I was just thinking about the song Finite Simple Group (Of Order 2), and if you have studied graduate level math and haven’t heard it, you really should:

If you haven’t studied graduate level math, the many, many puns will not be funny—in many cases they get the meaning at least approximately correct in both senses, which is the ideal form for a pun. There is something interesting to contemplate without watching the video, though.

It is curious how context-dependent humor can be. This can, of course, become a problem. For about a year after I left grad school, I could barely make jokes which other people would understand. In fact, I often could barely make jokes because I was constantly interrupting them with, “oh, wait, that won’t make any sense to you.”

The problem was not that I couldn’t think of things to joke about that would be of general interest, but that all of the similes and analogies which sprang to mind were esoteric. Since the essence of wit is making suddenly obvious connections which are normally hidden, it proved disastrous because I couldn’t find the things which would make the connections obvious to others.

One of the things necessary for the skill of comedy, then, is to keep familiar with the things one’s audience will be familiar with, whatever those are. As can be seen by the laughter which Kleinfour (the a cappella group in the video) got, this can be esoteric if your audience happens to be made up of people who all share that esoteric knowledge.

Just a subset of the dictum, know your audience, I suppose.

In this view, JP Sears gives some pretty good advice on how become depressed:

It should be noted that he concentrates on the things within one’s control. The death of loved ones, loss of a job, etc. would all work too, but they’re outside of one’s control.

Oddly, fixating on the possibility of them would probably help to get further depressed, then, but he forgets to give the advice of focusing only on what one cannot control.

No one’s perfect, I suppose.

(NOTE, SINCE INTERNET: this is all humor.)

Over at Linus Tech Tips, they had an absolutely hilarious video where they gave Linus (who is a tech geek) a high end DSLR in a series of challenges, while they gave Brandon (who is a professional photographer and videographer) a pixel 3 phone. It was interesting to see how it turned out, but the main thing is that it was just hilarious all the way through:

The origin of this challenge was Brandon complaining about phone companies saying that one doesn’t need a DSLR any more because their phones are such excellent cameras. He was, apparently, the one who came up with the format of the challenge because of course someone who isn’t a good photographer with a phone will have inferior pictures to someone who is a professional photographer using high end equipment. But there’s another problem, which is people who want to become photographers buying high end cameras instead of learning the craft of photography. So swapping them tested both things at once!

Which is, of course, a horrible way to test things if you’re interested in a controlled experiment, but it is a fascinating way to test them if one is more broad-minded than that. (Having background knowledge of photography really helped to interpret the results.)

Anyway, I strongly recommend watching it if you can find the time, because it’s both enormously entertaining and quite interesting. I just wish that they had showed us more of the pictures taken.

Originally made almost ten years ago, this video of a generic news story still applies as if it were made today (note: rough language not suitable for young children):

It’s a spot-on parody of news stories and their utter vacuity. The basic problem with news as a business is that the world produces important news at whatever rate it feels like, while new publications must publish on whatever schedule they’ve chosen; these days often hourly.

It should be noted that this introduces selection pressures which cause evolutionary changes in the people who present news as a business.

Possibly more interesting, however, is surprise that a ten year old piece of humor should still apply today. Why wouldn’t it? It’s making fun of something human beings do, and human beings do not change very much. There is the minor technological dependency on the particular thing being done, in the firehose of news depends upon technology which permits instant publishing. True, several hundred years ago one couldn’t say “in a desperate attempt to fill 24 hours of programming”.

But even several hundred years ago newspapers had a regular publishing schedule because men become hungry on a regular schedule and must therefore have money with which to buy food on a regular schedule. And several hundred years ago, as today, the world produces important news on whatever schedule it wishes, without regard to the bellies of newspapermen.

To wit, this advice of Thomas Jefferson to a fellow about how to run a newspaper is as true today as it was in 1807, when it was written, and can be adapted with only the slightest changes to television and internet news:

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy.

14 June 1807 Works 10:417–18

A very interesting video from Shadiversity about the medieval wattle-and-daub style house construction and why it resulted in the iconic wood-squares-and-white look:

It actually reminds me, mildly, of a very modern type of house construction technique called “insulating concrete forms” where the forms used for pouring concrete are made of rigid foam insulation and form part of the resulting structure. Though obviously far more rigid—and far more modern—than wattle-and-daub houses, it does have the thick, dense walls in common that are much better at blocking out outside sound. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to, but I hope some day to have a home made from insulated concrete forms—they seem very nice.

There’s some rough language in it, so don’t play it over speakers at work:

There’s a lot to say about news but probably the easiest way to summarize it all is that for anything really important you’re going to hear about it from all of your neighbors anyway and for everything else, you’re best off reading about it in a history book.

I really love this Lindy Hop performance:

The dancers are Orion Hall and Colleen Vernon. The song is the Spiderman theme song by Michael Bublé.

It may not be the most technically skilled Lindy Hop performance ever, but it may be one of the most clever.

Today at A Clerk of Oxford, she posted a medieval poem which satirizes the romantic poems popular at the time. It may take a few readings to be able to deal with the unusual spellings, but it’s worth it because the poem is quite fun.

This may be my favorite stanza from it:

Whosoever wist what life I lead,
In mine observance in divers wise;
From time that I go to my bed
I eat no meat till that I rise.
Ye might tell it for a great emprise, [triumph]
That men thus mourneth for your sake;
So much I think on your service,
That when I sleep I cannot wake.

