Yet another try: daily blogging and humor

The last time that I restarted was here. And now I'm doing it again. Restarting. Trying to teach this old dog a new trick: writing regularly. Again. So here's my latest exercise in self-manipulation.This is another one of those back-dated fill-it-in posts, a renewed attempt to rewrite history and post every day. But for the record, it's Friday May 17th.

Daniel Dennett, at the Second World Conference on the Future of Science, in Venice, 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)I finished reading Dan Dennet's book, "Inside Jokes" (web site here, Amazon reference here) a week ago.Dennet has popularized ideas in cognitive science and evolutionary theory and philosopy. Most of his work is readable by people with a moderate science background. This one is a bit more challenging: it's both very academic, and very funny.The book explains a theory of humor developed initially by his co-author and former student Matthew Hurley as part of his doctoral thesis, for which Dennett was advisor. The third co-author is Reginald Adams, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has cultivated a major interest in humor.To help illustrate some of the features of the theory the authors retell (and then analyzes) some pretty good jokes.My make-up project (let's see how long it lasts) is going to be a joke a day.I'll start with this one from "Inside Jokes": (p.15)"He who laughs last...thinks slowest."