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The gems in this issue were forwarded to me by Gene Spafford <spaf@cs.purdue.edu> ---------------------------------------------------- Originally-from: Andy Koenig @ Bell Labs They just sent out announcements for the conference on massively parallel systems. I got 600 of them. ---------------------------------------------------- Congratulations are in order for Tom Reid. He says he just found out he is the winner of the 1994 Psychic of the Year award. ---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 13 Oct 90 09:07:18 -0400 From: RIch Epstein <@VM.CC.PURDUE.EDU:REPSTEIN@GWUVM> To: Spaf for Yucks <spaf> Subject: Stealth Semantics A political cartoon in the Washinton Post showed a confused driver passing a large campaign billboard which read: -------------------------------------------- | T H R O W T H E B U M S O U T ! | | Re-elect Congressman Rottweiler! | -------------------------------------------- || || || || - Rich Epstein, inside the Beltway, but I wish I weren't ---------------------------------------------------- Representative Tim Moore sponsored a resolution in the Texas House of Representatives in Austin, Texas calling on the House to commend Albert de Salvo for his unselfish service to "his country, his state and his community." The resolution stated that "this compassionate gentleman's dedication and devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely throughout the nation to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future. He has been officially recognized by the state of Massachusetts for his noted activities and unconventional techniques involving population control and applied psychology." The resolutiobn was passed unanimously. Representative Moore then revealed that he had only tabled the motion to show how the legislature passes bills and resolutions often without reading them or understanding what they say. Albert de Salvo was the Boston Strangler. ---------------------------------------------------- From LAGLENN@UNCVX1.BITNET: As many of you know, I am taking a class here at UNC on Personality. One of the tests to determine personality in our book was so incredibly useful and interesting, I just had to share it. Answer each of the following items "true" or "false" 1. I salivate at the sight of mittens. 2. If I go into the street, I'm apt to be bitten by a horse. 3. Some people never look at me. 4. Spinach makes me feel alone. 5. My sex life is A-okay. 6. When I look down from a high spot, I want to spit. 7. I like to kill mosquitoes. 8. Cousins are not to be trusted. 9. It makes me embarrassed to fall down. 10. I get nauseous from too much roller skating. 11. I think most people would cry to gain a point. 12. I cannot read or write. 13. I am bored by thoughts of death. 14. I become homicidal when people try to reason with me. 15. I would enjoy the work of a chicken flicker. 16. I am never startled by a fish. 17. My mother's uncle was a good man. 18. I don't like it when somebody is rotten. 19. People who break the law are wise guys. 20. I have never gone to pieces over the weekend. 21. I think beavers work too hard. 22. I use shoe polish to excess. 23. God is love. 24. I like mannish children. 25. I have always been diturbed by the sight of Lincoln's ears. 26. I always let people get ahead of me at swimming pools. 27. Most of the time I go to sleep without saying goodbye. 28. I am not afraid of picking up door knobs. 29. I believe I smell as good as most people. 30. Frantic screams make me nervous. 31. It's hard for me to say the right thing when I find myself in a room full of mice. 32. I would never tell my nickname in a crisis. 33. A wide necktie is a sign of disease. 34. As a child I was deprived of licorice. 35. I would never shake hands with a gardener. 36. My eyes are always cold. This is "The North Dakota Null Hyupothesis Brain Inventory" by Art Buchwald. The author lost the answer key, but if any of you out there have really good insights into your personality as a result of this test, it's time to be committed. ---------------------------------------------------- From: JMGREULICH@miavx1.UUCP (JEFF GREULICH) Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny Subject: I was going how fast??? Message-ID: <S1a7.20ba@looking.on.ca> Date: 14 Oct 90 10:30:04 GMT The following message was written by a couple of guys at the University of Dayton. Unfortunately, they don't have access to News. But it would be a pity if this wasn't shared with with world. (their permission was given, of course) ------------------------------------- Recently I have been pestered with a series of deeply scientific questions...All evolving out of the age old question..... If you're driving at the speed of Light and you turn your headlights on..What happens? These were quickly followed by If you're driving at the speed of light and..... ...Turn your radio on....What station do you get? ...Hit an on coming freight train.... ...Stick your head out the window.... ...Turn on the windshield washer jets.... ...Honk your horn.... ...Downshift into first.... These are all facinating (and deeply disturbed) questions. But let us assume that you get a car that can travel the speed of light and you begin to unravel these age old mysteries...WHEN SUDDENLY...You are faced with an even more dreadful question If you're driving at the speed of light and