Mohan K. V

Hey FRANCE! I'm coming your way soon!

Our most blasphemous poster yet.

As the USD-INR rate hits 61, we get that sick feeling in the stomach that next month, my son’s Lego buy will be that much more expensive. However, the sick feeling in the stomach isn’t ours alone. You have some Foreign Institutional Investors for company, who, after six long years, are seeing returns of –8%, while we rupee folks are up 36%.

The DEFTY is an index tracked by the NSE closely with the Nifty – it is the return of the Nifty but in dollars instead.

From July 2007 till now, the Nifty in rupees is close to it’s all time high. But the Defty is about 40% off its own.

These would have been a forgettable 6 years for the FIIs. India’s GDP has doubled, India’s growth remains among the top even though there’s inflation, but the return from stocks has been, in absolute terms, negative.

For her 1974 book Lighter Side of the Library, Janice Glover asked American librarians to recall titles requested by confused patrons, and the books they turned out to want:

Requested: Who Is Your Schoolmaster?
Book wanted: Hoosier Schoolmaster

Requested: Entombed With an Infant
Book wanted: In Tune With the Infinite

Requested: The Missing Hand
Book wanted: A Farewell to Arms

Requested: The Armored Chinaman
Book wanted: The Chink in the Armour

Requested: King of the Ants
Book wanted: Lord of the Flies

Requested: The Wooden Kid
Book wanted: Pinocchio

Requested: Five Pennies and the Sun
Book wanted: The Moon and Sixpence

And so on: From Here to Maternity; The Merchant of Venus; “Allergy in a Country Churchyard”; My Heart Is Wounded, They Buried My Knee. One inspired library staff finally sent a student home with Homer’s Iliad; he had come in asking for Homeless Idiot.

“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.” — G.K. Chesterton

In May 1856, an African teenager named Nongqawuse had a vision: If her people killed all their cattle, she said, their long-dead ancestors would rise and drive out the European settlers.

Word spread quickly, and they did as she urged. In 10 months that followed, the Xhosa nation killed 400,000 cattle, driven by mounting rumor and revelation that great fields of corn would also spring into existence, that their ancient heroes would return to life, and that sickness and old age would disappear. In his Compendium of South African History and Geography of 1877, George McCall Theal records the climax:

At length the morning dawned of the day so long and so ardently looked for. All night long the Kaffirs had watched, with feeling stretched to the utmost tension of excitement, expecting to see two blood-red suns rise over the eastern hills, when the heavens would fall and crush the races they hated. Famished with hunger, half dying as they were, that night was yet a time of fierce, delirious joy. The morn, that a few short hours, slowly becoming minutes, would usher in, was to see all their sorrows ended, all their misery past. And so they waited and watched. It came, throwing a silver sheen upon the mountain peaks, and bathing hill-side and valley in a flood of light, as the ruler of day appeared. The hearts of the watchers sank within them; ‘What,’ said they, ‘will become of us if Mhlakaza’s predictions turn out untrue?’ It was the first time they had asked such a question, the dawn of doubt had never entered their thoughts till the dawn of the fatal day. But perhaps, after all, it might be midday that was meant, and when the shadows began to lengthen towards the east perhaps, thought they, the setting of the sun is the time. The sun went down behind clouds of crimson and gold, and the Amaxosa awoke to the reality of their dreadful position.

The ensuing famine killed 40,000 Xhosa. “Nongqause escaped, and is still living,” Theal wrote. “For prudential reasons she has ever since resided in the colony, where she preserves an unbroken silence concerning the deeds in which she played so prominent a part.”

