The hidden mechanics of humor?

Humor is the embodiment of a latent method that discovers false inference in the brain. What an intriguing thought! Does this imply that a logician and a comedian never mix up? I simply couldn't resist to re-quote the Slashdot post [1]:

"The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom. But why do humans have a sense of humor in the first place? Cognitive scientist (and former programmer) Matthew Hurley says humor (or mirth, in research-speak) is intimately linked to thinking and is a critical task in human cognition because a sense of humor keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality. 'We think the pleasure of humor, the emotion of mirth, is the brain's reward for discovering its mistaken inferences,' says Hurley, co-author of Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. With humor, the brain doesn't just discover a false inference - it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. For example, read the gag that's been voted the funniest joke in the world by American men. So why is this joke funny? Because it is misleading, containing a small, faulty assumption that opens the door to a costly mistake. Humor is 'when you catch yourself in an error, like looking for the glasses that happen to be on the top of your head. You've made an assumption about the state of the world, and you're behaving based on that assumption, but that assumption doesn't hold at all, and you get a little chuckle.'"

[1] http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/27/037237/the-science-of-humor

A giggly polymorphic view on stereotypes

Did you ever wonder why developers are so slow? How project managers can spend a day doing nothing? Or, why designer is a job title?

I guess most of you have a specific stereotyp in mind. But does this generalize to a broader crowd? Are stereotypes typical singleton objects by definition? Or should we introduce "conditional" stereotyps depending on the point of view ...

Let's put this literally into perspective:

I hope you did not expect something deep here ... :)

In a sense, this reminds me of Brave New World ... "I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid."