Wednesday, February 01, 2006

The Cognitive Science Cafe

Here is the menu. Some are pretty funny, though most of them require more than a little familiarity with the field to make sense. Here's my favorite:
The Keil Transformation Sandwich
A prototype with the jelly and peanut butter surgically removed, cucumber and cream cheese injected, and wearing a costume of white bread.
The "Prototype" is peanut butter and jelly on white bread, of course. Is the Keil Transformation Sandwich still a Prototype?

If you get "The Keil Transformation Sandwich," you shouldn't have any trouble with the others.

6 comments:

Bora Zivkovic said...

Those are so funny. I am surprised how many I grokked.

Chris said...

Glad you got them. Some of them are philosophy jokes, so I figured people would get those, but some of them are pretty specific. I doubt many people actually know who Susan Carey is, for instance, so a sandwich named after her might not be so funny for them.

Anonymous said...

You know you're a huge cog sci nerd when you get almost all of them (because you know a good number of the people!), and you read them aloud to your girlfriend, who also laughs and gets them...

D'oh.

Chris said...

Tim, ha! You've obviously done a better job of explaining cognitive science to those close to you than I have. I don't think anyone I'm around regularly who's not a cognitive scientist would get the more obscure ones (Keil, Carey, Spelke, and the like).

Anonymous said...

Aha! The trick is to date other cog sci people from the beginning :-)

Chris Chatham said...

This is great! All my department mates now have a copy...

The menu actually looks pretty tasty too, though of course I'm partial to the california connectionist ;)