Apt names of medical specialists, collected by the MEDLIB-L discussion list in 1998:

Cardiologists: Dr. Valentine, Dr. Hart, Dr. Safety R. First

Chiropractors: Dr. Popwell, Dr. Wack, Dr. Bonebrake, Dr. Bender

Dentists, endodontists and orthodontists: Dr. Pullen, Dr. Fillmore, Dr. Hurt, Dr. Yankum, Dr. Les Plack, Dr. Toothman, Dr. Borer, Dr. Pullman, Dr. Filler, Dr. Harm, Dr. Hurter, Dr. Toothaker

Dermatologists: Dr. Rash, Dr. Pitts, Dr. Skinner, Dr. Whitehead

Family practice, internists: Dr. Kwak, Dr. Blood, Dr. Coffin, Dr. Patient, Dr. Payne, Dr. Slaughter, Dr. A. Sickman, Dr. Deadman, Dr. Will Griever

Hand surgeons: Dr. Palmer, Dr. Nalebuff, Dr. Watchmaker

Medical librarian: Rita Book

Neurologists: Dr. Johnathan Treat Paine, Dr. Brain, Dr. Head

Pediatricians: Dr. Donald Duckles, Dr. Small, Dr. Bunny, Dr. Tickles

Psychiatrists/psychologists/mental health: Dr. Brain, Dr. Strange, Dr. Dippy, Dr. Moodie, Dr. Nutter, Dr. Looney

Surgeons: Dr. Hackman, Dr. Blades, Dr. Klutts, Dr. Graves, Dr. Cutts, Dr. Slaughter, Dr. Kutteroff, Dr. Doctor, Dr. Butcher, Dr. Hurt

More here. In 1977 authors A.J. Splatt and D. Weedon submitted an article on incontinence to the British Journal of Urology. It was accepted.

Still more wisdom from German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799):

• “That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.”
• “If people should ever start to do only what is necessary, millions would die of hunger.”
• “I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others, but hate ourselves in others too.”
• “Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.”
• “Nothing is judged more carelessly than people’s characters, and yet there is nothing about which we should be more cautious. Nowhere do we wait less patiently for the sum total which actually is the character. I have always found that the so-called bad people gain when we get to know them more closely, and the good ones lose.”
• “Completely to block a given effect requires a force equal to that which caused it. To give it a different direction, a trifle will often suffice.”
• “Undeniably, what we call perseverance can lend the appearance of dignity and grandeur to many actions, just as silence in company affords wisdom and apparent intelligence to a stupid person.”
• “The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.”
• “There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.”
• “He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.”
• “It is certain, it seems, that we can judge some matter correctly and wisely and yet, as soon as we are required to specify our reasons, can specify only those which any beginner in that sort of fencing can refute. Often the wisest and best men know as little how to do this as they know the muscles with which they grip or play the piano. This is very true and deserves to be pursued further.”

See Diamonds and Pearls, From the Notebooks, and The Sage of Göttingen.

A problem from the 1999 Russian mathematical olympiad:

Show that the numbers from 1 to 15 can’t be divided into a group A of 13 numbers and a group B of 2 numbers so that the sum of the numbers in A equals the product of the numbers in B.

Click for solution …

In 1951 James Thurber’s friend Mitchell challenged him to think of an English word that contains the four consecutive letters SGRA. Lying in bed that night, Thurber came up with these:

kissgranny. A man who seeks the company of older women, especially older women with money; a designing fellow, a fortune hunter.

blessgravy. A minister or cleric; the head of a family; one who says grace.

hossgrace. Innate or native dignity, similar to that of the thoroughbred hoss.

bussgranite. Literally, a stonekisser; a man who persists in trying to win the favor or attention of cold, indifferent, or capricious women.

tossgravel. A male human being who tosses gravel, usually at night, at the window of a female human being’s bedroom, usually that of a young virgin; hence, a lover, a male sweetheart, and an eloper.

Unfortunately, none of these is in the dictionary. What word was Mitchell thinking of?

Click for solution …

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Apparently the economy in California is doing well. My personal economic indicator revolves around how hard it is to buy ordinary goods and services. At the moment it is very hard.

For starters, the lines everywhere are longer, and the traffic is notably worse than a few years ago. If you can get to a physical store, they don't have your size in stock, or the popular model is already sold out. At best, the salesperson might try to order your item from another store if you can wait a week. With the exception of grocery stores and pharmacies, physical stores are empty shells waiting for the Internet to deliver a head shot.