One of the two books in which this poem is found was in a commonplace book owned by a grocer, in the 1500s. It’s also fun to see, though the expression is somewhat different, the sense of humor is very much the same as what one might get from Chesterton or even a more modern wit.

Just to illustrate my point, compare this with Chesterton’s poem The Logical Vegetarian:

You will find me drinking rum,
    Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian
    You will find me drinking gin 
    In the lowest kind of inn
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.

In a blog post entitled Infidelity and Other Taboos, Media Style, The Last Psychiatriast introduces a concept he calls crowdsourcing the superego.

The post is about the story of two people who left their spouses to marry each other:

Two people, a man who looks suspiciously like Julian Assange, and a TV reporter who looks exactly like every MILF porn actress working today, divorce their spouses and get married. 

The original couples were friends, and the two met at their kids’ elementary school.  There are five kids between them, and, you know, whatever.

The twist is that they announced their marriage in the Style section of the New York Times, because, of course, they hooked up in style.  The further twist is that they semi-shamelessly recount in the Times how they fell in love while they were still married to other people.

It then gets to why their story was written up in the New York Times Style section:

It’s a mantra: narcissists don’t feel guilt, only shame.  Well, it’s not completely true, sometimes they do feel guilt, but you have to be hitting on a taboo to feel it.

Even the most hardened narcissist feels some passing guilt when their spouse is sobbing on the kitchen floor.  How do you get over that?  (Pills won’t help, but psychiatry is happy to tell you they might.)

This is how narcissism eradicates guilt: it rewrites the story, or as the po-mo mofos say, “offer a competing narrative.”

He then gives another example with different people publicly airing their transgressions, and gets to the crucial insight:

But what you need to get out of these stories is how this generation and forwards will deal with guilt: externalizing it, converting it to shame, and then taking solace in the pockets of support that inevitably arise.   Everyone is famous to 15 people, and that’s just enough people to help you sleep at night.  

As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

What’s so crucial about this insight is that it describes a coping mechanism for guilt that’s an alternative to repentance and even to admitting the guilt at all. Repentance works, of course, especially within Christianity where God is actually filling the gaps created by the defects of sin so that reparation of the damage done by sin is actually possible. Repentance outside of Christianity is possible, but it’s incomplete because satisfaction is not possible. It is possible to balance things out—at least minor things—but not do actually repair the damage. That is more than human beings can do.

However, where repentance is not considered an option, the guilt must still be dealt with. One traditional approach is the scapegoat. This was originally a form of animal sacrifice where the sins of the group where placed onto a goat and it was then killed.

(For those unfamiliar with ritual, it’s not that the sins could actually be placed on the goat or that the killing of the goat actually destroyed the sins, but that the ritual gave people a line across which they could disregard past sins and consider them over. In more modern (i.e. inadequate) terms, it provided closure.)

Scapegoating works—to a lesser degree than repentance—but it still requires admitting one’s guilt. The modern world, having worked itself up into a frenzy of stupidity (that is, of being wrong about everything at once), results in people who feel their guilt (since they are still human) but cannot admit it. This produces an enormous problem because one cannot deal with what one is pretending does not exist. And here’s where crowdsourcing the superego comes in. Guilt cannot be recognized by the modern mind, but shame can. So the modern can turn the guilt which he cannot recognize and cannot, therefore, deal with, into shame which he can recognize and can, therefore, deal with.

He will deal with it badly, of course, because realism is a precondition of success. Still, it allows him to do something about the guilt. And doing something, even if completely ineffective, still feels better than doing nothing.

It distracts from the problem, at the very least. And, more or less, at most.

Ramsey Dewey (and friends) can be quite funny when they put their mind to it. This video compares and tries to replicate two self defense videos which teach one how to defend against multiple opponents with guns:

I will say, though, that while the humor is entirely correct, and moreover that fighting multiple opponents with guns is probably not going to end well, there was an interesting point that wasn’t highlighted here. In Ramsey’s reproduction, the gunmen kept a safe distance from Ramsey. There was a curious self-defense video I saw which made the interesting point that while trained people will indeed keep a safe distance when they have guns, trained people rarely rob people with guns. They can make money honestly.

The sort of people who rob others on the street with guns don’t have training, and moreover use the gun primarily to assert their dominance and only secondarily as a weapon. And indeed, security footage does show that criminals often do wave guns right in people’s faces rather than keeping a safe distance. This doesn’t change the right thing to do when threatened with a gun (since the smallest mistake can result in being killed) but it is an interesting point of human psychology.

If you haven’t read the blog (which, alas, hasn’t been updated in years) of The Last Psychiatrist, you’ve been missing out. I’m going to highlight one of my favorite posts of his: The Dove Beauty Sketches Scam. Just go read it.

But if you want to know something about it first, it starts by showing this clip from a movie about a con artist who was approached by a psychologist and is teaching her about con artistry at her request:

Then The Last Psychiatrist asks this question:

Quick test for a con: what questions does it not occur to you to ask?  While you were memorizing the language and the pacing of the scam, you didn’t ask yourself, why didn’t Mantegna take that guy’s money at the end?  Why did he let him off the hook?  “He was just doing it as an example.” Oh, like when a guy says he’ll put in just the tip, “I want to see if it fits”?   It’s not like the psychiatrist doesn’t know he’s a thief– that’s why they were there in the first place.   So he purposely didn’t steal the money to make the psychiatrist feel at ease, feel closer to him.  To earn her confidence by first giving her his.  She’s the mark.  The aborted short con is part of an unseen long con.

The Last Psychiatrist has a very blunt and provocative style, but he uses it to deliver a lot of insight.