get pulled over by an Oakwood Taxi-cop....What kind of fine are you gonna pay??? And believe me you are gonna pay....He ain't gonna buy the line.. "669,600,000 mph!! That's impossible, my car shimmies at 500,000,000 mph!" And he ain't gonna take the excuse that you didn't realize how fast you were going......."Didn't you notice the Blue Shift ,son." After doing some research (No, I did not recently get a ticket) I found that the fair city of Oakwood charges $1 for every 1 mph over the speed limit So if you were pulled over for doing 669,600,000 in a 35 zone you would be charged $669,599,965 + a $33 court fee = $669,599,998 This does not include such subsequent fines as reckless operation, not wearing a seat belt, and DWI (Let's face it if you stopped for an Oakwood cop while doing light speed , you'd have to be drunk. Oakwood is roughly 2 miles across....You'd be out of his jurisiction in 0.00001 Seconds) A couple of other stats concerning a car capable of light speed. You'd flip the odometer in .537 seconds and need to change the oil every .053 seconds. I don't even want to get into the amount of gas it would use and at the current gas prices maybe a ticket isn't your first concern. But just think....you'll be able to answer all those complicated questions....Be the first to own a light-speed car.....Honest, it was only driven on Sundays by a little old lady who had to get to Epsion Indi and back. --Jason <SEIFERJC@UDAVXB.OCA.UDAYTON.EDU> Continuing along the line of Jason's scientific inquiry, what happens when you are going light speed in reverse and... ...turn on your headlights... ...look in the rear-view mirror... ...just barely avoid a car doing light speed the other direction... ...honk the horn... ...have to parallel park... ...shift into first... Which also brings up the question...could you get away with looking in the rear-view mirror, or would you have to turn around? --BastarMa <VOGTTIMJ@UDAVXB.OCA.UDAYTON.EDU> ---------------------------------------------------- In the war between men and women I prefer to follow the Bible's advice: Love thine enemy. ---------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------- Martyrdom - the only way a person can become famous without ability. - George Bernard Shaw ---------------------------------------------------- A little caution outflanks a large cavalry. - Bismarck ---------------------------------------------------- My favorite tactic along this line was a poster showing several people protesting aminal experimentation. The caption read "Thanks to animal research, these people can protest 20.4 years longer." ---------------------------------------------------- "The proof that IBM didn't invent the car is that it has a steering wheel and an accelerator instead of spurs and ropes, to be compatible with a horse." ---------------------------------------------------- Another unique feature of Athenian democracy was that a year after a law was passed it was reviewed. If the law was voted down the original proposer was executed. This certainly discouraged hasty legislation. Maybe we should try it :-)! ---------------------------------------------------- There _are_ some men who understand women. Unfortunately, they all spend their time in rooms with soft walls, talking to beings from Beta Lyrae. ---------------------------------------------------- Q: How many East Germans does it take to change a light bulb? A: Five. No, four. Hold on a minute, better make that three... ---------------------------------------------------- A sign in an eyeglass shop: "EYES EXAMINED WHILE YOU WAIT." By far the most comfortable procedure. ---------------------------------------------------- Which one does not belong? OBJECT OBJECT MONEY OBJECT OBJECT Answer: MONEY. Money is no object. ---------------------------------------------------- In a local college claculus class, the teacher wrote: + 8 lim x->0 --- = oo (infinity) x In an exam the next week, the following answer was seen: + 5 ___ lim x->0 --- = |__| |. x This one is a little difficult to show on the screen, but what you see is a horizontal 5. ---------------------------------------------------- This one is probably best when acted out: A crazy guy walks up to his friend with his hands cupped together. "You'll never guess what I've got in here," he says. "Well, let me think," says his friend. "An elephant! You've got an elephant in your hands!" The guy opens his hands a tiny crack and peeks in. Then he looks thoughtfully at his friend and peeks in again. Finally he looks at his friend defiantly and says, "OK, OK! But what color?!?" ---------------------------------------------------- Police: Mr. Johnson, we have just arrested a theif carrying several credit cards with Mrs. Johnson's name on them. Mr. Johnson: Tell the thief he can keep them. Police: But don't you want your credit cards back? Mr. Johnson: No. He's been spending only about half as much as Mrs. Johnson. ---------------------------------------------------- There is a convicted prisoner who is placed before a firing squad. The commander says, "I have heard that you declined having a last meal." "That's right." Says the prisoner. "And you don't even want a last smoke, or a blindfold?" "No, let's just get it over with." "Is there no last request we can grant you before we shoot you?" Asks the commander. "Well..." Stammers the prisoner. "I am a great lover of