Coaching, teaching, and writing

I sent the following email to Thomas Basbøll:

I read this:
http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/p/writing-coach.html
and was reminded of this:
http://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/10/could-i-use-a-statistics-coach/

He replied:

Which reminds me of this
http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2011/10/teacher-or-coach.html

We seem to be approaching some sort of Platonic ideal in which we can conduct an entire conversation from links to our previous writings. Just like that joke about the roomful of comedians who refer to jokes by their numbers.

7 thoughts on “Coaching, teaching, and writing

  1. A joke about referring to jokes by numbers? I can’t quite find the correct formalization, but it sounds like you’re close to the Joke Incompleteness Theorem. Gödel would be proud.

  2. “that joke about the roomful of comedians who refer to jokes by their numbers.” Also known as “Number 1”. Although I heard it first set in a prison. You can find your own link to it.

  3. “We live in an age of science and abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ‘the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.”
    (Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934, p. 1). Somehow relevant, I think.

  4. Just in case someone is lost, here’s the joke.

    Three comedians are shooting the breeze at the back of a nightclub after a late gig. They’ve heard one another’s material so much, they’ve reached the point where they don’t need to say the jokes anymore to amuse each other – they just need to refer to each joke by a number.

    “Number 37!” cracks the first comic, and the others break up.
    “Number 53!” says the second guy, and they howl.
    Finally, it’s the third comic’s turn. “44!” he quips. He gets nothing.
    “What?” he asks, “Isn’t 44 funny?”
    “Sure, it’s usually hilarious,” they answer. “But not the way you tell it…”

    • In another long-lived variant, someone says “123”, and somebody laughs especially loud and long.

      When he recovers, he explains: “I’ve not heard that one before!”

  5. They do something akin to “jokes by the numbers” at the comedy hour at the “Asian” retreat.A small finite # is all that’s required.

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