Why haven't they before? Maybe we should be taking Erich Von Daniken (Chariots of the Gods?) and his successors more seriously. Maybe they did.
    One might say the Romans failed to launch a space enterprise because their countdowns always aborted (no zero). But that's just silly.
    Watch this space, and the other one.

(7/11/04) Double Entendres
-- Nothing exists in a vacuum.
-- I thought I was wrong, but I wasn't.
-- "Oh! I forgot about that!"
-- Dying is the last thing I want to do.
-- You've got to be sick to want a doctor.

(5/12/04) Missing Insights
Pick your favorite controversial topic. Someone wants to ban "X" because they believe it is a bad thing, then the arguments start. Once the lines are drawn "pro" and "con", it is almost impossible to step back and notice that generally everybody does agree that less of "X" would be a good thing -- that really isn't what divides them (human beings aren't THAT different from one another). The world is generally divided between those who "can't imagine anything worse", and those that can. Often it separates "the majority" from those who don't have to imagine what it is like to have their rights abused.

Only when everyone considers themselves part of a minority, can we come together in true community.

Remember, when you look your neighbor square in the eye, you are facing opposite directions.

(5/4/04) Simple Science
1. Chicken Little really was right; the sky is falling -- in particular, the ozone*. Too much down here, too little up there. The misplacement of this highly reactive form of the element oxygen, combined with cow farts**, will cause the Earth to burn up.
* Our natural upper-atmospheric UV shield.
** a major contributor to greenhouse gases.

2. If Newton proved that there is no such thing as a free launch, in advance of space travel, what technological metaphors remain undiscovered for breakfast, dinner, and tea time? As more women enter academia, we should see fewer discoveries based on Freudian thrusts, and more on Julia Child or Martha Stewart. Where will future science take us?

3. Heisenberg proved that observation causes phenomenon, while Einstein asserted that the universe follows the rules -- at least when we're watching. Fortunately most of the matter in the universe can't be seen. Some say that this is why worms can burrow faster than the speed of light -- we can't see them while they are tunneling. Others say that the two ends of the worm are simply indistinguishable.

4. The current best-selling belief that the Universe is contained in a Nutshell and is filled with worm holes is comparable to the ancient belief that Earth floated in a bowl on the back of a giant turtle. Metaphors are a slippery way to teach.

5. Dinosaurs, those cute cuddly beasties, we have learned, come from amber. If the amber goes bad, we get petroleum instead. Packaging IS important.

6. Buddha taught the 7-fold path to Enlightenment first, but Covey had more media savvy.

7. Gates stole the Internet from Gore and so became Ruler of the Earth. The court is still out for the final count, however.

8. Ever since Americans exploded the first atomic bomb, they have believed that everyone else was pushing away from them, shifting toward Communism or what have you. Hubble et. al. simply put this in a different context.

9. A typical anthill has about 30 times the neurons of a human brain, and there are an average of about 60 anthills per acre. Ratio of the summed up IQ of Gaia to that of Mankind is therefore at least about ten thousand to one. This is of course assuming that Mankind is independent of Gaia, which was Man's idea.

10. Popular fiction would hold that it takes the bite of an irradiated spider, a superpower ring, the genes of a lycanthrope, or a magic potion, to turn into an animal. It's a placebo effect, to loosen a mental block. Alcohol and drugs work too, and the newspapers record the actual effects. The truly magical ingredients are the senses of ability and responsibility, held simultaneously, which make us something more than animals.

11. Why is it that so many intelligent people spend so much effort trying to teach "Dummies" and "Complete Idiots"? Why do people spend their lives walking dogs? As Humpty Dumpty says, it is simply a matter of who is to be the Master.

12. Good thing Einstein was not in forensics. If every eyewitness's point of view was to be held as an inviolable truth, with equal validity, we would have to invent quantum uncertainties in corporal punishment. Schrodinger's cat was just the beginning. Things could get messy.