Programming Funny Quotes

I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?

The problem with our society is that our values aren’t in the right place. There’s an awful lot of bleeding and naked bodies on prime-time networks, but not nearly enough cable television on public programming.

In the old legends, Arachne had gotten into trouble because of pride. She’d bragged about her tapestries being better than Athena’s, which had led to Mount Olympus’s first reality TV punishment program: 'So You Think You Can Weave Better Than a Goddess?' Arachne had lost in a big way.

The amount of educational programming on television today is simply desensitizing. The only reason left to go to school is to see gun violence.

Have you ever thought about a Twelve Step program for people who talk too much? You could call it On and On Anon.

Does it ever get easier?" she asked. I nodded. "It does," I said. You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who's gone terribly and then it's not grief at all, it's more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you. I think of Bastiaan every day, of course. But I've grown accustomed to his absence.

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

It's probably not easy for a woman to understand what it's like to be a man. Imagine you're starving, and someone puts a huge buffet in front of you. There's delicious, mouth-watering food all around you, and it's really really hard not to eat it all. That's what it's like to be a man around attractive women. The urge to want to hump everything that moves is part of a man's natural programming. It's a deep-seated hunger. To suppress that hunger takes civilization and a lot of willpower.

And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer – it's likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language – putting a letter in the wrong column, say, or omitting a comma – and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks, like "ILLEGAL FORMAT," or "UNKNOWN PROBLEM," or, if the man who wrote the program was really feeling nasty that morning, "WHAT'S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN'T YOU READ?" Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.

You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who’s gone terribly and then it’s not grief at all, it’s more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you.

Life is funny. I'd applied to the wrong graduate program, but that eventually led me to the right grad program. I'd taken what I thought was the wrong undergraduate major, and that was the thing that set me apart and allowed me to find my niche. I don't know if there are any lessons to take from that except to realize that the things you think are mistakes may turn out not to be mistakes. I realized wherever you are, if you make the most of what you've got, you can find a way to keep moving forward.

Your site isn't static. It's dynamically generated. Do you know what that means ?" "No." "It means the site looks different to different people. Let's say you chose the poll option that said you're in favor of tax cuts. Well there's a cookie on your machine now, and when you look at the site again, the articles are about how the government is wasting your money. The site is dynamically selecting content based on what you want. I mean, not what you want. What will piss you off. What will engage your attention and reinforce your beliefs, make you trust the site. And if you said you were against tax cuts, we'll show you stories of Republicans blocking social programs or whatever. It works every which way. Your site is made of mirrors, reflecting everyone's thoughts back at them..." "And we haven't even started talking about keywords. This is just the beginning. Third major advantage: People who use a site like this tend to ramp up their dependence on it. Suddenly all those other news sources, the ones that aren't framing every story in terms of the user's core beliefs, they start to seem confusing and strange. They start to seem biased, actually, which is kind of funny. So now you've got a user who not only trusts you, you're his major source of information on what's happening in the world. Boom, you own that guy. You can tell him whatever you like and no one's contradicting you.

Why are the super-rich for socialism? Don't they have the most to lose? I take a look at my bank account and compare it with Nelson Rockefeller's and it seems funny that I'm against socialism and he's out promoting it." Or is it funny? In reality, there is a vast difference between what the promoters define as socialism and what it is in actual practice. The idea that socialism is a share-the-wealth program is strictly a confidence game to get the people to surrender their freedom to an all-powerful collectivist government. While the Insiders tell us we are building a paradise on earth, we are actually constructing a jail for ourselves.

You've got to stop and ask yourself once in a while...why some asinine politicians would quicker cut out social security than the space program...Go figure.

When one begins to appreciate the roles of unconscious suggestibility and self-fulfilling prophecies in human life, this song seems as funny as the latest radioactive fall-out figures.

I guess it's funny -- well maybe 'funny' isn't the word -- but we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States that was behind it. But we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.

A guy from Bear Stearns had visited our class, thin and bald with a gold watch. He told us that if we were interested in getting into finance, we had better work hard and smart because a lot of machines were able to make investment decisions now, and in the future, computer programs would run everything.

