First, let’s go into some background on the Comcast case.  A year or so ago, Comcast decided that its network was being congested by too much P2P traffic; namely, traffic from the BitTorrent P2P protocol.  So, they decided that they would clear their network of this congestion by carefully denying BitTorrent connections.  They did this by looking into the traffic that BitTorrent was sending over the network, and sending back false information so that connections to peers would fail.  The actual details of how this was done is outside the point of this post.

After some outrage from Comcast customers who used BitTorrent, the FCC decided it would step in and tell Comcast to stop or suffer consequences.  As soon as this happened, there was some question about whether or not the FCC actually had the power to do this.  But, the case went to court and a judge decided that the FCC did have the power to do this, and that Comcast had to stop denying BitTorrent connections in this way.  This was a major win for users of the Internet: the court decision basically meant that your ISP can’t deny you from accessing information on the Internet.

However, the case was appealed by Comcast because that’s just the way the US legal system works.  The appeals court reversed the decision of the first court, and decided the FCC did not have this power, which is true.  Currently, the FCC does not have power to do anything about network management on the Internet.  Because of this, their decision to sanction Comcast for shaping the network was not allowed by any law.  So, the clear answer to this conundrum is to have Congress pass a law which would give the FCC this power, right?

In my opinion, yes.  This is the essence of Net Neutrality: give the FCC the power to force ISPs to be neutral, that is, to allow users to access any website, with any protocol.  This is the current spirit of the Internet: that anyone can access any part of it, and that it’s easy for someone to create a new site that becomes an overnight sensation.  The idea of an open Internet is not possible without Net Neutrality.  So, why hasn’t this been an issue in the past?

Probably because it’s never needed to be an issue.  As users start using more bandwidth, ISPs are looking for ways to get more money.  If there is no law forcing the net to be neutral, then ISPs can manage their network however they want.  Let’s say, for example, that your ISP partners with Google and Wikipedia.  Your ISP’s basic package will allow you to access these two sites.  Want to use Bing, or Yahoo!?  That’ll be an extra $20 a month.  Want to access any website you want?  It’ll cost you.  We’ve created a situation where innovation is stifled on the greatest frontier for innovation.

One of the great things that has come out of the Internet is small businesses.  A small business can easily create a website with a good product, and become big.  Without Net Neutrality, this becomes very difficult.  A small business would first have to give some money to your ISP in order for you to be able to get to their site.  But, remember that there are multiple ISPs, and the small business would have to pay all of them to reach all their potential customers.

It’s possible, however, that competition wouldn’t allow this to happen.  One ISP would have to be “the first” to implement a pricing scheme like this.  If consumers voted with their dollars and switched ISP if this happened, then ISPs everywhere would be sent a message that this is no way to run a business.  Unfortunately, however, I have a feeling that most people would just go along with it without knowing any better.  After all, the big sites that people actually use would be able to afford the fees an ISP would put on them to get to their user base.

So, what do we do?  Check out http://www.savetheinternet.com/ .  Find out what net neutrality really means, and join the fight to keep the net neutral!

[Note: I had originally written this post on April 11.  I think it's finished, and reading over it, it does seem finished.  I'm really not sure why I never published it.  Perhaps I was going to add more... I just don't remember now!  Oh, well... better late than never.  News since this post: Google and Verizon's Net Neutrality proposal has many outraged.  I haven't looked into it much, but I'll see if I can poke around it a bit more and write a post about my thoughts.]

Eventually, I decided it would be fun to go see Inception at the midnight premier.   The only other movies I’ve seen at their midnight premiers are Harry Potter 6, and Avatar.  Both were just awesome movie-going experiences.  If you’ve never seen a movie at midnight, it’s really something you should try once.

Anyway, I’m glad I went to see Inception, because it really is a great movie!  The problem is… seeing it so early left me no one to discuss it with.  So, I’ve been scouring the Internet for opinions and discussions.  After reading quite a bit, and fueled by inspiration from an article on CinemaBlend, I’ve decided to write my own small FAQ for the movie Inception.

DISCLAIMER: This article contains major spoilers.  Please, please, please do not read this until you’ve seen Inception.  The film is very enjoyable if you go in with an open mind.  Reading too much about it before seeing it could kill the whole experience.

