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Yucks Digest V1 #49
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To: yucks
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Subject: Yucks Digest V1 #49
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From: spaf (Gene "Chief Yuckster" Spafford)
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Date: Wed, 1 May 91 19:14:43 EST
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Reply-To: Yucks-request
Yucks Digest Wed, 1 May 91 Volume 1 : Issue 49
Today's Topics:
Administrivia
Re: words just fail me
Artist Creates Extraterrestrial Landscapes Out of Junk
Commercial secrets revealed
DarthStar Release 1.0
Dealer Support by the Manufacturer?
Description of a LOOOONNNGG plane flight
Mother Goose
The 24 Coins Puzzle... revisited
Unix & C Hoax (from Apr 1)
The "Yucks" digest is a moderated list of the bizarre, the unusual, the
possibly insane, and the (usually) humorous. It is issued on a
semi-regular basis, as the whim and time present themselves.
Back issues may be ftp'd from arthur.cs.purdue.edu from
the ~ftp/pub/spaf/yucks directory. Material in archives
Mail.1--Mail.4 is not in digest format.
Submissions and subscription requests should be sent to spaf@cs.purdue.edu
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[This is a freshly updated intro to the digest. I'll send this out to
people as they get added to the subscription list. It's probably
worth looking through if you're a list long-time subscriber. --spaf]
Date: Today
From: Gene Spafford <spaf>
Subject: Administrivia -- Welcome to Yucks.
Congratulations -- you are now a Yuckling. That means you have been
added to my "Yucks" digest mailing list, at your request or the
request of some other zany.
The "Yucks" digest is a moderated list of the bizarre, the unusual, the
possibly insane, and the (usually) humorous. It is issued on a
semi-regular basis, as the whim and time present themselves to me.
Yucks is directly mailed to over 400 people around the world; it is
undoubtedly remailed to many more hundreds or thousands of vicarious
yucksters. What effects this may have on global warming, world peace,
or the price of fish in Sri Lanka, I do not know. Undoubtedly, the
entropy of all the Universe is a little bit greater as a result of
Yucks, and that's probably as it should be.
Please contribute to the digest as you see fit. If you run across
something odd or bizarre, mail it on to me. I will post it if it
strikes me that way too. Note that the material in Yucks is not
always funny (some people think it seldom is, but hey, they probably
take life seriously too), and sometimes it meanders into the realms of
the mildly obscene or really twisted. I hope you find that Yuck-able.
I don't publish everything people send to me, and you should be glad
of that, although you may never know why...some people send things
that are too strange even for me.
I always try to credit the original author(s) of anything published in
Yucks. If you send me material, please try to point out the original
sources. If you reuse material from Yucks and publish it to your own
mailing lists, I would ask you do the same -- respect the effort put
into at least the typing and creativity expended to create the
article. You don't need to credit Yucks as the source: you can appear
to be incredibly witty and perverse. Or credit it if you wish. Just
remember to credit the original authors.
The list continues to grow. If there are people you regularly forward
"yucks" postings to, let me know and I'll be happy to add them to the
list. That way, they can get fresh, unadulterated yucks, just like in
the old days when they lived on the farm.
An archive of old postings is available for ftp on
arthur.cs.purdue.edu in the ~ftp/pub/spaf/yucks directory. Some of
the older files (Mail.1 to Mail.4) got damaged unexpectedly by a shell
script I used to pack them together -- sorry. Someday, I may try to
repair them from backups. Then again, they are more bizarre the way
they are. As part of my logout script, the current archive gets
updated with the most recent postings, so that "current" archive is
always really current.
If your e-mail address changes, please let me know -- I hate finding
bounced messages in my mailbox. Some of them don't even bounce --
they sort of dent and stick :-) If I try to send Yucks to you and I get
2 consecutive bounces a few days apart, I'll probably remove your name
from the mailing list. Digests are numbered, so if you stop getting
them, or see a missing issue number, check out the ftp archives for
what you missed.