Control: February 15 Sometimes, the gray days scare us. Those are the days when the old feelings come rushing back. We may feel needy, scared, ashamed, unable to care for ourselves. When this happens, it’s hard to trust ourselves, others, the goodness of life, and the good intentions of our Higher Power. Problems seem overwhelming. The past seems senseless; the future, bleak. We feel certain the things we want in life will never happen. In those moments, we may become convinced that things and people outside of ourselves hold the key to our happiness. That’s when we may try to control people and situations to mask our pain. When these “codependent crazies” strike, others often begin to react negatively to our controlling. When we’re in a frenzied state, searching for happiness outside ourselves and looking to others to provide our peace and stability, remember this: Even if we could control things and people, even if we got what we wanted, we would still be ourselves. Our emotional state would still be in turmoil. People and things don’t stop our pain or heal us. In recovery, we learn that this is our job, and we can do it by using our resources: ourselves, our Higher Power, our support systems, and our recovery program. Often, after we’ve become peaceful, trusting, and accepting, what we want comes to us—with ease and naturalness. The sun begins to shine again. Isn’t it funny, and isn’t it true, how all change really does begin with us? I can let go of things and people and my need to control today. I can deal with my feelings. I can get peaceful. I can get calm. I can get back on track and find the true key to happiness—myself. I will remember that a gray day is just that—one gray day.

Roosevelt was running for a third term; the Republicans were nominating Wendell Willkie for the futile job of running against him. What about a Gracie-for-President stunt? She would run as a candidate from the Surprise Party. Again she turned up unannounced on rival programs, appearing for a moment with a lamebrained pitch for votes and a bit of screwball political philosophy. Her lines were funny and widely quoted. “The president of today is merely the postage stamp of tomorrow,” she would declare.

To love is to lose, Sam. Unfortunately, it’s just that simple. Maybe not today but someday. Maybe not when she’s too young and you’re too young, but you see that being old doesn’t help. Maybe not your wife or your girlfriend or your mother, but you see that friends die, too. I could not spare you this any more than I could spare you puberty. It is the inevitable condition of humanity. It is exacerbated by loving but also simply by leaving your front door, by seeing what’s out there in the world, by inventing computer programs that help people. You are afraid of time, Sam. Some sadness has no remedy. Some sadness you can’t make better.” “So what the hell do I do?” “Be sad.” “For how long?” “Forever.” “But then why isn’t everyone walking around miserable all the time?” “Because ice cream still tastes good. And sunny and seventy-five is still a lovely day. And funny movies make you laugh, and work is sometimes fulfilling, and a beer with a friend is nice. And other people love you too.” “And that’s enough?” “There is no enough. You are the paragon of animals, my love. You aspire to such greatness, to miracle, to newness and wonder. And that’s great. I’m so proud of you. But you forgot about the part that’s been around for time immemorial. Love, death, loss. You’ve run up against it. And there’s no getting around or over it. You stop and build your life right there at the base of that wall. But it’s okay. That’s where everyone else is too. Everyone else is either there or on their way. There is no other side, but there’s plenty of space there to build a life and plenty of company. Welcome to the wall, Sam.

Ralph and I had met the previous summer at a program for high school juniors where you spent five weeks in a house in New Jersey studying the interdisciplinary history of the Northern European Renaissance. The thing that had brought us together was how the art history teacher mentioned the Doge of Venice, whom she called simply “the Doge,” in every lecture, regardless of subject. She could be talking about the daily lives of burghers in Delft and somehow the Doge would come into it. Nobody else seemed to notice this, or to think it was funny.

Whenever a goal is achieved, something funny happens: the character in the animation eats the answer, gets indigestion, gets a funny look on its face, or makes some slapstick move that is unexpected enough to keep the child attentive. This “reward” is a crucial feature of the program, because each time the child is rewarded, his brain secretes such neurotransmitters as dopamine and acetylcholine, which help consolidate the map changes he has just made. (Dopamine reinforces the reward, and acetylcholine helps the brain “tune in” and sharpen memories.)

We ate all of this in front of Tack’s huge, flat-screen TV in the living room where I was treated to a marathon of Storage Wars. Seeing as I didn’t watch TV, I’d never heard of this program. But by the second episode I was hooked. I declared that I thought Brandi and Jarrod were “adorable” together, which for some reason he didn’t explain made Rush laugh so hard I thought he would bust a gut. Rush might find that funny but I decided I was going to start dressing like Brandi. She always looked the shit. I also shared that Dave was my favorite “character” to which Tabby told me with grave seriousness, “But, Tyra, he’s the bad guy.