What is limbo?
This seems to be a very confusing point.  I can’t claim the view I hold as my own, because I read it somewhere, but I don’t remember where, so I can’t give credit.  Let’s make this clear, though: limbo is not a description of a place. Limbo is a description of a state of mind.  Limbo is where your mind goes when you forget that you’re dreaming.  For most of us, this is the normal dream world (kind of).  You brain enters limbo when you, for example, die within a dream within a dream, you forget you’re dreaming, so your brain enters limbo.  Because you died, you expect to go back to reality, but really, there’s another layer of dream left, so you get stuck in limbo.

How does your brain get “burnt out” in limbo?
This is a tricky one, and I hope I’m getting it right.  You can only get burnt out by coming back to reality.  The problem is that your brain thinks you’ve experienced many, many years, while in reality, you’ve only experienced a couple hours.  The sudden realization that you’re not old can cause your brain to get confused and “burn out”.

How did Saito get to limbo?
Saito was shot in level 1, the van, but died in level 3, the snow fort.  So, his brain got stuck in limbo, where he lived until he became an old man and Cobb rescued him.

In the end — dream world, or not?
This is the trickiest question of the movie, and I really do believe it’s up to individual beliefs.  However, let me attempt to explain my viewing of the movie.  In the end, Cobb is in limbo, meaning he is still in the dream world.  I think that when he was put under the first time by the chemist, in order to test the formula, we never actually saw him wake up.  Evidence:

• After this, we never actually see the top fall once spun.  Right away, Cobb tries to spin the top, but it’s knocked off the table, so Cobb can’t finish his test.
• Cobb’s children at the end are the same age as in his mind.  Cobb has been gone for quite a while.  Shouldn’t his children have aged at least a bit?  At the young age they are, even a couple months should show a difference in appearance.

Just to be fair, though, here’s some evidence against this theory:

• Cobb never seems Mal unless we see him go into a dream.  Refute: perhaps Mal only appears once he’s two layers into the dream world.  Or perhaps his subconscious just doesn’t let her interfere.
• Cobb isn’t wearing a wedding ring at the end of the movie.  If you pay attention carefully, Cobb is always wearing his wedding ring when he’s in the dream world.  At the end of the movie, however, Cobb’s wedding ring is absent.  Refute: this could be a product of Cobb accepting his wife’s death.  Even though he’s still in limbo, she’s no longer bothering his subconscious
• We see the top wobble a bit at the end.  Refute: kind of hard to say on this one.  Although, there are some that claim the top didn’t wobble.  It was very subtle.  I think that even in the dream world, the top wobbles while it’s spinning forever.  We just didn’t see it long enough to balance itself out.

And that’s all I’ve got for now.  Something else confuse you?  Let me know, I’ll see if I can answer it.

Wait… WHAT?  The hardcover is actually CHEAPER than the Kindle version?  I’m going to ignore shipping for argument’s sake.  This means that it costs less to cut down a tree, turn that tree into paper, print words on the paper, and glue the pieces of paper together than it does to send you a bunch of ones and zeroes.

Can anyone explain this to me?  I mean, really.  I’m pretty sure writers type on computers in today’s world, and I’m sure Amazon has some software to automatically take whatever and turn it into a Kindle book.  Of course you’re in part paying for the development of such software, but there’s a LOT more to a hardcover book than there is to a digital copy of the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the Kindle is an awesome platform, and I hope we see more and more e-readers.  But, until the pricing scheme gets fixed… they’re not going to take off.

Imagine that light is neither a particle nor a wave.  Instead, we only see light because there is a potential path for light to travel between whatever object we’re looking at, and our eyes.  So then, what is dark?  Dark is the impossibility of light.

Now, I had a couple problems with this.  First off, if this is the case, then where does the light come from?  The only answer I was given was basically “we don’t know”.  But, I think I’ve solved the puzzle that is this proposition.  Again, let’s imagine that light is neither a particle nor a wave.  Instead, think of light as a field of potential.  If you don’t know what a potential field is, think about gravity or voltage.  We can describe both of these as a type of potential, and observe the potential compared to other places in the field.  These fields are not local fields, they are everywhere, but they are very weak away form the sources.