If you have something to contribute to the list, send it to
"yucks-request@cs.purdue.edu", not to "yucks", please. Send all
requests, fan mail, and old fish to the same address.
That's it!
Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-1398
Internet: spaf@cs.purdue.edu phone: (317) 494-7825
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From: ai.wpratt@MCC.COM (Wanda Pratt)
Newsgroups: utcs.general
Subject: Re: words just fail me
Date: 1 May 91 01:57:00 GMT
I feel like I have to respond to this message to prevent the CYC project
>From being viewed as an arrogant project that thinks it has "all the
answers". This isn't my attitude, and I don't think that it is the
attitude of my co-workers or the project in general. The general (and
admitedly ambitious) goals of the CYC project make it an attractive
topic for the non-technical press. Unfortunately, while these
journalists understand our goal of creating a general-purpose knowledge
base and see an opportunity to write a article that will catch many
people's attention, they often do not understand the details and the
limitations of our work. The resulting stories are sometimes quite
distorted, generally portraying CYC as "HAL" or some other
anthropomorphism.
The article in the Austin American-Statesman and many of the similarly
sensationalized articles about CYC do not accurately represent the CYC
project. The authors of popular press articles usually WILL NOT allow
their articles to be previewed for accuracy. If they did, it would
make their stories much better, but less sensational. Remember this
the next time you read a non-technical report on a scientific project -
it might be about yours.
Wanda Pratt (a cs grad student and member of the CYC project)
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 1 May 91 00:58:54 PDT
From: one of our correspondants
Subject: Artist Creates Extraterrestrial Landscapes Out of Junk
To: yucks-request
By ELLIOT SPAGAT
Associated Press Writer
CHICAGO (AP) - Artist Vincent Jo-Nes creates extraterrestrial
landscapes out of down-to-earth junk.
The engineer turned to commercial art about six years ago and
translated his passion for recycling garbage into a junk-art museum
exhibit.
Jo-Nes sticks mainly to extraterrestrial landscapes, using curling
irons, disrd [sic], it looks like the main part of a spaceship,''' he
said Monday.
The sculpture sells at Boy Scout conventions and science fiction
fairs, Jo-Nes said. His clients include astronauts, science fiction
writers and ``Star Trek'' television and film producer Gene
Roddenberry.
Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry put some of the art on
display as an example of a creative use for garbage.
Jo-Nes said he started working with junk when an old girlfriend
kept asking for a vacation to an Italian villa. Low on cash, he
ventured into a trash container and modeled a villa from a shoebox.
In one of his model-size extraterrestrial cities, humans land on
a faraway planet to collect garbage left behind by a perished
civilization. The humans' starship is made of an old rack for
displaying sunglasses.
The model has 36 buttons. When pressed, a light will blink or a
robot will turn.
Early in 1912, Picasso began including newspaper clippings and
bits of debris in his paintings. Ever since, everyday objects have
found their way into paintings and sculptures, said Bruce Guenter,
chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
But major museums and art schools have shied away from
junk-molded art, he said.
``A lot of it is schmaltz, the kind of things you'd find in a
stationery store, not an art museum,'' Guenter said.
Many artists are lured to working with junk by the low cost of
raw materials, said Carl Hammer, owner of a Chicago art gallery
that sells such art.
``I love his stuff,'' said Chicago attorney Frank Speh, who owns
several sculptures created by Jo-Nes. ``You just look at it and
say, `Wow! Gee Whiz!'''
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 91 18:22:43 PDT
From: one of our correspondants
Subject: Commercial secrets revealed
To: yucks-request
By Michael Grant Copley News Service
There is more to the Taster's Choice coffee commercial the one with a
plot starting to unfold than meets the eye.
I wrote about the commercial the other day, wondering if its
allusion to instant coffee as a favorite of sophisticates didn't
place unreasonable strain on the First Amendment.
No sooner was the ink dry than I had messages from readers who
had seen the commercial too and had caught in it a "grammatical
error."
This was in the second commercial.