Apple stores are exceptions. They generally seem to have every model in stock and the staff is excellent. But I won't buy anything at an Apple store this summer because I'm quite certain they have new and better stuff coming soon. Apple trained me not to buy their products today if they might come out with something better soon, and they are always coming out with something better soon. I've been staring at my old and defective iPad for six months wishing there was something I could do about it.

Online shopping isn't much better. Let's say I realize I need to replace some sort of broken item in my house, which is a process that happens a lot. So I go to a web page that carries that product and use the contact link to find the email address for the company. I type out a simple question about the product and wait for a response.

And it never comes.

What kind of company doesn't bother answering a customer who already has his credit card in his hand? Answer: One that has too much business already.

Buying clothes online works unless you want a size that fits. Those sizes are generally not available, even online, which I find puzzling. And if heather grey and navy blue aren't your colors, you're usually out of luck.

And what's up with taking two weeks to deliver an item you purchased online? Which part of the supply chain is doing so well they can't keep up with the business?

I hired a locksmith recently to fix a broken bathroom door locking mechanism. He worked on it over the course of three separate days, including trips back to headquarters to get parts. When he was done, he proudly showed his work. The door handles were back on the door and functioning! The only problem was that the door would never again lock, because he didn't have the right parts for that. He's a locksmith who doesn't think the "locking" part of a bathroom door is terribly important. Apparently his boss was having a hard time hiring qualified employees. That was a bad situation for me, but a good sign for the economy.

I realize this is all anecdotal, but how hard are you finding it to buy normal goods and services compared to a year or two ago?

I keep reading that the big tech companies, most notably Google and Facebook, are finding that job performance isn't highly correlated to an employee's college grades or even the reputation of the school attended. And I also understand that tech companies are less inclined to ask interview questions such as "Why are manhole covers round?" Apparently the answers to those questions don't predict future employee success.

So now Google and Facebook and perhaps others are using secret new methods of collecting information on the Internet to identify great candidates they can poach from other companies.

BEEP BEEP BEEP

Sorry, my bullshit detector just went off.

I think what is really going on is that employee success in the tech industry is most correlated with luck. But if you work in Human Resources, and your job involves identifying good employees before they do something great, you need some sort of flavorful bullshit to make it seem as if there is science to what you do. Whenever I hear that someone has a secret algorithm, or they discovered something while data mining, I get highly suspicious.

In my experience, people who managed to get good grades from prestigious schools are indeed far more effective than people who didn't. I expect a Stanford grad to do be smarter and more effective than a Chico State grad at least 80% of the time.

But there have also been studies showing that the worst kind of work group is one that has too many smart people. Ideally, you want one smart person and several competent followers on a team, or so the studies suggest. So it doesn't surprise me that Google or Facebook could be hiring geniuses and experiencing project gridlock as the brainiacs stand around arguing. So that might be the problem.

I wonder how anyone can identify a great employee working for another company when that employee has only worked on teams. Often it is the team dynamic, the timing of the project, the chemistry of the group, the effectiveness of management, and a hundred other factors that create success. Most of it looks like luck.

I can see how a "Moneyball" approach works in the limited case of baseball. A batter is a member of a team, but the team has little influence on how he hits. A player's batting average is all about his own skill. But how do you evaluate, for example, an employee whose every move is part of a larger collaborative effort? You can't moneyball that.

I think the secret sauce that makes some groups successful is the chemistry of the team, along with luck, of course. And, as I mentioned, good team chemistry might mean having one smart person and several followers. The problem is implementing that system. Could a manager really get away with organizing teams by brightness level? "Okay, team. Susan is the smart one and the rest of you are . . . the other ones. Go do something awesome."

 

 

Last day for the new project! Thanks, geeks!

King James returns!



Here's the project mentioned.

A great Reddit thread asked readers for their favorite "intellectual" joke -- some of the high-ranked ones are really good!