So, what is the source for light’s potential field?  Well, this is going to sound goofy, but light sources.  When describing a potential field, we can think of two different things that could set up the field: sources or sinks.  With voltage, with think about potential sources and sinks.  Electrons are sources, and protons are sinks.  With gravity, we really only think about sinks, and everything is a sink.  Everything will move toward a gravitational sink due to gravity.  With light, we can have both — potential sources: the sun, light bulbs, etc.; potential sinks: black dye, etc.

However, I’m not sure if this really gets rid of the idea of particles and waves.  For example, with gravity, we currently know that mass somehow affects other mass, but we’re not quite sure how.  We theorize, however, that there is a particle, the higgs boson, that “carries” gravity.  The same goes for voltage: we need charged particles in order to interact with the field.  How, then, do objects and our eyes interact with the field in order to affect and see light?

This is only one of the problems I have with this theory.  If potential fields are caused by particle interactions, then we’re really not changing the way we think about light.  I also have to wonder if math would work out if this were the case.  For example, would energy and mass still be related by the famous e=mc²?  How else would this affect math we’ve experimentally determined to be true?

Or does that really matter?  We know that Newton’s law of gravity, F=(Gm₁m₂)/r², works very well to compute the gravitational force. However, it is not the complete picture.  Perhaps it’s the same with light: we’ve discovered equations that accurately predict certain things, but we’re not looking at the complete picture until we assume that light is a potential field.

Besides that, can we test this theory?  Any scientific theory that can’t be tested is basically useless.  The example that comes to mind is String Theory.  With String Theory, we have beautiful math that could describe a bunch of things.  However, the theory is very convoluted, and we haven’t been able to come up with a way to test it.  So, it’s a useless theory.  Why, then, are people working on it?  Well, people who believe in String Theory are looking for a way to test it.  But, that’s beside the point.  If we can’t test the theory that light is a potential field, it has no use to us, and there’s not much point in looking at it, even.

On top of all this, I have to question what difference this view of light would make.  How would viewing light as a potential field alter how we view the universe?  If the answer is that this would greatly change the way we look at the universe, then perhaps we should look into this a bit.  If it proves to be true, we could learn a lot about our universe.

However, until then, this is just a fun thought experiment, and an interesting example of what is, and what isn’t a valid scientific theory.  As a final note, I should say that this idea was proposed to me not as a scientific question, but as a philosophical one.  Just need to point that out.

In this blog post, I’m going to attempt to explain, very simply, what defragging a harddrive actually does, and why you should, or shouldn’t, do it.  Some of my more technically inept readers may think I’m oversimplifying things by not dealing with the different filesystems, not explaining exactly how data is written, etc., but that’s not the point of this post.  My goal is to explain, in the simplest terms possible, how your harddrive works, and what defragging the harddrive does, in terms of how data is stored on the drive.  To start, I’ll explain the typical way data is stored on the drive, then I’ll talk about what types of situations create harddrive fragmentation, next I’ll explain why fragmentation is bad for your harddrive, and, finally, I’ll give an argument about whether or not you should run a defrag tool.

First, let me attempt to explain what defragging a harddrive actually does.  Even though harddrives are disks, a good way to visualize them is by laying the data bits (all the ones and zeros) out in a line.  If you take this line of data, and curve it into a spiral, you’ll get your harddrive back.  But, because it’s easier to demonstrate things by using a line, I’ll assume that you can understand that even though your data is curved on the disk, we can pretend it’s all lined up.  There are two main parts to data on your harddrive: a table telling the computer where files are on the harddrive, what they’re named, how big they are, etc.; and the actual data of the files.

When you write a file to the harddrive, two things happen: one, the harddrive adds an entry to its file table with information about the file; two, the data of the file is written in the appropriate place on the harddrive.  Because when you get a new harddrive, there’s no data on it, files are written as far to the left as they can be.  So, if you write five small files to your harddrive, the information might look like this on the drive:
AAAAAABBBBBBBBBCCCCCCCDDDDDDDDDDDDEEEEEEEE
As “A” takes six units of space; “B”, 9; “C”, 7; “D”, 12; “E”, 8.  You’ll also notice that all the files are continuous.  This is what your harddrive likes.  Generally, you will read a file on your drive from start to finish, in order.  If the file is stored on your harddrive that way, there’s very little work to be done.  Your harddrive moves to the beginning of the file, and reads the data in order.  Now let’s say you delete A, C, and E, and write a big file F:
FFFFFFBBBBBBBBBFFFFFFFDDDDDDDDDDDDFFFFFFFF
As you can see, the file “F” takes up all the space that A, C, and E did. That’s 21 units of disk space, for those keeping track.  If your harddrive wants to read the file “F”, it has a lot of work to do!  It has to now take some time to move over files B and D in order to read F from start to finish.  We call F a “fragmented” file, because fragments of it are stored on different places in the harddrive.