In the first commercial, the sophisticated neighbor lady comes
to borrow coffee from the hip, flip, clean-cut young bachelor who may
once have been a Mouseketeer. Between them, a sophisticated spark
flitters.
In the second commercial, the sophisticated neighbor returns his
Taster's Choice, perhaps with more than good-neighborship on her
mind. But he has a "guest," a brunette, and so the neighbor departs
you get the sense for now.
The brunette is drinking coffee, and the bachelor asks, "How's
the coffee?"
I heard the brunette to say, "Perfect. Where do you get it?"
In fact, said the readers who called, she says: "Perfect. Where
do you get it from?"
One reader wondered about the state of a nation's educational
system when commercials permit so-called sophisticates to end
sentences with prepositions.
Another reader thought the error might be part of the plot,
making out the brunette to be an unschooled dolt, providing the
bachelor ample grounds to throw her over for the neighbor lady.
A couple of readers claimed this series of commercials was
created in England, that the players are all English, and that the
plot unfolds over a period of three years.
Their Englishness lets this nation's educational system off the
hook. It also made me think.
Correct or not, there is a rhythm in ending a sentence with
"from" that I can identify with the English. I can see Robert Morley
very clearly, for example, saying, "Where do you get it from?" If
that is the case, it undermines the argument for the error as a plot
device.
I was wondering about that, and about the more fundamental
question why yuppies would drink instant coffee in the first place
when I remembered a story I clipped from the paper last week. In it,
demographers said the era of the yuppies was over. For yuppie-aimed
retailers expensive electronic toys, fancy mustards, pasta makers,
espresso machines it was devastating news.
Yuppies simply had discovered that they couldn't buy happiness.
Today, they are into downscaling.
As one yuppie tracker said: "Cheap is chic."
That being so, it means the Taster's Choice commercial is on the
cutting edge of trend. Of course downscaling yuppies would serve
instant coffee at dinner parties.
Gone are the days of the Peruvian espresso, brewed from beans
that grew only in a two-acre grove near the summit of an Andean peak
said once to be the trysting place of Mayan fertility gods.
Gone are the mustards held in Alsatian cellars for exactly seven
years, two months and 11 days.
Taster's Choice, at this moment, is simply, brilliantly, in the
lead.
Soon, though, I hope to see the bachelor show up at his
neighbor's door, saying, "I'm having a few guests in for dinner, and
I haven't made salad. I wonder if I could borrow your Ronco
Veg-O-Matic."
"Of course," she says. "Listen, I was planning to browse at
K-Mart tomorrow, and I wondered if ..."
"Perhaps," he says.
He keeps the date, and en route, at a stoplight, another Ford
Escort pulls up next to theirs.
The window goes down, and the occupant asks, "Pardon me, but
would you have any Oscar Mayer wieners?"
Michael Grant is a columnist with The San Diego Union.
------------------------------
Date: 28 Apr 91 10:30:03 GMT
From: scannell@bubba.ma30.bull.com (P Scannell)
Subject: DarthStar Release 1.0
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
"Darth Star Release 1.00"
Long long ago (so long ago that even Paul Bunyan couldn't
find a laptop worth having) in a galaxy far far away (so far
that when Carl Sagan talks about "billions and billions of
stars" he's still overlooking it) a half-vast star cruiser
passed through with sound effects so loud you could hear
them through the vacuum of space. (This is because it was
so long, long ago. Nowadays they can fix that at any
muffler shop. But don't let them work on your star cruiser
without a written estimate.) Close behind was the really
vast Imperial star battleship, making so much noise you
could hear it in other dimensions, carrying the not
particularly vast but still extremely unpleasant Darth
Coder. The smaller vessel contained the lovely and
sarcastic Princess Uza, who as Darth Coder closed in on her
ship left a message with two Voice Mail droids, who escaped
in a life boat. (I realize that the CCITT standards for
ship abandonment specify, "Women and children first!" but
this is long, far, etc.)