Q: What does the "B" in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for?
A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot. (balloseater)

It's hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally. (Watch_Closely

I'd tell you a UDP joke, but you may not get it. (ambivalist)

I prefer IP jokes; it's all in the delivery. (ianschenck)

I could tell you a joke about TCP, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it. (Razakel)

Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says, "Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it's funny or not?" Gödel replies, "We can't know that because we're inside the joke." Chomsky says, "Of course it's funny. You're just telling it wrong." (Saboot)

What's the most intellectual joke you know? (self.AskReddit) (via Kottke)

In memory of computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart, who died last night, please watch this 1968 video of his "Mother of All Demos." Thank you Doug for helping augment human intellect.

"The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed." - Douglas Engelbart (1925- 2013)

Douglas Engelbart died at his home in California yesterday at the age of 88. Engelbart invented the mouse, among other things. In 1968, Engelbart gave what was later called The Mother of All Demos, in which he demonstrated "the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor".

Not bad for a single demo. Truly one of the giants of our age.

Update: Bret Victor urges us to remember Engelbart not for the technology he created but for his vision of how people could collaborate and create together using technology.

The least important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What did he build?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to admire him, to stand in awe his achievements, to worship him as a hero. But worship isn't useful to anyone. Not you, not him.

The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What world was he trying to create?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself.

(thx, andy)

Tags: Douglas Engelbart   obituaries   video

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." And I'll give them heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and a shorter lifespan. A growing body of research suggests that there is often a high health toll when it comes to coming to America.

A growing body of mortality research on immigrants has shown that the longer they live in this country, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. And while their American-born children may have more money, they tend to live shorter lives than the parents.

The pattern goes against any notion that moving to America improves every aspect of life. It also demonstrates that at least in terms of health, worries about assimilation for the country's 11 million illegal immigrants are mistaken. In fact, it is happening all too quickly.

Tags: medicine   USA

What if journalists from foreign countries wrote about the US the way US newspapers and magazines cover events in foreign countries?

On a recent visit to the United States by GlobalPost, signs of the increased security apparatus could be found everywhere.

At all national airports, passengers are now forced to undergo full-body scans before boarding any flights. Small cameras are perched on many street corners, recording the movements and actions of the public. And incessant warnings on public transportation systems encourage citizens to report any "suspicious activity" to authorities.

Several American villagers interviewed for this story said the ubiquitous government marketing campaign called, "If you see something, say something," does little to make them feel safer and, in fact, only contributes to a growing mistrust among the general population.

"I've deleted my Facebook account, stopped using email, or visiting websites that might be considered anti-regime," a resident of the northern city of Boston, a tough-as-nails town synonymous with rebellion, told GlobalPost. It was in Boston that an American militia first rose up against the British empire. "But my phone? How can I stop using my phone? This has gone too far."

Tags: journalism   USA

Andrew Blum writes about James Bridle and the New Aesthetic movement for Vanity Fair.

Suddenly everyone who thinks it's a movement either wants to be part of it or wants to destroy it," Bridle reflected one recent afternoon, sitting behind a makeshift desk in his new, windowless studio in a converted factory in the Cambridge Heath neighborhood of London. "Bruce describing it as a movement locks it into an existing idea of historical processes, but there's no such thing as avant-gardes anymore. That's such a ridiculous idea. That's an art-historical construct that just doesn't apply anymore. But it leads to that idea of there being avant-garde figures that are ahead of everything else. But there's not. It's just me, looking at this stuff, and going, 'Have you seen this? Have you actually seen it? Have you really paid attention and thought this stuff through? Because I'm trying to, and it's amazing!'"

More on the New Aesthetic here.

Tags: Andrew Blum   art   James Bridle   New Aesthetic

Paying Canadians to keep their oil sands in the ground to curb climate change might not sound like an obvious vote winner to a cash-strapped European government.

But it makes more economic sense than people realise, according to Bård Harstad, a Norwegian academic who has just won a prestigious environmental economics prize for a provocative paper suggesting just such a move.

Mr Harstad, 40, has been awarded the Erik Kempe prize, worth SKr100,000, by the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists for a study called “Buy Coal! A Case for Supply-Side Environmental Policy”.