This is the main way fragmentation is created: deleting files, and creating new ones.  Most of the time, your drive will try to store data as close to the beginning of the drive as possible.  So, if you find yourself creating and deleting files often, you probably have a fragmented drive.  In this way, fragmentation is pretty unavoidable.  Bigger drives are less prone to fragmentation, because there will be more empty space at the end of the drive, but most drives will eventually end up with some fragmented files.

So, why is fragmentation bad for your harddrive?  Well, the problem is that harddrives aren’t made to last forever.  And, depending on how fragmented your drive is, you can greatly shorten the life of your drive.  The more you have to move around on the drive to read data, the shorter your drive will last.

Finally… should you defrag or not, and, if so, how often?  In general… no, you probably don’t need to defrag.  Windows Vista and Windows 7 actually come with utilities to help prevent fragmentation in the first place.  On Windows XP, there is a special defrag tool.  There’s a possibility that you’ll notice a speed increase after defragging your harddrive, but most likely, the difference will be negligible.  All the defrag tool does is rearrange files on the drive so they’re all nice and in order.  If we were to take the example from above, your drive would look like this after defragging it:
BBBBBBBBBDDDDDDDDDDDDFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
However, defragging every now and then won’t hurt the drive.  If you really want to take the time to go through the process, it’s probably safe to do once every six months or so.  Any more often than that and you risk putting too much stress on the drive, and actually shortening the life of the drive even more.

As a final note, because Solid State Drives are becoming more popular, it should be noted that you should NOT defrag a solid state drive for any reason.  Solid state drives have fundamental differences in the way they work from standard harddrives, and defragging a solid state drive WILL cause a reduction in drive life.

Another interesting fact about The Hurt Locker is that it is the lowest grossing movie to ever win the title.  The current estimated gross is about $16 million.  Although, the low gross of the movie could be, in part, due to the limited release of the film.  Again, this isn’t something that should, or does, matter, it’s just an interesting tidbit.

One final note on The Hurt Locker.  The director of The Hurt Locker is Kathryn Bigelow, one of James Cameron’s ex-wives.  Apparently, Kathryn Bigelow was debating on whether or not she should actually direct the film.  So, she called her good friend James Cameron, and he convinced her to do the movie.  It’s quite possible that if The Hurt Locker had not been in the running for best picture, Avatar might have one (although, history isn’t on Avatar‘s side, read my previous post).  James Cameron, however, has said that he really liked The Hurt Locker, and even voted for it to win best picture, instead of Avatar.

So, there’s a blog post that’s about a week overdue.  Now, on to write a more technical blog post!

So, while I don’t think of myself as much of a movie critic, and I haven’t even seen all 10 best picture nominees myself, I’m still going to attempt to throw my prediction for who will win best picture at the Oscars this year.  Last year, I went to AMC’s “Best Picture Showcase”, and was able to see all five best picture nominees.  This year, while AMC is running the event again, I won’t be able to attend.  So, I’m not sure I’ll ever get the chance to see all ten nominees, but I’m going to attempt to have an opinion about all the movies anyway.

Before I start, I should note that I am disappointed at the Oscars this year.  Having ten movies get nominated instead of the normal five does not “open the field”.  Instead, it just removes from the title of “best picture nominee”.  Even if a movie doesn’t win the award, it usually still gets bragging rights that it was one of the five best pictures of the year.  However, being in the top ten, while still impressive, is less of a title.  By attempting to give films more credit, they have actually removed the credit from the films that actually deserve it.

