Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
So the (fairly) new trend around Asian shopping centers seems to be cheap Reflexology places. The underlying concept of Reflexology is that by pushing certain places (particularly on your feet) you can improve certain functions in your body. However, it hasn't been proven to work and there's considerable disagreement on which parts of your feet govern which parts of your body. On the bright side, it'll usually run you about $30 for a fairly decent massage. The downsides? Usually the people push way too hard, bend limbs in unnatural directions, and don't speak a word of English. There's always a price. Usually my broken Chinese and natural flexibility is enough to keep people from doing serious injury to me, but yesterday this woman got my elbows to touch behind my back. Just because something can bend one way doesn't necessarily mean it should.
In an effort to read more, but still read about physics, I'm reading the memoirs of Richard Feynman, one of the guys that worked on the Manhattan project, among numerous other things. it's really quite inspiring and not technical at all. I highly recommend reading it. To illustrate my point, I shall include an excerpt about mathematicians, the butt of many a physics joke.
...People would sit around playing Go, or discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.
I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and another guy standing in front of him, saying, "And therefore such-and-such is true."
"Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks.
"It's trivial! It's trivial!" the standing guy says, and he rapidly reels off a series of logical steps: "First you assume thus-and-so, then we have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem, and we substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around here and then thus-and-so..." The guy on the couch is struggling to understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen minutes!
Finally, the standing guy comes out on the other end and the guy on the couch says, "Yeah, yeah. It's trivial."
We physicists were laughing trying to figure them out. We decided that "trivial" means "proved." So we joked with the mathematicians: "We have a new theorem -- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial."
The mathematicians didn't like that theorem, and I teased them about it. I said there are never any surprises -- that the mathematicians only prove things that are obvious.
In an effort to read more, but still read about physics, I'm reading the memoirs of Richard Feynman, one of the guys that worked on the Manhattan project, among numerous other things. it's really quite inspiring and not technical at all. I highly recommend reading it. To illustrate my point, I shall include an excerpt about mathematicians, the butt of many a physics joke.
...People would sit around playing Go, or discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.
I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and another guy standing in front of him, saying, "And therefore such-and-such is true."
"Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks.
"It's trivial! It's trivial!" the standing guy says, and he rapidly reels off a series of logical steps: "First you assume thus-and-so, then we have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem, and we substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around here and then thus-and-so..." The guy on the couch is struggling to understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen minutes!
Finally, the standing guy comes out on the other end and the guy on the couch says, "Yeah, yeah. It's trivial."
We physicists were laughing trying to figure them out. We decided that "trivial" means "proved." So we joked with the mathematicians: "We have a new theorem -- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial."
The mathematicians didn't like that theorem, and I teased them about it. I said there are never any surprises -- that the mathematicians only prove things that are obvious.