Get your NCAA brackets ready… let’s see what will happen… (ok, pointless confession: I didn’t pick UPenn, but I am rooting for them. Really. Can you imagine what kind of upset it’d be if the Ivy League at least get to the second round?).
Associated Press has an article on how the legal academia is appreciating the Anna Nicole Smith saga – about which we of the legal world already know. Personally, I think the mainstream media should put a hiatus on the whole Smith thing and let the lawyers figure this out. It’s all up to them to haggle and feast on, not for the rest of the world to really care – unless the rest of the world really does have something invested in how Anna Nicole Smith’s property is going to be divvied up, if at all.
The science behind humor:
When Robert R. Provine tried applying his training in neuroscience to laughter 20 years ago, he naïvely began by dragging people into his laboratory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to watch episodes of “Saturday Night Live” and a George Carlin routine. They didn’t laugh much. It was what a stand-up comic would call a bad room.
So he went out into natural habitats — city sidewalks, suburban malls — and carefully observed thousands of “laugh episodes.” He found that 80 percent to 90 percent of them came after straight lines like “I know” or “I’ll see you guys later.” The witticisms that induced laughter rarely rose above the level of “You smell like you had a good workout.”
“Most prelaugh dialogue,” Professor Provine concluded in “Laughter,” his 2000 book, “is like that of an interminable television situation comedy scripted by an extremely ungifted writer.” [….]
“Laughter is an honest social signal because it’s hard to fake,” Professor Provine says. “We’re dealing with something powerful, ancient and crude. It’s a kind of behavioral fossil showing the roots that all human beings, maybe all mammals, have in common.”
The human ha-ha evolved from the rhythmic sound — pant-pant — made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Washington State University, discovered that rats emit an ultrasonic chirp (inaudible to humans without special equipment) when they’re tickled, and they like the sensation so much they keep coming back for more tickling.
He and Professor Provine figure that the first primate joke — that is, the first action to produce a laugh without physical contact — was the feigned tickle, the same kind of coo-chi-coo move parents make when they thrust their wiggling fingers at a baby. Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting.
“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Professor Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.” [….]
Oh-kay – lots of Big Words to figure out Why We Laugh. Could it be that it’s just good for us? Well, ok, maybe I’m being too simplistic, but it’s good to know that there may be an evolutionary explanation for humor.
A profile on an Asian-Australian mathematician (umm, Asian-Australian mathematician who lives in America?) – well, at least the accompanying math problems were interesting. Actually, no – what I thought was interesting was the paragraph where Prof. Tao admits that although he was a math prodigy, he was still not a big writer – pretty much the same grade level as others his age on that particular area. I guess you can’t be a genius at everything? Ah, well.