Okay, so the droids foolishly landed on Microoine (which
looks classier than Microweenie but is pronounced about the
same) and were resold to a local farmer. The droids were
put in the care of the farmer's son, Lint Seehacker, who
immediately proceeded to make unauthorized repairs which
voided the warranty. (They might have been placed in the
care of the farmer's daughter, but that's a different joke.)
In the process of doing this, he managed to play back part
of the message recorded by the princess. It was directed to
one Obi-Wan Methodology. The rest of the message was
garbled or encrypted or something.
Wondering whether this could be some relation to Bob
Methodology who lived nearby, he drove out to check. There
Obi-Wan (obviously it had to be the same person for this
plot to work) played back the rest of the message, in which
Princess Uza described the Rebellion's dire need for huge
amounts of new software. "We really want that quality
kind," she said, "but unless you help us soon we're going to
have to take that bug-ridden stuff that Darth Coder keeps
pushing."
Obi-Wan explained to Lint that by another amazing
coincidence Lint was the son of one of the old Zedi (for
Zero Difects, which is how they spelled it in those days --
just try and prove otherwise) Knights, and gave him a blue
pencil, the very thing which the Zedi Masters used to
correct defects in their code before they began debugging
it.
"How could they do that?" asked Lint. There is nothing on
earth quite so useful as a good straight man.
"They followed the Methodology. And they used the Force."
"The Force?"
"Yes. They Forced themselves to proofread their programs
carefully before they started testing them. Naturally, this
is a dying art, because it's hard work."
"And what about this Darth Coder?"
"He was seduced by the dark side of the Methodology. He
wanted the advantages of saying that he was following the
methodology, without the bother of having to do anything
productive. He writes many specifications and conducts many
reviews, but his code is as bad as ever. But when you are
eight foot seven and have a deep voice, you can get away
with murder."
"So he plans to turn us into mindless slaves, all following
his methodology?"
"Yes. It's bad enough being mindless freemen, without being
turned into mindless slaves."
They returned to Lint's home to get his coat and galoshes
(which you should never embark on interstellar travel
without) but found it had been destroyed by Imperial Storm
Hackers, and Lint's parents killed. Also they had made
illegal duplicates of his legal copy of Lotus 1-2-3.
"Don't be too upset, kid," said Obi-Wan. Those weren't your
real parents. You were adopted."
"I was?"
"Yes. Didn't it ever strike you as odd that your parents
were named Pascal and Lovelace, but your last name was
Seehacker?"
"Well, yeah. But they said it was for tax reasons."
"Besides, this is necessary to the plot. Those two would
never have allowed us to go off into the unknown and spend
actual money on tools to improve the quality of software in
the universe. The problem now is to get into the city and
hire a ship. But there will be Imperial Storm Hackers
looking for us, so we'll have to be a little bit clever.
But only a little bit."
"What will we do?"
"We'll go in posing as developers, delivering a new
release."
"How can we do that? Won't they look at what we're bringing
in?"
"There are ways to prevent them from looking too hard.
Painful as it is to me, I must go prepare some source code
for them."
Later, just before shift change, they approached the city.
When challenged, Obi-Wan hands the guard a diskette. "We're
delivering this new source code. Of course you'll want to
audit it first before you let us in."
"Er, yes," replied the guard uncertainly.
"Let me just point out a few of the trickier features for
you. You'll need to be very careful in auditing it, because
there are fifty-seven state variables to keep track of, and
there's a very tricky section just here where there's some
self-modifying code. Well, not exactly self modifying. The
assembly language part modifies the COBOL part, and the
COBOL part uses the ALTER verb to modify the assembly
language part. But neither part actually modifies itself,
to be brutally technical about it."
The guard's eyes were beginning to glaze over a little bit,
and he was clearly thinking about the end of shift and Jabba
time. (Jabbaweiser and Jabba Light being the only beers
available in that part of the galaxy, unless one liked Alec
Guinness Stout.) He placed the diskette in the drive and
perused the source code for all of thirty-seven seconds.
"I'm sure it's all right. Go on in."