The FT article is here, and you may recall an earlier MR suggestion that sealing or blowing up especially dirty fuel sources, in a Hotelling intertemporal resource extraction model, is more likely to be effective than many kinds of tax.

Due to the increasing ubiquity of connected cameras, writes Nick Bilton in the NY Times, photography is shifting away from documentation to communication.

Photos, once slices of a moment in the past -- sunsets, meetings with friends, the family vacation -- are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue. The cutting-edge crowd is learning that communicating with a simple image, be it a picture of what's for dinner or a street sign that slyly indicates to a friend, "Hey, I'm waiting for you," is easier than bothering with words, even in a world of hyper-abbreviated Twitter posts and texts.

"This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment," said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, and we are "turning photography into a communication medium."

Dave Pell worries that the realtime availability of all these photos is getting in the way of our experiencing selves.

Maybe it was a bad angle. Maybe I didn't get his good side. Maybe he just didn't have that surfer vibe. Whatever it was, the photo wasn't all that cool. Given time to reflect (even the few days I used to get between my own childhood birthdays and my mom picking up a set of 4x6 prints at the local pharmacy), my son probably would've developed a version of that day that had him riding a giant a wave, looking like a cross between Laird Hamilton and Eddie Vedder. Instead, he pretty much looked like a landlocked three year-old on a beach-bound surfboard who was suffering from a rare -- but particularly punishing -- bad hair day.

The instant my son looked at the image, his imagination-driven perception of himself was replaced by a digital reproduction of the moment he had just experienced. He had a few seconds, not nearly long enough, to create is own internal version of what that moment looked -- and by extension felt -- like.

Tags: Dave Pell   Nick Bilton   photography

Sequestration refers to the automatic spending cuts that the government of the United States passed into law in 2011, and which went into effect March 1^st of this year.  The original idea was that the impending meat cleaver approach to the budget would force a contentious Congress to reach agreement on smarter and more targeted cuts for the good of the country. Common sense might tell you that making intelligent budget cuts would be better than reductions across the board. Most people held that view.

But my common sense argues the opposite. I say dumb cuts are every bit as good as intelligent cuts, at least for cuts of the size we are discussing. I'll explain.

For starters, consider how often common sense is wrong. My most-used example is that common sense tells you that investing in individual superstar stocks would give you a better return than buying the market average. But we know from studies that buying individual stocks is a sucker's game unless you have insider or special knowledge. Common sense often steers you toward calamity.

The thing we call common sense is in reality some mixture of bias, fear, self-interest, ignorance, misjudgment, emotion, and about a dozen other psychological malfunctions. Common sense only operates well in simple situations, and the budget of the United States is far from simple.

When the sequestration was originally contemplated, the hope was that by 2012 Congress could get past partisan politics and agree on intelligent, common sense cuts. The flaw in that plan is that intelligence and common sense aren't real things when it comes to the budget. If you fired everyone in Congress today and replaced them with new folks, you would end up right back where we are. In the context of massive complexity, common sense and intelligence are nothing more than the soothing sensations our brains provide so we'll feel less frustrated and confused. Our tiny brains prefer simple statements such as:

Cut that defense budget!

Stop giving those freeloaders my money!

Yay for solar power!

I have a bit of insight about across-the-board budget cuts because I was a budget manager for a bank and then a phone company during a portion of my corporate career. My job was to present management with enough information for them to make "intelligent" budget decisions. Management would look at my information, assume it was nothing but a compilation of lies from department heads, and proclaim a 10% budget cut across all departments.

And oh how the department heads squawked about the irrational budget process. But they made the cuts, after much complaining, and life went on. As the budget guy, I got to see how many doom and gloom stories transpired because of the "dumb" cuts. Answer: none. I never saw a real business problem that could be traced back to the budget cuts. People simply adapted to the new constraints.

I would go so far as to say that sometimes the best way to improve a department function is to cut its budget. Constraints generate creativity. People will only try hard to improve if it is necessary. A fully-funded budget removes that creative energy.

