For anyone who hasn't read it, I just started Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard Feynman. It's pretty fantastic - not much about rationality - but it's quite funny. He tells one story of how he made his fraternity brothers at MIT look really dumb. One of them asked if French curves were made in any special way. Feynman told them that French curves are specially made so that the tangent at the lowest point is always horizontal to the ground. Of course, this is obvious for any point that the tangent (derivitive) at the lowest point (minimum) is zero. But the guys didn't realize that this was definitional and raved as though Feynman had made a brilliant explanation of French curves.
We teach a lot more calculus in high school in America today than they did when Feynman was a student (my impression is that this changed in the 50s and 60s in response to Sputnik). As a result, the humor of Feynman's response might not have registered with MIT freshmen in the 1930s the way it would with MIT students (or even high school seniors) today.
There was a recent discussion considering the idea of a monthly Book (later expanded to movies, links, etc) thread. The poll was pretty unanimous (Both before and after I was karmassassinated) that this was A Good Idea (tm), and daenerys's Janurary thread (from which I obviously stole a lot of this) was fairly successful, so let's see if we actually need one per month.
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