And so it was that they met Blaze Pascalo and his copilot
Mrspocca (a Trekkee) and escaped the planet a sidestep ahead
of the minions and grunions of Darth Coder.
Meanwhile, a million billion jillion miles away, Darth Coder
had captured the princess and was being very mean to her.
"Tell me where the Rebel base is or we will destroy your
planet."
"You can't do that," said Uza. "It's illegal."
"Not at all," replied Coder. "They signed an agreement to
be a beta site for Darth Star Release 1.0, which happens to
be a software package for destroying planets. Some people
will sign up for anything as long as it's free."
"We thought it was a new word processor or something, like
Wordstar."
"Fools. You should have read the spec."
"You didn't write one."
"Silly me. Now, where is the Rebel base?"
"All right, I'll tell. It's on Platalinguiniie."
"Good. Proceed with the test."
"What?!?!?!?"
"Come, now --"
"Now?"
"That was just an interjection, you fool! You can't expect
us to ship software without testing it. If your planet
didn't want to accept the risks of being a beta site, they
shouldn't have signed up for it."
"Well, you better have one HELL of a customer support
organization, that's all I can say."
"Is the software ready?"
"Yes, Your Nastiness. Just press the Execute key."
Coder pressed the Execute key. Nothing happened. "Oh, Ewok
doody. Fire up the debugger."
"Yes, Your Sliminess."
CAN DARTHCODER GET THE DARTH STAR WORKING IN ONLY A FEW
TWENTY-HOUR DEBUGGING SESSIONS?
CAN LINT, OBI-WAN AND COMPANY SAVE THE PRINCESS?
CAN I FINISH THIS TRILOGY BEFORE THE ACTORS GET TOO OLD?
PART II or VII: "The Software Strikes Back"
A NOTE ABOUT LAST EPISODE: Our Human Factors department has
asked me to point out that not only did nothing happen when
Darth Coder hit the Execute key, but no message appeared to
inform him that an error had occurred. Also, according to
good user interface design practice, the preferred method
for obliterating a planet is the Delete key, and the user
should be required to confirm the delete operation before it
is performed unless Undo is available. These changes will
be made in Release 2.0, assuming Darth ever gets 1.0
working.
On the planet Propellerbeeniie the incredible Darth Star
loomed over the landscape like a giant spaceship. (How's
that for creativity?) Also that peculiar rumbling sound
which magically travels even through vacuum was driving
everyone crazy. But worst of all was the threat of total
annihilation which threatened them threateningly, or
threatened to if Darth Coder ever got the thing operational.
But on the planet, as somebody was saying (maybe it was me,
but you can't prove it) the members of the High Council were
feeling rather low, and were discussing the situation.
Firing most of their MIS staff had not made them feel any
better about the grim news Princess Uza had brought them.
"Perhaps we could write a problem report," suggested one.
"How can we write a problem report before the thing fails?
They'll want a dump, debris samples, and all that stuff."
"Besides, even if we sent a problem report they'd probably
reclassify it as a Technical Improvement."
They all looked glum. The situation was hopeless. At
least, they decided, they would invite the saleman who
talked them into the deal to come watch the demo with them.
Meanwhile, Obi-Wan was holding a meeting of his own at the
Rebel Base, which was really on Finitestatemachiniie. The
Rebel Engineering staff had done a careful audit of listings
of the Darth Star program recovered from the Imperial
Garbage Dump and (surprise! surprise!) found a bug. They
were discussing it with Obi-Wan, while Lint tried to follow
the flow of conversation. Blaze Pascalo stood in the
corner, looking tough and macho but at the same time
strangely vulnerable. It's just a thing he does.
Suddenly Obi-Wan cried out, as if in pain. "What is it?"
asked Lint.
"I felt a grave disturbance in the Methodology, as if
someone were (gasp gasp) applying a hexadecimal patch
directly to an executable."
Then the meeting resumed. It appeared that no code had been
provided to check the target coordinates for validity. In
particular, if the proposed target were behind the Darth
Star the software would fire the destructive beam directly
through the very expensive peripheral device. Coder, of
course, would blame it on the hardware, which was how he had
kept his job up till now.