Which mirror now, Ms. Lane?” He glanced around the white room, scanning the ten mirrors. “Fourth from the left. Jericho.” I was sick of him calling me Ms. Lane. I picked myself up off the white floor. Once again the Silver had spit me out with entirely too much enthusiasm, and I didn’t even have the stones on me. I didn’t have anything but the spear in my holster, a protein bar, two flashlights, and a bottle of Unseelie in my pockets. “You don’t have the right to call me Jericho.” “Why? Because we haven’t been intimate enough? I’ve had sex with you in every possible position, killed you, fed you my blood in the hopes that it would bring you back to life, crammed Unseelie into your stomach, and tried to rearrange your guts. I’d say that’s pretty personal. How much more intimate do we have to get for you to feel comfortable with me calling you Jericho? Jericho.” I expected him to pounce on the sex-in-every-possible-position comment, but he only said. “You fed me your—” I pushed into the mirror, cutting him off. Like the first one, it resisted me, then grabbed me and squirted me out on the other side. His voice preceded his arrival. “You bloody fool, do you never stop to consider the consequences of your actions?” He barreled out of the mirror behind me. “Of course I do,” I said coolly. “There’s always plenty of time to consider the consequences. After I’ve screwed up.” “Funny girl, aren’t you, Ms. Lane?” “Sure am. Jericho. It’s Mac. I’m Mac. No more fake formality between us. Get with the program or get the hell out of here.” His dark eyes flared. “Big talk. Ms. Lane. Try to enforce it.” Challenge burned in his gaze. I sauntered toward him. He watched me coldly and I was reminded of the other night, when I’d pretended to be coming on to him, because I was angry. He thought I was doing it again. I wasn’t. Being in the White Mansion with him was doing something strange to me. Unraveling all my inhibitions, as if these walls had no tolerance for lies, or within them there was no need.

Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It’s funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.’ ‘Yeeeess...’ said Reg’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. ‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke and a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager was unable to find fault with his reasoning. Even when Gordon wrote it off three weeks later.’ ‘Heavens. And did the program sell very well?’ ‘No. We never sold a single copy.’ ‘You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me.’ ‘It was,’ said Richard hesitantly. ‘The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I’ve recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you’re looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear. ‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5. Odd, that.

Knuth: They were very weak, actually. It wasn't presented systematically and everything, but I thought they were pretty obvious. It was a different culture entirely. But the guy who said he was going to fire people, he wants programming to be something where everything is done in an inefficient way because it's supposed to fit into his idea of orderliness. He doesn't care if the program is good or not—as far as its speed and performance—he cares about that it satisfies other criteria, like any bloke can be able to maintain it. Well, people have lots of other funny ideas. People have this strange idea that we want to write our programs as worlds unto themselves so that everybody else can just set up a few parameters and our program will do it for them. So there'll be a few programmers in the world who write the libraries, and then there are people who write the user manuals for these libraries, and then there are people who apply these libraries and that's it. The problem is that coding isn't fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can't write the library yourself. If the job of coding is just to be finding the right combination of parameters, that does fairly obvious things, then who'd want to go into that as a career? There's this overemphasis on reusable software where you never get to open up the box and see what's inside the box. It's nice to have these black boxes but, almost always, if you can look inside the box you can improve it and make it work better once you know what's inside the box. Instead people make these closed wrappers around everything and present the closure to the programmers of the world, and the programmers of the world aren't allowed to diddle with that. All they're able to do is assemble the parts. And so you remember that when you call this subroutine you put x0, y0, x1, y1 but when you call this subroutine it's x0, x1, y0, y1. You get that right, and that's your job.

My father's generation grew up with certain beliefs. One of those beliefs is that the amount of money one earns is a rough guide to one's contribution to the welfare and prosperity of our society. I grew up unusually close to my father. Each evening I would plop into a chair near him, sweaty from a game of baseball in the front yard, and listen to him explain why such and such was true and such and such was not. One thing that was almost always true was that people who made a lot of money were neat. Horatio Alger and all that. It took watching his son being paid 225 grand at the age of twenty-seven, after two years on the job, to shake his faith in money. He has only recently recovered from the shock. I haven't. When you sit, as I did, at the center of what has been possibly the most absurd money game ever and benefit out of all proportion to your value to society (as much as I'd like to think I got only what I deserved, I don't), when hundreds of equally undeserving people around you are all raking it in faster than they can count it, what happens to the money belief? Well, that depends. For some, good fortune simply reinforces the belief. They take the funny money seriously, as evidence that they are worthy citizens of the Republic. It becomes their guiding assumption-for it couldn't possibly be clearly thought out-that a talent for making money come out of a telephone is a reflection of merit on a grander scale. It is tempting to believe that people who think this way eventually suffer their comeuppance. They don't. They just get richer. I'm sure most of them die fat and happy. For me, however, the belief in the meaning of making dollars crumbled; the proposition that the more money you earn, the better the life you are leading was refuted by too much hard evidence to the contrary. And without that belief, I lost the need to make huge sums of money. The funny thing is that I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished. It is a small piece of education, but still the most useful thing I picked up at Salomon Brothers. Almost everything else I learned I left behind. I became fairly handy with a few hundred million dollars, but I'm still lost when I have to decide what to do with a few thousand. I learned humility briefly in the training program but forgot it as soon as I was given a chance. And I learned that people can be corrupted by organizations, but since I remain willing to join organizations and even to be corrupted by them (mildly, please), I'm not sure what practical benefit will come from this lesson.

