Nonsense

It seems that I have lots of spare time recently. :) I'm still waiting for the Stanford University open courses to start. That will take awhile..

But now for something completely different... I might have mentioned about the "Society of Mind" lectures. In one of them, Minsky started to explain theories about "Why jokes are funny?". According to the mighty Freud, jokes are funny, because they are messing with "not allowed" topics. Things our society try to suppress thinking or talking of, like violence, sex, bad politics, etc.. So our mind is trying to mask our real thoughts by making them seem not serious. And you might say, "Ye, Freud, the guy is nuts!", but I find it reasonable explanation for the majority of the jokes. And here's the funny part, Freud's theory does not explain why the nonsensical jokes are also funny. Does it?

Think about it for a moment. Why are nonsense jokes funny? This is extremely interesting question for me, because I'm a big big fan of Monty Python, and the jokes there are totally nonsensical. It's like a surrealism without the depri-art part. So I needed to know why people are laughing like crazy when they hear a punchline that's completely illogical and sometimes not related to the rest of the joke.

The answer is here. In this wonderful paper, Minsky suggests that the reason people laugh when hearing nonsense jokes is the same as the reason they laugh about all other kinds of jokes . And this reason was originally formulated by Freud - they allow our childish consciousness to play with forbidden things. This time, the forbidden topic is logic, or more precisely, the lack of it. Illogical thinking is considered bad thing in our society and the people speaking nonsense are labeled dumb. Of course, not if you are telling jokes ;) .

And now for something completely the same: a fine selection of toys for your mind I found around the web:

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Two strawberries were sitting in the bathtub, one said to the other 'can you pass the soap' the other replies 'what the fuck do I look like, a typewriter?'

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If you say Jesus backwards it sounds like sausage.

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- Why did the plane crash?

- Because the pilot was a loaf of bread.

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- What's the difference between a duck?

- One's twice as long as itself.

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- Ask me if I'm an orange.

- Are you an orange?

- No.

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Driving down a road Santa sees a sign that says, “Watch for Fallen Rocks.” A few kilometres later, he sees some rocks at the side of the road, so he stops and picks them up. When he gets to the next town, he carries the rocks into the Highway Maintenance office and puts them on the counter. “Here are your fallen rocks,” he says to the man behind the counter. “Now where is my watch?”.

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Inpatient customer, sarcastically:

- "Waiter, do you serve crabs?"

- "Sit down, sir - we serve anyone."

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Descartes is sitting in a bar. The bartender asks him if he'd like another drink. Descartes replies, "I think not" and *poof* he disappears.

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These here are from the paper:

A gentleman entered a pastry-cook's shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "You've not paid for the liqueur." "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." "You didn't pay for that either." "But I hadn't eaten it".

--- from Freud (1905).

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"A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so sorry. I thought it was spinach."

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Well, some of them are not complete nonsense, see.. But they are in the same category, since they make fun of false interpretations. (Btw, if you have more, please share! :)

On average..

"Announcing that on average, people have an average intelligence is kind of boring. What's interesting about intelligence and what is interesting about things like personality is the variation around the mean and the explanation about that variation. And that's what we need to start talking about now.

Oh, btw. well, it is, of course, by definition the case, that on average, people have average intelligence, they don't believe it. If you ask people "Do you think that you are more intelligent, less intelligent or about of average intelligence compared to the rest of the population, you'll get some distribution around that, too. But you'll find that the average perception of intelligence is that we're all above average.

This goes for a variety of other questions like "How good looking are you? Above average, below average or average?". Well, we're all little above average there, too. It turns out, that there is one group that gets the answer correct. And if you ask this group of people on average "Are you brighter or dumber than average, they'll come out in the middle. Asked "Are you cuter or uglier than average?", they'll come out, you know, average. Anybody knows who that group is? ….. Yes, it's the depressed. Depressed people have an accurate assessment of their own intelligence and good looks. In fact, it has been seriously argued, that part of what keeps us undepressed is an unrealistic assessment of the world. Right? We're smart, we're good looking … if we knew the truth, we all will be depressed. But that's a topic for another date. …."

Extracted from the Jeremy Wolfe's lecture "Intelligence: How do we know you are smart?"

from A to B losing time T

Traveling from point A to point B means losing time t. Say, knowing the distance and your speed, you can proudly calculate the time you gonna lose. :) This, however doesn't solve your problem.

Happily, we live in a wonderful world (what have our poor parents done without the magic devices we own?!? ) and now we are able to graduate MIT without leaving our dens. :) Check what I found here. Amazing, wonderful, funny, especially this lecture dedicated to the subject of "behavioral psychology" is the perfect stuff to entertain you on your way to work or university or in the train/plane/car/whatever. Why we stop inserting a coin in the cola vending machine when it stops giving us cola but we don't if we gamble? How can you implant and modify false memories in somebody's mind. Or how every cell of our brain is mapped to a small areas of our bodies.. Really interesting stuff. :)

Oh, and last week we won the "KIT Company of the year award", part of the simulation we did during the previous semester in the "Business Leadership" course. The prize itself is not important, but the fact, that we almost believed ourselves in having the future in our hands and knowing what we want and wanting all that so much… :) (btw, we stands for 3D Innovations: Diana, Christian, me and Martin)

What else… what else.. Tomorrow I have to get the chips from the custom office. I also have to fight again with the bureaucracy in Deutsche Bank to get my bank statement letter translated in English. Firefox has a new version 4. The rechargeable battery of my macbook was almost up to explode. "But the wind still blows over Savannah and in the Spring the turkey buzzard struts and flounces before his hens." ;)