So all that remained was to move the planet just
before the demo, which of course is no big deal if you have
the right software tools. Lint inquired whether Coder might
not notice that the planet had moved, and turn the Darth
Star. But as Pascalo pointed out, "Darth Coder and his gang
are too busy debugging to notice anything that's going on in
the Real World." (Though what that has to do with this
story is not clear.)
So they moved the planet, Darth really didn't
notice it, the Darth Star blew up, Darth left the Empire to
become a consultant and Obi-Wan got a bigger budget.
Lint and Princess Uza got married. (I had been
thinking of having them turn out to be sister and brother,
but that would have been silly.) Obi-Wan gave the bride
away, but to the wrong person.
And so everyone lived happily ever after, and it was all due
to the Methodology.
Part XIII or LXVI: "Return of the Zedi"
Obi-Wan returned to Microoine. The End.
------------------------------
Date: 29 Apr 91 23:30:04 GMT
From: okunewck@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Phil OKunewick)
Subject: Dealer Support by the Manufacturer?
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
I found this in an old Adm3a kit manual.
"NOTE: Lear Siegler _does_not_ service ADM-3A kits. If service or
technical assistance is needed, your Dumb Terminal Dealer should be
contacted."
(Yeah, a few terminal dealers I dealt with back then weren't real bright.)
------------------------------
Date: 30 Apr 91 10:30:03 GMT
From: EDB393GBP3@vx24.cc.monash.edu.au
Subject: Description of a LOOOONNNGG plane flight
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
Summary of A Twenty-Four Hour Flight
Hour 1: Board plane. Think 'Christ, this seat's as comfy as a
Porcupine Skin condom.' Put on Walkman to try and cover up
noise of screaming little buggers behind you. Carefully
investigate contents of seat pouch. In fifteen seconds, you
have used all entertainment possibilities it offers to you.
Hour 2: Scratch arse for eighteenth time. Consider talking
to bloke next to you. Decide to leave it while he finishes
his 'Hot Nuns With Fresh Fruit' magazine. Try to ask hostess
for a drink, but can't attract their attention: they're all
on their way to the back for a quick knee-trembler with a fat
German businessman or going forward to help the Captain
grease his joystick.
Hour 3: You realise why flying out of Australia really sucks.
In the time you've been airborne, you could have crossed
Europe, or the US. But here, you've just passed over ONE
BLOODY SHEEP STATION ! Why don't they rebuild or move all the
good bits of Australia to Manchester, for example. I'll tell
you why. We're safer from terrorists, because none of them
can be stuffed taking this incredibly long plane trip to kill
us!!
Hour 4: First set of XTRA LONG LIFE batteries die. Replace
them. Keep trying to sleep. Have you ever tried to stretch
your legs and needed just one more inch of room to do it ?
It's living hell ! And you can't get out because like an
idiot, you asked for a window seat, and the two geriatrics
next to you appear to be dead for all the movement they're
showing.
Hours 5 - 7: You might have slept: you're not sure. It is
clear that are exactly 247 stitches around the headrest in
front, and about the same number of protruding metal things
on this chair/jabbing your legs. You have, however, perfected
the art of sleeping with your eyes open.
Hour 8: Land in Bangkok for 45 minute duty free binge and
getting sniffed by drug dogs. Lets hope they know the
difference between smelly socks and heroin.
Hour 9: Back onto the plane. The hippies that left you at
Bangkok, in search of enlightenment etc... have been replace
with upper middle class European gents with strangely
satisfied looks on their faces. You are served a plate of
something that may or may not once have been food. For the
tenth time, you read that second paragraph on page 8 of
Lord of The Rings because you can't concentrate long enough
to hold the plot together in your head.