I glanced over and saw Wyatt glaring at me. Journey’s “Lovin’ Touchin’, Squeezin’” was playing on the radio. “What?” I asked. “You secretly hate me, don’t you.” He gestured toward the radio. “You can’t stand the thought of me taking a much needed nap and leaving you to drive without conversation. You’re torturing me with this sappy stuff.” “It’s Journey. I love this song.” Wyatt mumbled something under his breath, picked up the CD case, and started looking through it. He paused with a choked noise, his eyes growing huge. “You’re joking, Sam. Justin Bieber? What are you, a twelve-year old girl?” There’s gonna be one less lonely girl, I sang in my head. That was a great song. How could he not like that song? Still, I squirmed a bit in embarrassment. “A twelve-year old girl gave me that CD,” I lied. “For my birthday.” Wyatt snorted. “It’s a good thing you’re a terrible liar. Otherwise, I’d be horrified at the thought that a demon has been hanging out with a bunch of giggling pre-teens.” He continued to thumb through the CDs. “Air Supply Greatest Hits? No, no, I’m wrong here. It’s an Air Supply cover band in Spanish.” He waved the offending CD in my face. “Sam, what on earth are you thinking? How did you even get this thing?” “Some tenant left it behind,” I told him. “We evicted him, and there were all these CDs. Most were in Spanish, but I’ve got a Barry Manilow in there, too. That one’s in English.” Wyatt looked at me a moment, and with the fastest movement I’ve ever seen, rolled down the window and tossed the case of CDs out onto the highway. It barely hit the road before a semi plowed over it. I was pissed. “You asshole. I liked those CDs. I don’t come over to your house and trash your video games, or drive over your controllers. If you think that will make me listen to that Dubstep crap for the next two hours, then you better fucking think again.” “I’m sorry Sam, but it’s past time for a musical intervention here. You can’t keep listening to this stuff. It wasn’t even remotely good when it was popular, and it certainly hasn’t gained anything over time. You need to pull yourself together and try to expand your musical interests a bit. You’re on a downward spiral, and if you keep this up, you’ll find yourself friendless, living in a box in a back alley, stinking of your own excrement, and covered in track marks.” I looked at him in surprise. I had no idea Air Supply led to lack of bowel control and hard core drug usage. I wondered if it was something subliminal, a kind of compulsion programmed into the lyrics. Was Russell Hitchcock a sorcerer? He didn’t look that menacing to me, but sorcerers were pretty sneaky. Even so, I was sure Justin Bieber was okay. As soon as we hit a rest stop, I was ordering a replacement from my iPhone.

It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do. Makes you think, why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges. You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding. But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never suspended, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before. It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago. It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago. Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh. Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete. I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing. But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind. Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was. Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter. I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves. One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.

Since emotions have to be programmed into robots from the outside, manufacturers may offer a menu of emotions carefully chosen on the basis of whether they are necessary, useful, or will increase bonding with the owner. In all likelihood, robots will be programmed to have only a few human emotions, depending on the situation. Perhaps the emotion most valued by the robot’s owner will be loyalty. One wants a robot that faithfully carries out its commands without complaints, that understands the needs of the master and anticipates them. The last thing an owner will want is a robot with an attitude, one that talks back, criticizes people, and whines. Helpful criticisms are important, but they must be made in a constructive, tactful way. Also, if humans give it conflicting commands, the robot should know to ignore all of them except those coming from its owner. Empathy will be another emotion that will be valued by the owner. Robots that have empathy will understand the problems of others and will come to their aid. By interpreting facial movements and listening to tone of voice, robots will be able to identify when a person is in distress and will provide assistance when possible. Strangely, fear is another emotion that is desirable. Evolution gave us the feeling of fear for a reason, to avoid certain things that are dangerous to us. Even though robots will be made of steel, they should fear certain things that can damage them, like falling off tall buildings or entering a raging fire. A totally fearless robot is a useless one if it destroys itself. But certain emotions may have to be deleted, forbidden, or highly regulated, such as anger. Given that robots could be built to have great physical strength, an angry robot could create tremendous problems in the home and workplace. Anger could get in the way of its duties and cause great damage to property. (The original evolutionary purpose of anger was to show our dissatisfaction. This can be done in a rational, dispassionate way, without getting angry.) Another emotion that should be deleted is the desire to be in command. A bossy robot will only make trouble and might challenge the judgment and wishes of the owner. (This point will also be important later, when we discuss whether robots will one day take over from humans.) Hence the robot will have to defer to the wishes of the owner, even if this may not be the best path. But perhaps the most difficult emotion to convey is humor, which is a glue that can bond total strangers together. A simple joke can defuse a tense situation or inflame it. The basic mechanics of humor are simple: they involve a punch line that is unanticipated. But the subtleties of humor can be enormous. In fact, we often size up other people on the basis of how they react to certain jokes. If humans use humor as a gauge to measure other humans, then one can appreciate the difficulty of creating a robot that can tell if a joke is funny or not.

