A good one

This is not a joke, but it is very funny. From the NY Times:

Shaquille O’Neal . . . when asked what he thinks about Portland’s Greg Oden. “I don’t,” Shaq said. “I’m a Shogun. You can’t ask me about a low-level ninja.”

For the non-sports fan, Gred Oden is a center drafted first in 2007 (and I assume even non-sports fans don’t need to be told who O’Neal is).

Hear a good one lately?

Two recent articles both cite Robert Provine (who has been mentioned here before in an earlier post) in a discussion of why good jokes are hard to remember.  Natalie Angier’s column in the New York Times is more generally about human memory; from her we get the following:

Really great jokes . . . work not by conforming to pattern recognition routines but by subverting them. “Jokes work because they deal with the unexpected, starting in one direction and then veering off into another,” said Robert Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.” “What makes a joke successful are the same properties that can make it difficult to remember.”

This may also explain why the jokes we tend to remember are often the most clichéd ones.

The other article supplies  the following:

Examples of a bad joke:

What do you call a judge with no thumbs? Justice Fingers

Why do cows have bells? Because their horns don’t work.

Examples of a better joke:

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class one day.

“In English”, he said, “A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A loud voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”

Human ingenuity

An item was posted on The Consumerist about a small”salad-spinner-like device that you use to handwash your small loads.”  Apparently it really was inspired by the salad spinner.  The item linked to an article that provided some details about the genesis of the product:

While engineering and designing the Smart Touch Salad Spinner for Zyliss, RKS learned that resourceful women were using salad spinners to wash their delicates. Independently, Fran Slutsky, co-owner of leading commercial laundry machine manufacturer American Dryer Corporation, had identified the need for an easy, energy-efficient way to clean small loads of laundry and discovered that salad spinners effectively mimicked washing-machine agitation. After becoming aware of their work for Zyliss, Slutsky enlisted RKS to develop a concept for a hand-powered, high-performance, laundry device for small loads. (Emphasis mine.)

Not compatible with life or I can die now

A Scientific American interview with Martin A. Samuels, chairman of the neurology department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, examined the phenomenon of being “scared to death.”  (Via post in Boing Boing.)  It was prompted by a criminal case going on now:

A Charlotte, N.C., man was charged with first-degree murder of a 79-year-old woman whom police said he scared to death. In an attempt to elude cops after a botched bank robbery, the Associated Press reports that 20-year-old Larry Whitfield broke into and hid out in the home of Mary Parnell. Police say he didn’t touch Parnell but that she died after suffering a heart attack that was triggered by terror.

Samuels explains that the “fight or flight response” can cause the heart to “go into abnormal rhythms that are not compatible with life.”  When asked if “other emotional states besides fear could lead to these fatal heart rhythm,” he responds:

Any strong positive or negative emotions such as happiness or sadness. There are people who have died in intercourse or in religious passion. There was a case of a golfer who hit a hole in one, turned to his partner and said, “I can die now”—and then he dropped dead. A study in Germany found an increase of sudden cardiac deaths on the days that the German soccer team was playing in the World Cup. For about seven days after the 9/11 terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon there was an increase of sudden cardiac death among New Yorkers.