Comic Encounters with the Physical World II

Standing in front of my bathroom medicine cabinet, I heard the faint tinkling sound of a small object bouncing inside it. I opened the cabinet to explore, and all of my shaving equipment fell out into the sink. The sound I’d heard was one of the tiny plastic supports that holds up the particleboard shelves spontaneously popping out and falling to the shelf below.

Odd Classroom Moments

Earlier this week while lecturing to my senior seminar, I uttered the following sentence: “Being sober is always worse.”

When the students laughed at this, I was jolted out of my concentration and quickly realized how ridiculous I sounded. There is a reasonable explanation. I was describing one of the features of relative addiction theory, as proposed by psychologists Howard Rachlin, Gene Heyman, and others. But to my students it sounded like I was expressing a personal preference for drunkenness.