music, and it would mean a great deal to me if I am allowed to sing my favorite song, in it's entirety, before I am shot." "Since this wish of yours is your last request, I will grant it. You may sing." Replies the commander. So the prisoner starts... "Ten million bottles of beer on the wall, Ten million bottles of beer... " ---------------------------------------------------- The following are "tales" told by our MIS instructor: of course, written...it may not be as "funny" :( ...you be the judge) A physics professor was very strict about attendance, and despised tardiness. Every student caught arriving to class late (especially those interrupting his lecture) was quickly reprimanded in front of the whole class. Students were quick to comment on the professor's genetics. Well, one day a student entered through the front doors of the lecture hall, while the prof was writing notes on the chalkboard. The professor caught the student out of the corner of his eye (this acute sense of peripheral vision, further supported the rumours of his evolution), and turned to face the student. He demanded, "What do you think you're doing?". Being a science student, one naturally thinks quick, so the student snapped up and replied, "I came down from the back to get a better look at the board". The prof smiled. Back in those days, it was required that in order for a student to receive credit for a particular course, a card (listing of his/her courses) had to be signed by the instructor/lecturer. It was at the time, policy that students attend their courses. But depending on the size of the class, it was often quite possible to receive credit, even after not attending the class regularly. Not so, with this physics professor...if he didn't recognize you, you would have to repeat the course (& attend!). On one occassion, a student handed his card to be signed. The professor looked at the name, then at the student, and said, "I've never you see in my class.", and handed back the card. Now being a science student, he naturally thought quick, and proceeded to the end of the line. When he was at the front again, he handed his card to the prof. The prof looked at the name, then at the student, and said, "You look familiar. OK", and signed the card. ---------------------------------------------------- From: wilkes@penguin.ulowell.edu (C.T. "Tom" Wilkes) This reminds me of a tale told, if I remember correctly, by Richard Feynmann about Murray Gell-Mann, one of the developers of quark theory. It seems Gell-Mann was hauled into traffic court for running a red light, but explained to the judge that the light had appeared to him to be green due to the blue shift. Since Gell-Mann was a Nobel-laureate physicist, the judge was about to let him off until a disgruntled graduate student who happened to be in the audience told the judge exactly how fast Gell-Mann would have been travelling. The charge was changed to speeding.... ---------------------------------------------------- From a reference in a 17th-century book to sailors, it called lawyers "land sharks" and said that they'd rather chance a woman on board ship than a lawyer. ---------------------------------------------------- From Book of Anecdotes, possibly the first entry in the Cannonical List of Lawyer jokes. A story told of former President and General, U.S. Grant; Undistinguished and often shabby in appearance, Ulysses S. Grant did not recommend himself to strangers by looks. He once entered an inn at Galena, Illinois, on a stormy winter's night. A number of lawyers, in town for a court session, were clustered around the fire. One looked up as Grant appeared and said, "Here's a stranger, gentlemen, and by the looks of him he's traveled through hell itself to get here." "That's right," said Grant cheerfully. "And how did you find things down there?" "Just like here," replied Grant, "lawyers all closest to the fire." ---------------------------------------------------- Straight from Salinas, California, the lettuce bowl of the country: "Woman purees tomatoes with .38" A 39-year old Salinas woman was cited last week after trying to slay her husband's tomatoe plants with his .38-caliber revolver. The woman, whom police would not identify, was cited Thursday for discharging a weapon in the city limits while she and her husband argued over the length of her hair. (By the way, "The tomatoe plants survived the assault," according to a spokesman for the Salinas Police Department.) Vegetable-related crime is not new to Salinas. Just last fall, a panhandler was arrested after brandishing a 12-inch cucumber at a businessman and, according to police, threatening to "place the cucumber in a very inappropriate place on (his) person". ---------------------------------------------------- Sorry, this is not a joke. I head some guy named "L.J." (not a rapper) on the radio today... his understanding of the situation gave him a great source of cynicism. He has an article in the September Harper's on the S&L thang. Not really a joke, but here's a modern allegory. Enjoy, -todd ========================================================================= A boxer suffers from insomnia. A friend advises: "Try counting till you get asleep." Next day: "It didn't work: at 9 I always got up again." ---------------------------------------------------- POLICEMAN : "I'm afraid that I'm going to have to lock you up for the night." MAN : "What's the charge?" POLICEMAN : "Oh, there's no charge. It's all part of the service. ---------------------------------------------------- Three men stood before a judge on a charge of drunk and disorderly conduct in a public park. JUDGE : What were you doing? 