Listen', he said seriously, 'I'm not just wasting your time telling funny stories. You have to know about stuff like this or your program is going to claim it's found intelligent life on Mars. And everyone knows there's only Australians there, right?

It’s all very clever, all very droll, it may even be true, it may even be deserved, but it’s still criticism. Do you think those folk down there really want to know that the Seven Servants are nothing but a pack of computer-run, money-grabbing, capitalist leftovers from an unhappier age; that the Polytheon is nothing but a jumble of corporate-personality simulation programs that got out of hand; that their beloved Elector is just a crazy athleto who got pulled out of a gym one night and stuck on the Salamander Throne; that the Ministry of Pain is run by professional incompetents who got promoted beyond their natural ability because the Compassionate Society wants everyone to do the job which makes them happiest, irrespective of whether they are any good at it? You think that would make them any happier, no matter how funny you make the faces or the walks or the words?

In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So

Humor Humor is a great social lubricator—it can make interacting go more smoothly. If you are good at telling jokes, try a few. Telling jokes is risky, however; do not tell ethnic, racist, or off-color jokes. And as always, pay careful attention to interactive chemistry. One high school student who attended my program reported that, although he tried to become part of a popular social group at his new school, playing on the football team and joining several clubs, he was not invited to socialize with the other kids off the field. He had become known for telling joke after joke, in vain hopes of being accepted. When we examined things more carefully, it became clear that his style of telling jokes—sometimes irrelevant, sometimes just plain corny—was not appealing to the peer group he was associating with. Quite simply, the chemistry was off. If you wish to inject humor and levity into an interaction, it’s better to tell funny stories. If the funny stories are about yourself, great: People enjoy mildly self-deprecating humor. You can also find amusing true stories in the newspaper.

PAUL: It was great at the beginning. I could speak the language almost fluently after a month and the people were fantastic. They’d come out and help us. Teach us songs. Man, we thought it was all going so well. But we got all the outhouses dug in six months and we had to stay there two years, that was the deal. And that’s when we began to realize that none of the Nglele were using these outhouses. We’d ask them why and they’d just shrug. So we started watching them very carefully and what we found out was the Nglele use their feces for fertilizer. It’s like gold to them. They thought we were all fucking crazy expecting them to waste their precious turds in our spiffy new outhouses. Turns out they’d been helping us because they misunderstood why we were there. They thought it was some kind of punishment and we’d be allowed to go home after we finished digging the latrines, that’s why they were helping us and then when we stayed on they figured we must be permanent outcasts or something and they just stopped talking to us altogether. Anyway, me and Jeff, the guy I told you about, we figured maybe we could salvage something from the fuckup so we got a doctor to make a list of all the medicines we’d need to start a kind of skeleton health program in Ngleleland and we ordered the medicine, pooled both our salaries for the two years to pay for it. Paid for it. Waited. Never came. So we went to the capital to trace it and found out this very funny thing. The Minister of Health had confiscated it at the dock, same man who got our team assigned to the Nglele Tribal Territories in the first place. We were furious, man, we stormed into his office and started yelling at him. Turned out to be a real nice guy. Educated in England, British accent and everything. Had this office lined with sets of Dickens and Thackeray all in leather bindings. Unbelievable. Anyway, he said he couldn’t help us about the medicine, he’d been acting on orders from higher up, which we knew was bullshit, then he said he really admired our enthusiasm and our desire to help his people but he wanted to know just out of curiosity, if we’d managed to start the medical program and save a thousand lives, let’s say, he wanted to know if we were prepared to feed and clothe those thousand people for the next ten years, twenty years, however long they lived. He made us feel so goddamned naive, so totally helpless and unprepared, powerless. We went out of there, got drunk, paid the first women we could find and spent the rest of the week fucking our brains out. And then for the next year and two months we just sat around in Ngleleland stoned out of our minds counting off the days we had left before we could go home. Anyway, since you asked, that’s what the Peace Corps was like.

