Peace Like A River


It was a wide river, mistakable for a lake or even an ocean unless you'd been wading and knew its current. Somehow I'd crossed it... Now I saw the stream regrouped below, flowing on through what might've been vineyards, pastures, orhards... It flowed between and alongside the rivers of people; from here it was no more than a silver wire winding toward the city. - Leif Enger, Peace Like A River

Friday, December 31, 2004

I just took the kids to McDonalds, so they could climb off some energy. About nap time for Hanna.

Among the things we saw in St. Louis: the impressive Arch, the St. Louis Zoo, and an impressive light display at a Catholic Shrine.

No year-end review would be complete without some math jokes...

****
Q: What's huge, white, swims in the ocean, and has only one side?
A: Moebius Dick.

Q: What's brown, furry, runs to the sea, and is equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?
A: Zorn's lemming.

Q: What's yellow, linear, normed, and complete?
A: A Bananach space.

Q: What does an analytic number theorist say when he's drowning?
A: Log-log, log-log, log-log,...

Q: How many number theorists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: This is not known, but it is conjectured to be a prime number.

Q: How many light bulbs does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One, if it knows its own Goedel number.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the Moebius strip?
A: To get to the same side.

***Excuses for not doing math homework:
---I accidentally divided by zero and my paper burst into flames.
---I could only get arbitrarily close to my textbook, I couldn't reach it.
---I have the proof, but there isn't room to write it in this margin.

***Set-theoretic campfire song:
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
You take one down and pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall...

Joke: Some students came upon their math professor kneeling by his bicycle. Looking closely, they saw that one of the tires was flat. The math professor was pumping air into the *other* tire. "Excuse me, Professor," said one of the students. "You are pumping air into the wrong tire." The professor stopped what he was doing and stood up, looking perplexed. "But... do they not communicate?"
****

and finally, a Lithuanian Yiddish herring joke...

***
"What's green, hangs on a wall, and whistles?"

"I don't know."

"A herring."

"But a herring isn't green."

"So, you paint it green."

"But a herring doesn't hang on a wall."

"So, you hang it on a wall."

"But a herring doesn't whistle."

"So, it doesn't whistle."
***

Happy New Year!

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