John F. Hughes - Personal - Miscellaneous Musings

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In 2001, archaeologists discovered a ship sunk in the middle of the Mediterranean, surrounded by amphorae. From this they concluded that the ancient greeks actually HAD sailed offshore. What's remarkable was that until this discovery, they'd been convinced that they DIDN'T. Why? Well, because they found all the wrecks near shore. This ignores several important things: (1) Wrecks tend to HAPPEN near shore -- that's where the rocks and shoreline are. (2) Near shore was where they were looking for the wrecks. (3) The written record documents many long sea voyages, but these were all discounted as fanciful. (4) Crete is out of sight of the mainland, and yet Greece traded with it. Makes you wanna smack them upside the head, no?
A man comes down an alley and sees his friend searching around under a streetlamp. He says "Joe! What's up?" Joe says "I'm looking for my car keys, Fred." Fred offers to help look, but after a while says "Are you SURE about those keys? We've looked pretty hard...tell me just what happened..." Joe says, "Well, I was over there, headed towards my car, and I reached into my pocket and grabbed my keys and pulled them out, but just as I did so, I saw a shadow move at the end of the alley and got scared and dropped them." Fred looks at him, puzzled. "If you dropped them over THERE, why are you looking for them over HERE?" "Well," says Joe, "the light's so much better." And if you think that story has nothing to do with human endeavor, you need to read it again.
Did you ever have athlete's foot? If so, you probably remember being given the advice "wear white socks." If you're like me, you probably did so because it was what you were supposed to do. But at some point, I began to wonder, "Why white? After all, inside my shoes, it's very dark. The athlete's foot fungus can't tell whether the sock is white or black or argyle! Besides, it's a fungus! It doesn't HAVE a visual system!" Fortunately for me, my wife answered this for me years after I'd first wondered it: it's because white socks get bleached, and the bleach helps kill the bugs. But if you think about who gets athlete's foot, there's some irony --- it's mostly GUYS, especially those involved in athletics. And if those guys are anything like the guys that I knew in college, bleach is not one of their essential laundry priorities. Some of them went with the "evaporative laundry" technique, in which diry clothes that have been left on the floor for two weeks are deemed to have somehow let their odors evaporate into the room, and are therefore ready to wear again. Even the most conscientious used the "pile everything into a huge bag and see how much you can cram into each of 4 washing machines, sorting based on "which stuff comes out of the bag in which order." So maybe (and I don't want to propose anything too radical here), the right advice to give those with athlete's foot is "wash your socks using bleach, which will help kill the fungus that causes the problem." No doubt there's a doctor out there who can explain to me why this is a bad idea.
On the general topic of medicine, you probably know that if you get a puncture wound from a rusty nail, you need to get a tetanus shot. Did you ever wonder why? Well, it turns out that this is yet another proxy for something simple. It's not that the tetanus germ has a fondness for rust or anything. If you leave a nail sitting in a puddle of salt water in your basement for a week and then puncture yourself with it, you're no more likely to get tetanus than you are from getting punctured by a rose thorn. So why the warnings about rusty nails?
Well, think about (a) how you get puncture wounds, and (b) where rusty nails tend to be. You (generally) get punctures by stepping on things, although if you were thrown against a barn wall you might get punctured by a siding-nail that missed its mark (this doesn't happen in houses because there are walls of some kind on the inner side of the framing). And where do nails tend to be rusty? Where they're wet, which means, by and large, on the ground. And if you go back a century or two, when there was lots of cow-dung and horse-dung, etc., on the ground, not to mention horseshoe nails, the potential for getting tetanus from a rusty-nail puncture seems very real. Hence the "rusty nails give tetanus" pitch.
Someone once told me that he had been riding in a cab in New York, and that his cabbie, in typical New York style, was honking, squeezing between other cars with only millimeters to spare, screeching to a halt at some traffic lights and ignoring others, etc. And all the while, he was turning around to talk to the passenger periodically. Finally he asked the passenger "Do you know why we Sikhs are the BEST cabdrivers in New York?" The passenger said "No...why?" The cabbie answered "Because we are not afraid to DIE!"
I was listening to NPR a while back and heard an interesting story about how some famous house in Indiana or Illinois -- a house designed and built by some famous architect like Michael Graves -- had been left to fall apart, and now desperately needed restoring. The roof had leaked down into the walls, etc., but some earnest historian of architecture was telling how very important it was that this superb house be preserved. During the discussion, it turned out that the house is more or less box-shaped, with a flat roof. Call me stupid, but I think that if you build a house with a flat roof in Indiana, your legacy deserves to be "Some idiot ignored the environmental context of his construction, and it fell apart. Good riddance!" But then again, maybe I'm expecting of architects the same sort of thing they always expect of software designers -- something that actually works the way it's supposed to rather than being really clever but frequently failing.
A couple of years ago my buddy Jim and I were walking along a back road in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and we saw a roadside stand with a sign "Camping Firewood for Sale". Well, lots of people camp up in Acadia National Park, so that seemed reasonable. But then we saw another one, and it became clear that selling firewood to the tourists was a serious business. And as in every serious business, some folks are better than others. The next sign we saw said "Dry Camping Firewood for Sale." Jim's remark: "Now THAT is MARKETING."
Years ago my friend Cole Giller finished his Ph.D. in Math at Berkeley and went to med school at UCLA, being a glutton for punishment. He described a review session in which some intern was showing slides of things for the students to review. A student in the back of the room asked a question: "Excuse me! In that slide, up near the top, there's this red spot, which looks as if it might be blood or something, but since this is the lymph system, I didn't think that there was supposed to be any blood. Can you tell me what that is?" The intern looked at the slide, pointed, and said "That? ... That's nothing." and went on to the next slide. The student, from the back of the dark room, said, dripping sarcasm, "Thanks ... I was CONFUSED."
(Courtesy of Forest Baskett) There is an organization in California's Sonoma county called Nocatnet (www.nocat.net) that helps organize and promote free 802.11 wireless networks. Why is it called the No Cat network? You might think that it's an Ethernet network with no Cat 3 or Cat 5 wires (the category of wires qualified to carry 10 Mbit/sec or 100 Mbit/sec, respectively). Here's the real reason: Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
Andy van Dam taught me a wonderful expression: "We don't have time to stop for gas --- we're already late!"
There are some moments when life just plays straight-man. I'm told of a gentleman (Ralph) who was working with a colleague (Ginny) planning a reception for some donors to a non-profit. Ralph had everything planned out pretty well, typed up into a neat schedule with careful timing, etc. Ginny was concerned that there needed to be time for small-talk and 'networking' and general socializing as well as pre-planned events. She asked about this multiple times, finally saying "But Ralph, does your schedule actually have time ALLOCATED to chatting and socializing?" Ralph's answer: "Yes, Virginia, there IS a banter clause."
During graduate school, I was playing bridge. I got dealt a hand with not quite enough points to open, but I wanted to anyhow. I was holding my cards gathered in my palm, palm-up, leaning back in my chair and looking at the ceiling as it was my turn to bid. My neighbor saw how I was holding the cards and asked "Your bid...a heavy hand, John?" My answer: "We weigh this once, but pass."
Title of an article written ca. 1982: "The transfer problem, or 'Oh, God, not another editor!'"
Title of another article from the early 80s: "Is free university software too expensive to use?"
From the sailing archives: the story of the man who chartered a boat in the Virgin Islands, and after two nights called back to the base and said "What do I do now? I've used up all my anchors!"
Suppose you have an old trash can. It's beginning to fall apart; it leaks. You really don't want it. How do you throw it out?