I could read it so you don’t have to?” she offers, but I’m already halfway through. I start to read aloud. “ ‘I had this vision for creating a platform that would help people to connect and coalesce around the things that mattered most to them. It was a natural extension of what I’d been doing for years. People used to call me a humanist spirit guide—I guess that’s what I’m bringing to WAI now, just on a larger stage.’ “He doesn’t even mention us. Doesn’t say anything about how Jules and I dragged him kicking and screaming into this. I wanted to create a platform. Cyrus just wanted to baptize cats.” “To be fair, the Cat Baptism is one of the most shared rituals,” Destiny says, trying to lighten the tone. “Eight hundred thousand videos and counting.” I keep going. “ ‘I’m attracted to the solitary life, Jones says. You can imagine him in a monastery, although he’d have to cut off that halo around his head. In addition to creating a social network that millions of people are turning to for meaning and community, he is also taking care of his employees—he has just kicked off a mentorship program to give the women on his team the support they need to thrive in their roles.’ ” Destiny tells me to stop reading. “It’s just bullshit.” I take a shaky deep breath. “That’s my mentorship program,” I whisper. “Cyrus is telling them what he wants to hear. You and I both know that.” I’m stammering now, but I keep going. “ ‘He’s otherworldly but handsome in an almost comical way. His sentences are long, and when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder, where is this going? But he always manages to bring whatever he’s saying to a satisfying conclusion. Everything he says is mysterious and somehow obvious at the same time.’ ” At least this one is funny. I allow Destiny to laugh briefly. I get to the last line. “ ‘I have to say, I’m developing something of a crush.’ ” “Oh, for God’s sake, another woman in love with Cyrus. Take a number, sister.” Destiny leans over, reads the byline. “George Milos. Guess Cyrus appeals to all genders.” As we get up to leave, she says, “I don’t think Cyrus is a bad person. He’s just basking in a sea of adoration, and it makes him think more of himself than he should.” “Where does that leave me?” “You have a tough gig. No one wants to be married to the guy everyone thinks is going to save the world.

A minute? You take too long,” Anastasia retorted. “Funny, you like it when I do that in the bedroom.” “And as usual, it comes back to sex,” Anastasia replied with a forbearing sigh. “It’s what keeps my old parts lubricated,” was Seth’s snickered reply. “I can’t believe I married you.” “It’s true love.” “Or defective programming.

Hi, Mad,” Piper’s voice sang out in her ear. “Oh, it’s you,” Madison said, falling back on the pink brocade duvet covering her double bed. “Of course it’s me. I always call you at this time,” Piper said. “Who’d you think it was?” “I thought you were Blue,” she said with a giggle. “But that’s, of course, impossible, since Blue doesn’t even know my name.” “Just what are you talking about?” Piper demanded. “And who is Blue?” “Blue”--Madison grabbed one of her pink furry pillows that lined her headboard and hugged it to her chest--“is my Heart-2-Heart partner. And I think I’m in love.” “What?” Piper screeched into the phone. “We were just assigned our partners yesterday. I have spent almost every spare minute with you, except for a few hours last night and the two hours since we left Giorgio’s. When could you possibly have found the time to fall in love?” “Okay,” Madison said, rolling over onto her stomach. “Maybe not love with a capital L. But a very strong like. Blue is funny and smart--he knows how flies land on the ceiling upside down. And talented--he can do a backflip. Or at least he could when he was nine at his cousin’s house in Issaquah.” “He put all that in one letter?” Piper asked. Madison giggled. “Of course not. We’ve e-mailed several letters. In fact, I’m expecting one now.” “Geez,” Piper said a little wistfully. “I haven’t even checked to see if my Heart-2-Heart pal wrote back.” Madison plucked at the fuzzy strands of yarn on her pillow. “You should. I love this program! We can tell each other anything. It’s so great!” “And this guy’s name is Blue?” Piper’s voice sounded doubtful. “I don’t remember any kid at school named Blue. There was that one guy we called Green in our chem lab, remember? But I think we called him that because his last name was Green and we could never remember his first name.