Anyway, the list of the ten nominations is as follows:

1. Avatar
2. The Blind Side
3. District 9
4. An Education
5. The Hurt Locker
6. Inglourious Basterds
7. Precious
8. A Serious Man
9. Up
10. Up in the Air

Now, let’s look at what the list actually consists of.  For starters, we see a few rarities on the list: two Sci-Fi movies and an animated feature stick out.  Generally, these two types of movies are left behind by the Oscars, because they lack the mass appeal of the other genres (drama is a favorite).  Which is stupid: there are plenty of Sci-Fi movies or animated films that are better than other genres.  Many people were disappointed at last year’s nominees because “WALL-E” wasn’t nominated.  It seems that, with the presence of “Up”, the Oscars are trying to “make up” for that.  However, at the same time, it can be seen as the only reason that Sci-Fi and animated films have snuck on to the list is due to expanding the list to ten movies, instead of the usual five.

So, who will win?  A lot of people are thinking that, with the momentum of its best motion picture win at the Golden Globe awards, Avatar is a big contender.  As much as I loved the movie Avatar (just search my blog for “Avatar” — I loved it), I doubt it will win Best Picture.  I would LIKE for it to win Best Picture, but I’ll be sightly surprised if it actually happens.  As previously stated, the Academy just doesn’t seem to like Sci-Fi movies, and Avatar falls under that category, and I have to wonder if it would even be on the list if they had stuck to only five nominations, instead of changing it to ten.

The same goes for Up.  It was a great film, but I find it hard to believe that it actually has a chance at winning best picture.  With Up, the Academy also has to fear losing its actors: animated films require only voice actors.  Part of the goal of the academy is to keep actors with jobs, and giving Up the title of “best picture” would lead to more animated films, and less jobs for “body actors”.

Finally, I’ll lump District 9 into this whole “won’t win” category.  Again, it was a great film, but I just don’t see it winning best picture.  I also kind of worry that if a Sci-Fi film wins best picture, we’ll see directors flooding to the genre, and attempting to bring more people into the fan base.  The fact remains that Sci-Fi is not a genre for everyone, and Avatar is the first movie I’ve heard people who normally don’t like Sci-Fi say they like.  So, if a Sci-Fi or animated film is going to win Best Picture, it’s going to be Avatar.

Since this won’t happen, what do we have left?  Well, out of the seven left, I’ve only actually seen The Blind Side.  But, once again, that won’t stop me from making a decision!  I also find it hard to believe that The Blind Side will actually win.  I don’t think it was a bad movie, I just don’t think it’s “Best Picture”-worthy.

Out of those remaining, my vote goes to either Up in the Air, or The Hurt Locker, and out of those two, I would choose Up in the Air.  One by one: An Education sounds a little like The Reader kind of, not really, and it just seems like a movie that won’t win; Inglourious Basterds is, from what I understand, a comedy about Nazis… no offense to anyone, but I just don’t see that winning best picture; Precious is based on a novel, and, in my opinion, the best picture winner has to be something original; A Serious Man is described on IMDB as “A dark comedy”… say no more, it’s not going to win.

Why not The Hurt Locker?  It’s about the war in Iraq, and that can be a touchy subject.  Again, I haven’t seen it, but I just have a feeling that Up in the Air has more of a chance than The Hurt Locker.

Writing all this gives me an idea: “The Uninformed Critic” — writing movie reviews based on what I can find out about them through IMDB and Wikipedia.  Has anyone done this yet?  I might need to start a new series of posts here… We’ll see how that goes…

Anyway, to wrap up, my prediction for Best Picture nominee is Up in the Air.  We’ll see how I do!

First off, let me say that whether Wave succeeds or not makes little difference for Google.  Google is a company with enough resources to work on a major product, even if that product is a failure.  Google wanted Wave to replace e-mail.  This is where the whole “Federated Wave Servers” idea came from.  In order for Wave to be the new standard, companies had to be able to run their own Wave servers — Google couldn’t control it.  Besides that, Google already controls a good chunk of the e-mail market with GMail, so this was mostly a fun experiment for them.

But, still, it seems like something that should have succeed… or, at least, lasted a good amount of time.  But, Wave has quickly lost momentum and died in everyone’s mind.  The problem is that Google stopped innovating, and the Wave server never became very popular.  I don’t believe there have been any feature additions to Wave since it launched, and I’m not sure there’s any good source other than Google Wave to get a Wave account.