Consider this highly simplified example. Let's say a government-funded medical procedure costs $1,000 per patient, but the budget cuts make it impossible to spend that much for the coming year. Once the constraints are in place, you might see more effort in searching for cheaper solutions across the globe. Before the cuts, there was no reason to even look for a cheaper solution. Now folks might do research and discover that India has a procedure that costs $100 and produces the same result. Or you might do a study that results in a better understanding of which patients will respond to the treatment, so you can skip the people who wouldn't have been helped. For the best results in the long term, you need a healthy balance of both funding and constraints.

The best way to ruin a good program is to overfund it until everyone involved gets fat and lazy. One could argue that the best way to improve a program - once it has reached a massive national scale - is to cut its budget and force some creative energy into the system.

So while most of the country was worrying that the dumb budget cuts of the sequestration would lead to doom, I was thinking it was a brilliant work-around to a failed Congress. The dumb budget cuts would be no worse than intelligent cuts, and we'd gain some degree of predictability about the fiscal future. The economy loves predictability.

This is another situation in which the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters comes into play. The law states that any looming disaster that the general public recognizes years in advance will be solved. For example, if today the government proclaimed that Social Security would go away in the year 2040, the country would adapt. And the solution would likely have many advantages over Social Security in the long run. For example, perhaps it would trigger a massive wave of home upgrades as people add in-law apartments to their existing homes. The economy would boom, grandma would be close to the grandkids, and you could easily feed her with the money you saved by not paying Social Security every month. When she dies, you have an extra space to rent.

Don't get too caught up in my examples. I'm just making the case that budget constraints fuel creativity. And that trade-off is sufficiently unpredictable that common sense simply can't tell you whether to cut a particular large program or not.

So how do you make budget decisions in the face of massive unpredictability? That's simple: You pick the path that is cheapest. And that is roughly what the sequestration did.

 

 

 

Malcolm Gladwell on economist Albert Hirschman, who embraced the roles of adversity, anxiety, and failure in creativity and success.

"The Principle of the Hiding Hand," one of Hirschman's many memorable essays, drew on an account of the Troy-Greenfield "folly," and then presented an even more elaborate series of paradoxes. Hirschman had studied the enormous Karnaphuli Paper Mills, in what was then East Pakistan. The mill was built to exploit the vast bamboo forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But not long after the mill came online the bamboo unexpectedly flowered and then died, a phenomenon now known to recur every fifty years or so. Dead bamboo was useless for pulping; it fell apart as it was floated down the river. Because of ignorance and bad planning, a new, multimillion-dollar industrial plant was suddenly without the raw material it needed to function.

But what impressed Hirschman was the response to the crisis. The mill's operators quickly found ways to bring in bamboo from villages throughout East Pakistan, building a new supply chain using the country's many waterways. They started a research program to find faster-growing species of bamboo to replace the dead forests, and planted an experimental tract. They found other kinds of lumber that worked just as well. The result was that the plant was blessed with a far more diversified base of raw materials than had ever been imagined. If bad planning hadn't led to the crisis at the Karnaphuli plant, the mill's operators would never have been forced to be creative. And the plant would not have been nearly as valuable as it became.

"We may be dealing here with a general principle of action," Hirschman wrote, "Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be."

Gladwell's piece is based on Jeremy Adelman's recent biography of Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher.

Tags: Albert Hirschman   books   economics   Jeremy Adelman   Malcolm Gladwell   Worldly Philosopher

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Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution picks up on a Reddit thread that asks "What's the most intellectual joke you know?" I've always been fond of this one:

Q: What does the "B" in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for?
A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

And this one:

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Phillip Glass

Two of the current favorites in the Reddit thread are:

Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, "I'd like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream." The waitress replies, "I'm sorry, Monsieur, but we're out of cream. How about with no milk?"

And:

It's hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.

Tags: lists

A bottle of fine wine normally improves with age for a while, but then goes bad. Consider, however, a bottle of EverBetter Wine, which continues to get better forever. When should we drink it?

– John L. Pollock, “How Do You Maximize Expectation Value?”, Noûs, September 1983