Hour 10: Due to lack of circulation, you've gone numb from
the bum down. The apparently deceased geriatrics have moved
(Praise De Lawd ! It's a miracle !) but only to go stink up
the lavvies with the smell of Geritol, incontinence
underwear, and ice cream stains from fourteen loving but
clumsy grandchildren. You seize the opportunity to drag your
bloodless bum up and down the aisle to try and force some
feeling back into it. As you casually drag your feet, you look
around and curse the bitch at the ticket counter who wouldn't
give you a ticket next to that bunch of Swedish nympho
cheerleaders in the back.
Hour 11: You spend most of this hour treading carefully back
from the front of the plane to the back. What you're trying
to avoid, (besides little kids) is building up static
electricity and shocking yourself every five steps. When one
of the little buggers jumps off an armrest, lands on your
corns, and buries his plastic football helmet straight into
the family jewels, you seriously consider testing the
strength of the suction on the toilets to see how long the
little mongrel can hold on to the yellow-splashed seat. Or
if the toilets are busy, maybe rubbing both feet vigorously
on the static-inducing carpet and zapping the little
bastards' eyes with 800 volts of carpet power.
Hours 12-24 Repeat the above, only WORSE !
================
More of this alleged humor is available in the epic space saga....
Rocket Roger ! Now showing on rec.humor, but why not just subscribe !
Drop me a line at edb393gbp3@vx24.cc.monash.edu.au and tell me why my user ID
is so annoying !
================
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 1 May 91 12:30:41 PDT
From: one of our correspondants
Subject: Mother Goose
To: yucks-request
Fewer Kids Know Mother Goose
GLENSIDE, Pa. (AP)
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, but then
what did Jack do? Many youngsters didn't know, said a researcher who
is worried that the nation may be forgetting Mother Goose.
"We've made Walt Disney our storyteller," Bette Goldstone, an
education professor at Beaver College, said before she marked Mother
Goose Day on Wednesday, as proclaimed by the Mother Goose Society of
Melrose Park.
"We're not losing the fairy tales. They've all been converted to
cartoons and motion pictures," she said. "But we are losing the
Mother Goose."
Mother Goose has a lot of educational value for youngsters and
some teachers are taking advantage of it, Goldstone said.
"You're speaking in their language pattern. That's how propaganda
works," she said. "Kids like to play with language. This is more
relevant for them than Care Bears or Rambo."
Goldstone surveyed 150 preschoolers in suburban Philadelphia
during the past two years to determine their knowledge of six basic
Mother Goose rhymes. Thirty percent couldn't say where they learned
about Mother Goose or said they hadn't heard of it.
More than one-third of the children surveyed didn't know "Jack Be
Nimble," "Hey Diddle Diddle" or "Little Miss Muffet," the survey
said. More than one-quarter didn't know "Pat-A-Cake."
Nearly a third of the youngsters didn't know all of "Jack and
Jill."
The rhymes mirror children's language patterns, Goldstone said.
"Hey Diddle Diddle" is a prime example, as is the alliteration of
"Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater," she said.
Many teachers use Mother Goose to teach reading skills, showing
pupils on paper the poems many have memorized from their even-younger
days. Other teachers use the lessons to teach proper behavior.
"But there's more than that. There are counting rhymes ("One Two,
Buckle My Shoe), alphabet rhymes ("A is for apple, B bit it, C cut
it...), months of the year ("30 Days Hath September)," Goldstone said.
"If the kids had this, there would be fewer gaps in their
knowledge," she said.
The violence and alleged sexism of Mother Goose has generated
criticism.
An English critic wrote in 1641 that the poems were inappropriate
for children, and in 1952 researchers compiled a list of 40 topics
they considered taboo.
The unsigned list, which Goldstone has shared with her children's
literature class at the college, said the body of Mother Goose work
includes eight allusions to murder; two to chokings; deaths by
squeezing, starvation, boiling and hanging; one body snatching; eight
whippings; 14 thefts and one case of lunacy.
"I don't know if the children understand the violence deeply,""
said Sherry Goodman, a preschool teacher in Montgomery County.
Other critics allege promiscuity, as in "Georgy Porgy," who kissed
the girls and made them cry, and the abuse of the wife of "Peter
Peter Pumpkin Eater," who kept his wife in a pumpkin shell.