1ST MAN : Oh, just throwing peanuts in the pond. JUDGE : And what were you doing? 2ND MAN : I was throwing peanuts in the pond, too." JUDGE : Sounds harmless. And you, were you throwing peanuts in the pond as well? 3RD MAN : No, sir. I AM Peanuts! ---------------------------------------------------- If George Bush wants to provoke a war, he should arrange for Roseanne Barr to sing the Iraqi national anthem. ---------------------------------------------------- During an operatic concert at the Festival Hall, while the nervous soprano was fumbling her way noisily through her role in Don Giovanni, one man in the audience turned to his friend and whispered : "What do you think of this singer's execution?" "Oh, I'm all for it." was the reply. ---------------------------------------------------- A new arrival, about to enter hospital, saw two white coated doctors searching through the flower beds. "Excuse me," he said, "have you lost something?" "No," replied one of the doctors. "We're doing a heart transplant for an income-tax inspector and want to find a suitable stone. ---------------------------------------------------- `You seem to be in some distress,' said the kindly judge to the witness. `Is anything the matter?' `Well, your Honour,' said the witness, `I swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but every time I try, some lawyer objects.' ---------------------------------------------------- The following are from the San Jose Mercury News, 28 October, 1990: Wrong place, wrong time ----------------------- Darnell Madison, 37, was shot and killed in July in Homewood, Ala., when he burst into a motel room intending to rob the seven men whom he had seen with a wad of money. He was unaware they were armed police officers working on another case. In June a replacement bus driver hired by Greyhound during the drivers' strike met the bus he was to drive from Delaware to New York City. However, a passenger on the bus wound up driving to New York because the substitute driver could not drive a stick shift. Rory Johnson, 29, was arrested in May for a liquor store robbery in Elkhart, Ind. Johnson had parked in the back of the store to facilitate his getaway but had trouble exiting because of congestion due to road construction. Five minutes after the robbery, he was sitting in his car, having moved only a few feet, and liquor store employees pointed him out to police. ---------------------------------------------------- Quoted from Martin Snapp's election results in the Oakland Tribune: Politician with the most staying power: Judge Frank Ogden of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who was re-elected with 91 percent of the votes, despite the fact that he died three months ago. Moral: In Chicago, dead people vote. In Oklahoma, they get elected. ---------------------------------------------------- A graphic design takes an award at Harold's Chicken Shack in Hyde Park, Chicago. This sign that has a large "NO" on the left, and smaller lettering on the right saying: "DOGS / EATING / BICYCLES" ---------------------------------------------------- In a recent Columbus Dispatch, a photo of two billboards, one above the other. The top one is a typical campaign ad: "Reelect Chalmers Wylie", photo, "fine record", etc. etc. The bottom one is one from a series of teaser ads, the punch line to be revealed in a few days. It says, simply, in huge letters: Why? The billboard company swears the juxtaposition is not intentional. ---------------------------------------------------- In a 1st year practical class today, I saw "fine tuning" of a program taken to a new extreme. The student was using audible output from a PC to tell him where he was up to in his program. Each audible output was a different note. Thus, as his program ran, he could "hear" where it was up to. Needless to say it provided much amusment for those around him..... This certainly opens a new market for debugging tools and other products. "I'll take Wordperfect in C major, with Quatro in E flat." The sales assistants would certainly have to be sharp! ---------------------------------------------------- (Borrowed from an overhead slide used by a major workstation manufacturer) ---------------- THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS 1) Order the T-shirts for the Development team 2) Announce availability 3) Write the code 4) Write the manual 5) Hire a Product Manager 6) Spec the software (writing the specs after the code helps to ensure that the software meets the specifications) 7) Ship 8) Test (the customers are a big help here) 9) Identify bugs as potential enhancements 10) Announce the upgrade program ---------------------------------------------------- / net.rumor / mmm!mrgofor / Mar 19, 1986 / This story did not happen to me, and I disremember where I heard it, so it may not be true, but it's interesting nonetheless, so... There was a computer system that was experiencing intermittent power failures that were proving impossible to track down. Every means of recording device and electrical filter was used, but to no avail. The power failures always seemed to happen