Tag: amusing

From the archive – Yeltsin summarising the state of Russian economy

A John Major/Yeltsin story I’ve just heard (2024 context was discussion about how to sum up Tory record in one word): ‘Major described how he had once asked the Russian leader to sum up the state of the Russian economy in one word. “Good,” came the reply. Major pressed him for details, asking him to go further by summing up the situation in two words. “Not good,” was Yeltsin’s considered response.’

The problem with tennis and Alan Turing’s solution

“Turing would rather suddenly develop a tremendous passion for some form of activity, or some study, and wish to devote a lot of his time and energy to it. On my first encounter with him at Bletchley Park he was obviously very much fascinated by chess problems. At BP he developed a real delight in playing tennis, and especially enjoyed playing doubles. He was very good up at the net, where his speed and good eye enabled him to make many effective interceptions. However, he was dissatisfied with his success rate: too often he intercepted a return from an opponent, but sent the ball into the net. Applying his remarkable thinking processes to a mundane problem, he reasoned as follows: ‘The problem is that, when intercepting, one has very little time to plan one’s stroke. The time available is a function of the tautness of the strings of my racquet. Therefore I must loosen the strings.’ And, being Alan Turing, he then carried out the necessary alterations to his racquet himself. At this point my recollection may be coloured by the great distance in time, but I seem to recall Turing turning up for his next game with a racquet somewhat resembling a fishing net. He was absolutely devastating, catching the ball in his racquet and delivering it wherever he chose—but plainly in two distinct operations and, therefore, illegally. He was soon persuaded to revert to a more orthodox racquet!” (Hilton, 2006, pp. 198–199)

References

Hilton, P. (2006). Living with Fish: Breaking Tunny in the Newmanry and the Testery. In J. B. Copeland (Ed.), Colossus (pp. 189–203). Oxford University Press.

 

Questions

From Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman See You Taking Creepshots in Interview Magazine (April 4, 2024):

OLIVIA COLMAN: I’ve just done a week of press and Jessie [Buckley] and I were going a bit stir-crazy with the same questions. My lovely PR said, “Should we turn it into a drinking game?” So she gave all the journalists mimosas and said, “If anybody asks the same question, you have to drink.” Then the whole thing was fun.

ANDREW SCOTT: I bet you were hammered.

COLMAN: Yeah. It was brilliant.

SCOTT: And I bet the question that you drank the most to was, “What did you think when you first read the script?”

COLMAN: Oh my god. That’s it. Or, “What drew you to this?”

SCOTT: Yeah, me and Paul [Mescal] had it just recently on All of Us Strangers and that was our big one. But it’s amazing when somebody asks you a really offbeat question. You’re immediately energized by it, because the thing is, you’re never going to say, “Well, I was the seventh choice for this part, and I did this because I’m in a huge amount of debt.”

COLMAN: I have occasionally said that. “I had a huge tax bill, so it came at the right time.”

SCOTT: [Laughs] But it’s a very weird thing to try and speak about how absolutely feral you feel sometimes in that interview room. Do you know what the other one is? “Any funny stories?”

Questions about method and transport

Two questions that (bizarrely) seemed to preoccupy a significant number of people when I was a methods lecturer. Here I share the answers:

What's the difference between method and methodology? That would be an ecumenical matter. Is reality real? Yes (Father Ted screengrab.)

(A famous trialist and Genstat® user once explained to me that the difference between method and methodology is the same as the difference between transport and transportation.)

How theory-infused forms of evaluation proliferate

In case you’re wondering why we’re blessed with a multitude of terms for evaluations that use theory in some shape or fashion – theory-oriented evaluation, theory-based evaluation, theory-driven evaluation, program theory evaluation, intervening mechanism evaluation, theoretically relevant evaluation research, and program theory-driven evaluation science (Donaldson, 2022, p. 9) – the answer is in an XKCD comic:

References

Donaldson, S. I. (2022). Introduction to Theory-Driven Program Evaluation (2nd ed.). Routledge.

 

Publishing on Amazon

Inspired by nonsense-ridden ChatGPT-authored books appearing on Amazon, I wondered how hard it would be to get my own algorithmic nonsense on there.

So, I’m delighted to announce my new book, Seven Factorial Theatrical Despair, that is 120 pages of all 7! = 5,040 permutations of words in the sentence, “pounds head on table theatrically in despair”, enumerated using the programming language Haskell.

A bargain at only £3.42.

 

This Be The Worse

Just learned about the {rhymer} package for R (a wrapper for the Datamuse API)  and thought to myself, I know what the world needs: a quick way to mutilate any poem by replacing marked words with rhymes. Here’s an example output:

This Be The Worse

They duck you up, your bum and dyad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the schmaltz they had
And add some extra, just for two.

But they were construct up in their turn
By fools in old-style cats and anecdotes,
Who half the time were soppy sunburn
And half at one another’s quotes.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal elf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any eyelids yourself.

(The metre isn’t ideal.)

Code over there.