Seth’s blog

You may remember What does NASA stand for? Need Additional Six Astronauts. This circulated after the Challenger blew up. In contrast, the volcano jokes I’ve heard are curiously bad:

6. Dear Iceland, We said send cash, not ash.

7. Woke this morning to find every surface in the house covered in a layer of dust and a foul stench of sulphur in the air…. Yes, I’ve been married to that bone-idle slob for 20 years.

8. It was the last wish of the Icelandic economy that its ashes were spread all over Europe.

9. There’s no pleasing the English. The last time they got the Ashes they were over the moon.

10. Went outside today and got hit by a bag of frozen sausages, a chocolate gateau and some fish fingers. Someone said it’s a fallout from Iceland.

One of my Tsinghua students, a freshman, has been getting up early Saturday mornings to go to nearby Beijing University to attend a 4-hour intro psych class for graduate students. “What does the teacher talk about?” I asked. He showed me his notes. “The Door-in-the-Face Effect” was the heading of a little graph he’d drawn. “What’s that?” I asked. “If you get someone to help you in a little way, they’re more likely to help you in a big way later,” he said. I knew that result. It’s called the foot-in-the-door effect. “Your teacher made a mistake,” I said.

I was wrong. There is a door-in-the-face effect very similar to the foot-in-the-door effect. The door-in-the-face effect is after you make a big request that is turned down, you are more likely to get agreement to a small request.

A cold joke is a sort of nonsensical joke that is funny because it’s not funny, sort of like the New Yorker Anti-Cartoon Caption Contest. Two examples:

1. A piece of bread was walking down the street. It got hungry, so it ate itself.

2. Hanging in the hallway at Whites High School in Wabash, Indiana, are basketball team photos. In the center of the front row in each picture someone holds a basketball identifying the year: “62-63″, “63-64″, “64-65″, etc. One day I saw a freshman looking at the photos. Turning to me, he said,”Isn’t it strange how the teams always lost by one point?”

In the checkout line at Monterey Market:

ME Are those mangosteens?

MAN They’re baby artichokes.

You eat them raw, he said. Peel off the outer leaves and slice them thin.

MAN With some Pecorino sliced thin, pinenuts, a little olive oil . . .

ME Sounds Italian.

MAN Yes, it is.

Everyone laughed.

A collection of mathematical jokes at Wikipedia includes some nice ones — such as

Why do mathematicians think Halloween and Christmas are the same?
Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.

– but inexplicably omits my favorite:

Why is six afraid of seven?
Because seven ate nine.

Why is this funny (at least to a 5-year-old)? Because we enjoy seeing unexpected connections.