soon after lunch time, but for no apparent reason. After months of agonizing work, the technician finally figured it out: The room on the other side of the wall from the computer room was the men's bathroom. The grounding for the computer room circuits went to the water pipes that serviced one of the toilets. The building was rather old, and the toilets were in some need of repair. It seems that when one sat on the toilet seat, the weight of the sittee would cause the whole construction to lean forward a bit - not much, but enough to cause the marginally attached grounding wires to separate from the water pipes as the pipes bent along with the toilet - voila - the computer re-boots. I bet that was a hard one to track down! ---------------------------------------------------- This reminds me of a story from the dark ages of computing - when the Computing Center at a major university had both a monopoly on computing resources and a policy of "no frivolous use of the computer(s)". The CC, in its unchallengable wisdom and power, had decreed a single file-and-compute server for a university with about 35,000 undergraduates. Much of the hardware was purchased with grant money, and the grants included strings that in essence required billing real $ for every microsecond of crunch, and guaranteeing the granting agencies a usage fee no higher than that charged any other user. (So the No F. Use bit wasn't JUST puritanism - the guys who kicked in the megabucks were likely to get irate.) And the sysops didn't realize how popular the first text-only Startrek game would be until it was well-known and chewing up significant computer resources. You can imagine what came next. They removed it. It reappeared. They removed it again. Several users had made copies, and some of them announced where copies could be found. They wrote a program to search the entire filesystem for copies. Several encrypted copies were announced on the grapevine. They upgraded the program to search for these encrypted copies. And the war continued, with progressively more redundant copies using progressively more of the disk farm, and the encryption methods evolving under the selection pressure of the system administrators' decryption efforts. Like any war, it began to have effects outside the actual battle. (One observer placed a line to the effect of "Kirk Spock Enterprise NCC-1701 klingon phaser photon torpedo Federation" in a datafile used by a perfectly legitimate application, blasted the administrators through channels when the file vanished, and gleefully showed me how the usecount of the restored file kept rising, as the Startrekfinder kept finding it, and the CC administrators kept examining it to see if it was part of a hidden game.) But, also like any war, destruction befell innocent bystanders. And, like any crusaders out to destroy sin, the staff didn't catch on from the early, minor incidents, and kept increasing their efforts. What finally ended it was a pair of almost simultaneous hits on valuable files. The lesser incident was the destruction of a file named "Kirk", owned by a student nicknamed "Kirk", and containing coursework completely unrelated to the Great Interstellar War. The greater was medical. It seems a drug company was in the late stages of testing a new drug, and had paid the university over a half-million (1970's) dollars to run one of the tests. The drug in question had an effect on the endocrine system, and one of the measures of this effect was the length of the penises of male rats who had matured under influence of the drug. The project was near completion, the (rather large number of) rats had been grown, and as they were retired from the experiment, during its carefully-scheduled last few weeks, measurements made on each were filed on the exceedingly-well-maintained-and-backed-up central computing utility. One day the researcher logged on to enter the latest set of measurements, and found that the contents of the file named "RAT_PENIS_DATA" had been replaced by a short tirade about improper use of the computing center resources. You can imagine what hit the fan. The center staff, of course, in their War on Fun, had not taken care to preserve the latest state of the file they had blasted. Indeed, the file name had been, in their minds, a minor side-issue during their assault on the Startrek Plague. Yet the research was to prepare the drug for use on humans - with potential liabilities far exceeding the half-meg-plus pricetag of the research - and potential damage to the big U's reputation resulting in loss of lucrative research contracts ditto. Would error- corrections applied to the file between the last backup and the destruction be re-applied correctly? Was the CC prepared to pay for the extra costs incurred by Biochem as it completely re-entered the data from the notes, re-ran the experiment if it couldn't resolve any differences to the satisfaction of the FDA, and pay the drug company for the lost sales if it delayed the introduction of a useful drug? Thus, goes the story, did the war end. But the repercussions didn't stop, of course. The war had left lingering fallout, in the form of alienated clients of the Computing Ceter, and the center's destruction of valuable data provided an extra round to be used against the Center whenever a department was trying to obtain computers of its own, over the Center's opposition.