Wayne (unabashedly, shamefully) writes:

> Yes, I still have my old deci-trig-log-log slide rule.  It's funny you
should
>  mention that, because just last week I was explaining how it worked to my
> wife
>  and one of my sons.  It wasn't for any high mathematical purpose, though.
I
>  just wanted them to understand this old joke:
>
>  After the  Great Flood, Noah released all the animals from the Ark and
told
> them
>  to go forth and be fruitful.  Most of the animals happily obeyed, except
for
>  pair of puff adders (snakes) who seemed uninterested in mating.  Noah was
>  concerned that if they didn't reproduce the species would become extinct,
so
> he
>  prayed to the Lord for guidance.  God sent him a message in a dream:  "Cut
> down
>  a tree, saw it into rough sections, and use it to build a table.  Place the
>  snakes on the table and leave them alone, and they will do what comes
>  naturally."  Noah did as he was told, and sure enough, soon there were
> little puff adders slithering all over the place.
>
>  The moral of this story is:  Even adders can multiply on a log table.

As long as this is my day to participate in bad jokes, I'll break netiquette
and post publicly a response that I gave to Ted Ashton earlier in the day.
Ted asked (in response to the earlier "brother's keeper/keeper's brother"
story):

========================================

> <*Groan*>  Are you the author of that second portion or does some other
>  novelist get the credit?

It is part of the Classical Apocrypha that every young professor tells his
young graduate students around the campfire at night when out in the field.

And I've got a million of them.

One that you might enjoy:

Noah, as commanded by his Lord God, gathered up two of every animal and put
them on the ark. When the waters finally cleared and ark was once again on
solid ground, Noah lowered the ramps and told the assembled animals: "Go
forth, be fruitful and multiply."

And they did. And every year they returned to Noah to show off their new
offspring, and Noah was exceptionally proud. Except for the snakes. Year
after year they returned, but just the two of them, with no young. And Noah
was mightily disappointed. Finally, he asked them on the fifth year, "Did you
not hear my commandment to you to go forth, be fruitful and multiply? Why
haven't you done this?"

The snakes finally whispered in shame, "Noah, we're adders!"


Wait, the story's not over yet.


Noah, now growing older by the year, learned to live with his disappointment.
Perhaps a world without snakes would not be all that bad. All of the world's
animals were being repopulated and every year the crowd that returned grew
larger and larger -- except for the two snakes. Every year they came back,
just the two of them.

But then on the 10th year, when everyone returned again, the snakes did too,
but this time with a whole herd of little ones in tow. Noah could hardly
contain his joy. He asked excitedly, "What happened? What happened?"

The adders replied joyously, "We learned logarithms!"

========================================

Clearly, there is something wrong with the 12th of October such that the same
awful joke would appear twice on the same day. Nonetheless, in order to make
your day complete, here's another one that I liked to tell on field trips
(remember, there's no tv out there in the field. This is all the
entertainment you're likely to get):

"You may have heard of the severe legal trouble that John Harwood of the
Scripps Institute of Oceanography got into recently. Harwood is a tenured
professor of marine mammology at the Institute. About half a year ago, he
found a pod of dolphins that -- for all appearences -- did not age. You can
imagine the level of excitement that that discovery generated in Harwood, but
he wanted to keep it quiet until he could ascertain whether it was really
true or not. This was a physiological behavior that was otherwise completely
unknown in mammals.

Apparently the dolphins derived their anti-aging compounds from eating a
specific species of seagull every day. And every day was the trick. If they
didn't get their meal of seagull meat by sundown every day, extremely rapid
aging overtook them and they died rather rapidly.

Harwood captured several of the dolphins and put them in his backyard pool,
and every day at 4:00PM, he fed them a meal of ground seagull. However, on
one day, several weeks into this protocol, he was running very late.

Just by chance, that same day, a circus was in town in La Jolla and an
elderly lion escaped, unnoticed, from his cage. The lion wandered through
town and settled directly on Harwood's front door.

It was now about 6PM, and the sun was getting ready to set. Harwood raced
home with the afternoon meal of seagulls. Although he saw the lion on his
doorstep, because he was so late, he simply jumped over the lion, ran to the
back, and fed the gulls to the dolphins. And it was that point that the La
Jolla police arrested him at gunpoint.

Harwood was surprised as anybody at his arrest -- and he demanded to know
what he was being arrested for. The police sternly told him: "Transporting
gulls across a staid lion for immortal porpoises!"

Wirt Atmar