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| Martin Perscheid "Ceres Science" on Facebook 15 August 2024; see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Perscheid |
Arthur Koestler explained humor as an intersection or juxtaposition of two different meanings which then creates a new meaning of its own. Humor is necessarily a surprise, which is why jokes are seldom funny twice.
Recently, I found the works of Ashleigh Brilliant by way of a comment from a friend online. (See NecessaryFacts for July 12, 2025.) I first listened to a Tom Lehrer record in 1966. Ashleigh Brilliant is still alive and guards his intellectual property. Tom Lehrer passed on 26 July 2025 and sometime before the end, he put all of his works into the public domain. From him, I took the titles of two posts here: “Fight Fiercely Harvard” and “Albeit they possess the might … Nonetheless we have the will.”
Probably 15 years ago, I heard an interview with Lehrer on NPR’s “All Things Considered” in which he retracted the fun in “The Old Dope Pedlar.” After crack-cocaine and then the arrival of fentanyl, the humor seemed gross. His songs that are centered on science and mathematics hold up well enough.
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| Tom Lehrer (retouched) Wikimedia https://tomlehrersongs.com/ |
His arrangement of “The Chemical Elements” to the tune of “Modern Major General” is probably the most enduring. Several independent animations are on YouTube and Daniel Radcliffe performed it ad lib on a talk show.
However, recently, I listened to New Math several times and I was ultimately disappointed. First of all, I don’t know how “new” he considered this, but it was how I in elementary school 1955 to 1961 learned multiplication. One difference is that he always sang “… carry…” whereas we learned to “borrow” from the higher order and “carry” to it. Also, to the point here, his humor about Base 8 was cute as a lesson but irrelevant as social criticism.
When we learned Base 2, Base 5, Base 8, and Base 12 (1962-1964) aside from the poetry of number theory, we were told that we would use this if we ever worked with computers which is exactly what happened. We do not use Base 5, of course, and Base 12 was offered to us then as a gateway to Base 16 which was merely cumbersome once you understood the processes of Base 12. But calculating in binary, octal, and hexadecimal has proved useful (to say the least). And Lehrer did not see this coming, even though his day job was teaching mathematics at MIT and at UC Santa Cruz.
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| Ashleigh Brilliant (Santa Barbara Independent) https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/ |
Diogenes of Sinope was called The Cynic because he lived “like a dog” in an abandoned wine cask. When Plato defined Man as “a featherless biped” Diogenes held up a plucked chicken. Cynicism can deliver that other plane of meaning with which to turn a chuckle into a theorem. So, too, do the aphorisms and cartoons give you something to pause over. Eventually, many are just to be stepped over.
I bought five books by Ashleigh Brilliant from two different sellers on Abe Books, then I bought three from Brilliant’s own website. From him, I bought his first two anthologies—I May Not be Totally Perfect but Parts of Me are Excellent; I Have Abandoned My Search for Truth, and Now Am Looking for a Good Fantasy — and his doctoral dissertation, The Great Car Craze: How Southern California Collided with the Automobile in the 1920s; When Motor Mania Made Social History. I gave the five used books to friends at the University of Texas and kept the others for my own library.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Dealers Make the Show: ArmadillonCon 41 Day 3 Part 2
Big Bang Theory: More Friends than Seinfeld
America Surrenders to North Korea
Discoveries are identifications. Inventions are creations. Fire existed in nature and its discovery by a human required a focus of identification. As animals, human ran from fire because they sensed panic in the animals that were fleeing even before they were first confronted by the challenge of wildfire. Discovering that burned meat (and vegetables) could be eaten probably resulted from dire circumstances and it was likely one cause of human interest in fire. Glacial cold would have been the other likely cause and the conceptual leap in understanding that fire would solve that problem was a heroic identification. Eventually, camp fires brought stories and some stories were funny.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Gilda Radner: It’s Always Something
Some Sociology of Academic Astronomy
The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy
Two Books on Fermat’s Last Theorem
Big Bang Theory: More Friends than Seinfeld
Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer. It is pernicious and aggressive, not curable or even treatable. She spent most of her last 30 months in hospitals, getting or recovering from chemotherapy. There were bright times, a good Christmas, her husband Gene Wilder, a coterie of friends, group support meetings at a Wellness Center for cancer patients, and an experiment with macrobiotic foods that allowed her to feel great for a couple of months. Her narrative is open, honest, frank, and (as much as possible) humorous.
Most interesting to me was the constancy of cancer and its treatments. In our local support group for multiple myeloma, we all tend to speak of neuropathy as if it were new, special to our cases, and identified with Revlamid, Velcade, or Darzalex. And we all complain about the pain and the effects and side-effects of the painkillers that sometimes do not work at all. And it is personal. However, Gilda Radner’s story is 35 years old. She went through all of those symptoms and all of the others. I have a lot more perspective and context now.
