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I was never a big fan of dead baby jokes, gross jokes, truly tasteless jokes, or the like. Yet I’m quite capable of being disgusted and amused by things at the same time. Like that Post Log pic. (There was a pun intended there, by the way.)

Where do you find a turtle with no legs?
Right where you left it….

One of the things I’ve been reading lately is The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and teacher who worked on the Manhattan Project and was on the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. And, by all accounts, he was quite a character.

What do you call a cat with no legs?
It doesn’t matter, it won’t come to you. [To be fair, neither would a cat with legs....]

A recurring point in Feynman’s lectures is that a scientist must live with doubt. No matter how certain he thinks he is about a “fact”, he must keep an open mind to the possibility that some new evidence will be presented that will indicate that what we’ve known all along is totally wrong. That’s why scientists call what they “know” theories instead of facts.

What do you call it when you take a dog with no legs for a walk?
A drag….

A scientist, Feynman says, believes things with varying levels of certainty, but never 100% certain. Holding in mind that something is probably true (until new evidence leads us to believe it probably is not) is like believing that something is both true and not true. Parents and teachers know what it’s like to see a behavior we should discourage. So we put on our stern faces and use our I-really-mean-it voices. We wag our fingers and shake our heads. And hope like hell we’re out of earshot when we bust a gut laughing at what the kid has done.