She flipped on the radio to get her own voice out of her head and replace it with whatever inanity was on the morning drive. People who host morning radio programs cannot believe how funny they are. She moved it to AM—did anyone listen to AM anymore?—and put on the all-news channel. There was comfort to the almost military precision and predictability. Sports on the quarter hour. Traffic every ten minutes. She was distracted, half listening at best, when a story caught her attention: “Notorious hacker Corey the Whistle has promised a treasure chest of new leaks this week that he claims will not only embarrass a leading official in the current administration but also will definitely lead to resignation and, most likely, prosecution . . .” Despite

When a TV show starts out, it is incredibly competitive: maybe one in a hundred TV ideas goes on to get made into pilot (tester) episodes. Maybe one in twenty of those pilots will go on to have a first series commissioned. And maybe one in ten of those will be asked back for a second season. It takes a sprinkling of fairy dust and a lot of goodwill. But do two seasons and you will quite probably go on to do five--or more. So we got lucky. No doubt. And I never even asked for it. Let alone expected it. I was simply, and blissfully, unaware. But on this journey, Man vs. Wild has had to endure a lot of flak from critics and the press. Anything successful inevitably does. (Funny how the praise tends just to bounce off, but small amounts of criticism sting so much. Self-doubt can be a brute, I guess.) The program has been accused of being set up, staged, faked, and manipulated. One critic even suggested it was all shot in a studio with CGI. If only.

By the time Chip and I met, he’d managed to combine these two conflicting sides of himself: the kid who steered clear of trouble and did the right thing, and the kid who rode his Big Wheel full speed into the street without looking both ways. I had never met anyone like him. It’s funny to me to think that the whole opposites-attract thing might have been programmed into my DNA. Just as my outgoing mother was drawn to my quiet dad, I was this shy girl drawn to the super-outgoing Chip Gaines. And the fact that he owned a successful lawn and irrigation business and had made up his mind that he loved Waco and wanted to stay put was somehow a perfect fit with everything I knew I wanted myself.

Follow your heart, but take your brain with you!" After buying an armload of funny books filled with clean jokes, one-liners, and speech openers, I discovered how truly "spot-on" Joe had been. Inserting humorous zingers throughout my programs has worked like a charm and improved my presentation skills.

The funny thing about social media is that the general principle is that nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd,” says Du Linh Tu, director of the digital media program at Columbia Journalism School.

The funny thing was that that this meant the whole company had been running without mutexes for a couple weeks, and nobody noticed.

Cecilia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmering blue of their kidney-shaped swimming pool with its powerful underwater light: the perfect symbol of suburban bliss. Except for that strange intermittent sound, like a baby choking, that was coming from the pool filter. She could hear it right now. Cecilia had asked John-Paul to look at it weeks before he went to Chicago; he hadn’t got around to it, but he would have been furious if she’d arranged for some repair guy to come and fix it. It would have indicated lack of faith in his abilities. Of course, when he did finally look at it, he wouldn’t be able to fix it and she’d have to get the guy in anyway. It was frustrating. Why hadn’t that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn’t feel like a nag.

11. No clerics. What would you think about a religion with no clergy? We here at SoulBoom are all for it. One of the miracles of the Twelve-Step Recovery Program at AA is the lack of leadership roles. The inmates are running the asylum! Elected servant-leaders run the meetings for limited terms while following the adage “principles above personalities.” As expertly quoted in the Twelve Traditions of the AA Big Book, “For our group purpose, there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.” What if modern religion was like that? (Or politics, for that matter!) Leaders as trusted servants. We no longer need people with funny hats (whose only historical “expertise” was knowing how to read when most of the population didn’t) to interpret the holy writings for us. What if no member of this faith had more power or authority than any other member? What if, like at an AA meeting, there were regular, democratic elections, where a rotating staff of elected folks helped to serve the needs of the community… and nothing else?

Large glass windows had been installed in the exhibit, and the orangutans took to pitching rocks at them. San Diego officials, thinking quickly, instituted an exchange program. One non-thrown stone would get you a banana. But the orangutans were not interested and kept trying to break the windows. The park finally had to bring in a contractor to dig up the entire ground floor of the exhibit in order to remove all of the rocks, as each shattered window cost the zoo $900 to replace. What happened next? The orangutans began to tear the ceramic insulators off of the wall and threw them instead. Evidently, these animals really wanted out.

I can actually follow the plot of TV programs now, and I no longer use books as masks—I read them like a normal person, just like you have read this. Which assumes you are normal; maybe you’re not. Maybe none of us are. Maybe none of us would want to be anyway. But, for the sake of argument, let’s call me normal now. I am better. I don’t know whether it’s for good, or if one day something might make me abnormal again. But that’s the funny thing about living. If you do it properly, you don’t know how the next sentence will begin.

It was an inappropriate thought, but the baby wasn't so much like a love child, the effortless product of the blissful or even oblivious union of two people. He was a different sort of miracle, the effortful product of a tricky collaboration between unlikely partners. He was their version of a television program.

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked there heads when the get out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs the could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich -small town rich- an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny.