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| Although a new, revised 20th anniversary edition was released in 2009, I read the first edition. "...featuring a newly updated resource guide for people living with cancer and a tribute by Radner’s former colleagues at Saturday Night Live." Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 19, 2009) Length: 304 pages ISBN13: 9781439148860 |
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
The Little Black Bag: Medical Care as a Faustian Bargain
You need a sense of humor and of all the puns, one-liners, walking into a bar, and knock-knock jokes that could be invented, the words of the practitioners themselves in all seriousness provide the insights we expect from good nightclub comics.
The American Astronomical Society headquarters are in Washington, D.C., which sets the stage. As Edward Gibbon said in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, sentiments in the West are different from those in the East. The AAS is run like a US Senate subcommittee with lots of rules that evolved in an environment favorable to process and procedure. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific is in San Francisco. Today and tomorrow, I am sitting in at online meetings of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO) which was founded in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Their quarterly print newsletter is titled The Strolling Astronomer. I am also a member of the Astronomical League, which holds its annual conventions in Albuquerque and Phoenix, among other venues.
In line with the academic community generally, the AAS has been very keen on encouraging people to declare their gender identies in their email signatures. You will see "Dale Evans (he/ him)", and "Stanley Livingston (she/ her)" and so on. Today, in an AAS sponsored message board, I met someone like "Altair Brightstar (she/they)." Apparently, she wants to be referred to in the third person feminine singular nominative, but the third person plural nominative for the objective. I take they at them's word.
I already knew an obscure campus joke from the olden tymes when all graduate students were in the same college and same lodgings. A sociologist sat down to dinner with some biologists. After some pleasant engagement, the biologists excused themselves, saying "We have to get back to the lab to start some cultures." That gave the social scientist pause: How does one start a new culture?
It came up at all because among the chatrooms on this AAS discussion board is one dedicated to "Climate." The AAS is as committed to fighting anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as they are to fighting gender discrimination. I am not. To me sex and gender, variable though they can be, are serious business, and objectively knowable (at least in context). AGW is totally different from that.
I am currently employed writing classroom instructions for factory technicians working with optics and lasers. Wanting to demonstrate that all wave phenomena can be described by the same principles, I was on an oceanography website sponsored by the University of Rhode Island: Discovery of Sound in the Sea (here: https://dosits.org). They provide teaching points on the scientific method. Their "Facts and Myths" page is in a self-test format. They offer this: "22. One way to arrive at “scientific truth” is to conduct an opinion poll of scientists." The answer: False. They say:
"An opinion is a personal judgment or belief, not necessarily based upon fact. On the other hand, “scientific truth” is arrived at through the scientific method, which is an orderly and very well-established process for asking questions about the natural world and testing the answers. Hypotheses that have been consistently validated through observations or experimentation can eventually be advanced to the status of theory. A theory is a thoroughly substantiated explanation of some aspect of the observable world. Theories come as close to objective truth as possible."
I found that cogent because I have attended committee meetings of the AAS where "climate deniers" have been derided. Among those denigrated was Apollo astronaut Dr. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt who is scheduled to be a guest speaker at the Astronomical League Conference (ALCON) next year. That is relevant here because it is commonly cited that "90% of scientists" accept AGW. (See fact-checking on that published in Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2016/12/14/fact-checking-the-97-consensus-on-anthropogenic-climate-change/ And read support for AGW consensus from NASA here https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ ) Opinion polls do not establish scientific truth.
So when I saw the session on "Climate" listed under Dynamical Astronomy which usually studies orbits, celestial mechanics, and motion, I asked what the relevance of climate was. I was directed to a webpage from the AAS Subcommitte on Professional Culture and Climate. https://dps.aas.org/leadership/climate It is really about "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion." But as physical scientists, they ignored social science and just took the vernacular meanings of "culture and climate." Close enough... stars, planets, whatever.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History
Reflections on the Sokal Affair
Problems with Pop Sci from Sky & Telescope (Part 2)
Today, I discovered the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, founded 1 March 1947 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I had no idea that they exist, even though we lived in Las Cruces for two years, and I worked with one of the founders, Walter Haas. Today, I joined.
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| https://alpo-astronomy.org |
On 1 December 2020, lining up on Mars, I saw a pair of stars that looked like a binary. I noted the time and their approximate position. Eta Piscium was discovered by S. W. Burnham in 1878.
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| Serendipity |
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| "But Gershon, you can't call it Gershon's equation if everyone has known it for ages." (Sidney Harris, What's So Funny About Science?) |
It turns out that there is a Gershon's equation which "everyone" has known about for 700 years.
One year later [1322], at the request of the bishop of Meaux, he wrote The Harmony of Numbers in which he considers a problem of Philippe de Vitry involving so-called harmonic numbers, which have the form (2^m) * (3^n). The problem was to characterize all pairs of harmonic numbers differing by 1. Gersonides proved that there are only four such pairs: (1,2), (2,3), (3,4) and (8,9). -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gersonides
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| Ground elk, Ground beef, Ground bison, Ground venison https://forceofnaturemeats.com |
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| Flying Warthogs from military.com |
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| Drachmon of 6.24 grams from Klazomenae c. 500 BCE |
