Category Archives: Humor

What Does the Spleen Do?

Posted on December 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

Those comedians at Harvard Medical School address the age-old question:

John Cleese explains the brain

Monty Python’s John Cleese does a remarkable job of explaining the human brain.

Cleese is an English actor, comedian, writer, and producer known for his brilliance and wacky sense of humor. He manages to produce a very authentic-sounding lecture in non-English. There is only one complete sentence and it comes at the very end of his lecture.

(I’m afraid this is what I sound like to some of my students!)

For even more fun, turn on the closed captioning in YouTube and watch as the computer tries to make sense of him!

1 Comment

Posted on April 7, 2013 in Humor, Neurology

Dr. Bugs births a baby

Posted on December 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

I don’t know if studying bugs make some people buggy or if they’re just born buggy to study bugs… but I will warn you that Dr. Bugs, or Mark Moffett, as he’s known to some, has a love of bugs that is bigger than some of us might find reasonable. The ecologist, explorer, and photojournalist recently let a bug hatch from the back of his hand. Warning: There are several things in this video to make you squeal, but don’t let that keep you from watching all the way to the end.

The elements on Google

Posted on September 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Tom Lehrer is a singer-songwriter and mathematician who became well-known in the 1950s and 60s for writing off-the-wall smart songs. This little animation uses one of his well-known songs in which he sings the names of the elements on the periodic table. The tune is the “Major-General’s Song” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera, Pirates of Penzance. Screen shots from Google illustrate the song, making it fun to watch, and at the same time, showing how useful Google is as a research tool.