------------------------------
Date: 30 Apr 91 23:30:05 GMT
From: warwick@cs.uq.oz.au
Subject: The 24 Coins Puzzle... revisited
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
In rec.puzzles:
>Problem from a puzzles book:
>Your eccentric Uncle Jake is a rare coin collector. He has twenty-four
>coins that appear identical, except only one is solid gold; the others
>are made of a heavier alloy. He sits you in front of a balance and says you
>can have the gold coin if you can find it. You can use the scale only three
>times. How can can you find the lightest coin?
Since the GOLD coin is the LIGHTEST, all the other coins are made of highly
toxic, radio-active heavy metals. To find the gold coin:
1. Jake should: divide the coins into two piles of 12 coins.
The pile with all alloy coins will be at critical mass,
and will enter a chain reaction, annihilating itself.
2. Take the remaining pile, and divide it into two piles of 6 coins.
Place the piles on opposite sides of the scales. The scales have
thus been used for the FIRST time.
The heavier pile will be hottest, and will melt through
the scale pan beneath it.
3. Take the pile of 6 coins in the remaining scale pan, and divide
into two groups of 3 coins. Uncle Jake should keep one pile himself,
and give one to you. Instruct Uncle Jake to place one coin in each
hand, while placing one under his tongue. Wait for a response.
At this point, either:
a) Jake is dead, with the gold coin in his left hand.
b) Jake is dead, with the gold coin in his right hand.
c) Jake is dead, and you have the gold coin.
d) Jake is alive, with the coin in his mouth.
Procede accordingly:
4. a) b) c) To accertain which is the case, place the discarded
pile of 6 coins (hopefully, you have been quick, and the pile
will only have melted through the table and not the floor), and
melt a hole in the intact scale pan with them. Now the scale
pans have the same mass. Place the coin from Jake's left hand
in the left scale pan, and the coin from his left hand in the
right scale pan.
If the balance is level, then YOU have the coin.
If the balance is heavier on one side, take the coin
from the other side - that is the gold coin, go to
step 5.
So YOU have the gold coin. Put one coin in each of Jake's hands.
Now repeat step 4, disregarding the need to remelt the scale pans,
and proceding to step 5 regardless.
It can be proven that this step itterates at most twice, so this
step may use the scales for the SECOND and THIRD times.
4. d) Beat Jake over the head with the scales, which are, after all
particularly strong - enough to support these extra-heavy coins.
This uses the scales for the SECOND time.
Take the gold coin from Jake's mouth.
5. Get all of the coins and pile them on Jake's body. The evidence
of Jake's existence should disappear within a few minutes. The
coins will take somewhat longer. See World Book, "half-life".
As Jake said, "You can have the gold coin if you can find it."
You found it.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 1 May 91 16:50:09 EDT
From: meo%sware.com@mathcs.emory.edu (Miles O'Neal)
Subject: Unix & C Hoax (from Apr 1)
To: spaf (Gene Spafford)
This is from someone at Apple...
I thought that you might get a kick out of this if you had not as yet come
across it. The scary thing about it is that it could of course be true....
buckster....
Sub: UNIX and C Hoax!
COMPUTERWORLD 1 April
CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
In an announcment that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis
Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C
programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept
alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development
Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T
Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of
Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were
impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished
reading 'Bored of the Rings', a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great
Tolkien 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of
the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the
operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be
as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration
levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque
allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal,
called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to creat real programs
with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL
and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such
a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this
to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years.
Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying
to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to
generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological
parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the
general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been
working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and
feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that
have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland
International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular
Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a
number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt
further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter
and had to postpone a hastely convened news conference concerning the fate of
the RS-6000, merely stating 'VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic
statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal,
Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was
correct.
In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that a
similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the MS-DOS
and Windows operating environments. And IBM spokesman have begun denying that
the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone awry.
------------------------------
End of Yucks Digest
------------------------------