You see, the funny thing was that when I changed, the people around me changed, too.

The meeting was drawing to a close when Hayward asked a final question. “Dr. Ballard, in your presentation at the War College you mentioned a new underwater exploration technology you have under development. What is the status of that effort?” Before I could respond, Admiral Kollmorgen spoke up, “Admiral, that program is being funded by my office, sir.” At that moment, my Argo/Jason system was born. Kollmorgen approved grants of $500,000 a year for four years—two million dollars total to design the system. Funny how things really get done, isn’t it? But I knew I would need millions more to test it. After the meeting, Thunman arranged for the Navy’s Deep Submergence Systems group to sign me into the highly classified programs that Hayward had mentioned.

Was there anything about Ada Lovelace?” I asked. Nightingale gave me a funny look. “Byron’s daughter?” he asked. “I’m not sure I understand the connection.” “She worked with Babbage on the difference engine,” I said. “In what capacity?” “She was a famously gifted mathematician,” I said. Who I mostly knew about from reading Steampunk, but I wasn’t going to mention that. “Generally considered to have written the first true computer program.” “Ah,” said Nightingale. “So now we know who to blame.

I know that that heroic myth is part of my programming. That I’m quite a funny, normal bloke, that there’s a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us, that any centralized power structure with an egocentric figure at its helm will become corrupt. The only solution is to develop a template built on ecological responsibility and equality.

I often get letters from people who say how they like the programs a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think, too, of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, "Well, presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action.

One helpful tip that I learned from neurolinguistic programming is to listen to what you say to yourself. When you catch yourself saying something mean, change the voice! For instance, if you’re telling yourself, I can’t do this… I don’t feel good about myself, replay that negative thought out loud, but in a Mickey Mouse voice. Try saying something you’re insecure about out loud right now in your best Mickey Mouse impression. Sounds pretty ridiculous, right? Well, that’s how ridiculous the voices in our heads sound. And if we say it in a silly voice, we don’t respond to it the same way.

Right away I started to panic, and I was running around looking for him. When I found him, he was standing behind a column, laughing at me. He was watching me the whole time and laughing. He thought it was funny, just a joke. I could have killed him.

Over the years, that trust proved difficult to sustain. In particular, the fault line of race strained it mightily. Accepting that African Americans and other minority groups might need extra help from the government—that their specific hardships could be traced to a brutal history of discrimination rather than immutable characteristics or individual choices—required a level of empathy, of fellow feeling, that many white voters found difficult to muster. Historically, programs designed to help racial minorities, from “forty acres and a mule” to affirmative action, were met with open hostility. Even universal programs that enjoyed broad support—like public education or public sector employment—had a funny way of becoming controversial once Black and brown people were included as beneficiaries.

Once you realize that nothing you do will ever be “enough” because kids are programmed to push boundaries and to always want more, you’re forced to realize that your relationships are not about what you buy or give. They’re about who you are to that other person. You will never do enough, maybe, but you ARE enough.

The funny thing is, thinking back, I don't think all these modern gizmos actually make you any more productive. Hierarchical file systems—how do they make you more productive? Most of software development goes on in your head anyway. I think having worked with that simpler system imposes a kind of disciplined way of thinking. If you haven't got a directory system and you have to put all the files in one directory, you have to be fairly disciplined. If you haven't got a revision control system, you have to be fairly disciplined. Given that you apply that discipline to what you're doing it doesn't seem to me to be any better to have hierarchical file systems and revision control. They don't solve the fundamental problem of solving your problem. They probably make it easier for groups of people to work together. For individuals I don't see any difference.

It has the funny kind of incomplete, semiabstract reality that scripts or scores have—they are programs, as it were, for real things in the world (the produced play, the performed music) that require adding a context, and decisions about that context affect the whole of the abstract object.

Do you have Kernighan and Ritchie?” “Is that a title or two authors?” “Two authors. C.” “See? I guess.” “You guess you have it?” “I meant I could see it being two authors.” The young man looked at her funny. “The C Programming Language. It’s like the foundational text.

There was always a rumor that Babbage had worked on a mechanical device of some kind for the Folly,” said Nightingale. “One which might have had applications in the practice—but it was just a rumor.” “Was there anything about Ada Lovelace?” I asked. Nightingale gave me a funny look. “Byron’s daughter?” he asked. “I’m not sure I understand the connection.” “She worked with Babbage on the difference engine,” I said. “In what capacity?” “She was a famously gifted mathematician,” I said. Who I mostly knew about from reading Steampunk, but I wasn’t going to mention that. “Generally considered to have written the first true computer program.” “Ah,” said Nightingale. “So now we know who to blame.