Wave died because Google seems to have abandoned it.  They released a product, and they appeared to have stopped working on it.  Wave is something Google needed to not only push to corporations, but also continue innovating, and releasing new features, and this never happened.  Google was unable to explain to potential customers why they need Wave, and this is where it failed.  I think this is slightly unfortunate, but I’m not very surprised.  While e-mail is antiquated, it still works, and it’s going to take a lot of push in order to move away from it.  Google didn’t seem to have any major corporations backing Wave, which also contributed to the failure.

Who knows… maybe we’ll see Google attempt to revive Wave with some new features.  Maybe it will come back for a couple months… But Google will have to work really hard to get the momentum and excitement about Wave going again.

I do, by the way, have 12 Wave invites.  I suppose you can comment here or contact me if you want one.  That’s a dangerous statement to say on the Internet.  Although Wave has died, I have a feeling there are people who never got in on the game, and are still looking for invites, only to find a product that no one uses.

I, obviously, am just bitter because I did NOT bring a camera.

Anyway, I was quite disappointed in how people used their digital cameras, and I now feel that it is my duty to educate the public on how to take pictures at a concert, or any other event that involves a stage and stage lighting.  I saw many people take a picture, then look at the result, disappointed.  Others will simply get home and realize that none of their pictures turned out very well.  Without going into much technical detail, I present to you… how to take pictures at a concert!

The easiest thing to do is to just turn off flash.  As soon as a digital camera realizes that it’s going to use flash, it tones down all light sensitivity settings.  I realize why the temptation to leave flash on “auto” is there, but your pictures will turn out better if it’s off.  Flash is made for very close objects.  On a stage, with lights that are brighter than your cameras flash, your best bet is to just let the stage lighting do its work.  Objects on the stage are too far away to actually be affected by the flash.  Additionally, since your camera tones down its light sensitivity, you’re going to get darker pictures.

Another tip is to turn the ISO up.  A higher ISO means higher light sensitivity.  However, beware of turning the ISO up too high.  Digital cameras often have a lot of noise in the darker parts of an image when using a high ISO setting.  Top out your ISO at around 800.  Anything above that usually results in noticeable noise.

However, for best results, you should just use manual mode.  Any good digital camera has a manual mode of some sort.  Manual mode with manual focus is a very powerful tool.  Go learn how to adjust the settings on your camera and use that when taking pictures at a concert.  Knowing how to use manual mode properly will ensure you’ll get the best pictures at a concert.

So, the next time you go to a concert… please turn OFF the flash on your camera.  It’s annoying, and you’ll get better pictures without it.

There’s been one joke in particular we’ve been quoting quite a bit.  Originally, we were quoting it because it didn’t really make sense to any of us, and we thought it was just kind of stupid.  In the play, only one character (Albert Einstein) actually laughs at the joke.  Perhaps, though, we though, we were just missing something.  Before I go any further, I should probably share the joke.  It goes like this:

A man goes into a bakery and says, “Can you mail a pie?”  The baker says, “Yeah, I think we could.”  Then the man says, “Well, could you bake me a pie in the shape of the letter E?”  And the baker says, “Yeah, I think we could do that.  Come back tomorrow, and we’ll have it for you.”  So the man comes back the next day, and the baker shows him the pie.  The man says, “You idiot!  That’s a big E.  I wanted a small e, a small e.”  So the baker says, “No problem, come back tomorrow, and I’ll see what I can do.”  So the man comes back the next day, and the baker shows him the pie.  The man says, “Perfect… it’s perfect.”  Then the baker says, “So where do you want me to send it?”  And the man says, “You know what… I think I’ll eat it here.”

By the silence on stage, it’s immediately clear that none of the characters understand the joke.  By the silence in the audience, it’s clear that none of them get it either.  Alright, there was some laughter… due to not thinking the joke was funny, and a humorous situation being created due to a non-funny joke being told.  I’ll even admit that at first, I didn’t get it.  In fact, I’m not even sure if it’s a joke that’s meant to be “got.”  But, there are some interpretations we can take that make the joke funny.

1. The choice of “E”

This is the reason that Einstein points out during the play.  He notes that the choice of the letter “E” is perfect, and any other letter wouldn’t have worked.  He goes on to explain most letters, and it becomes clear that the joke would clearly not have worked with any other letter.  However, does this really make it funny?  I’m not convinced that having a pie shaped as a letter is a funny situation in and of itself.

2. Pi and e

As you might have thought of by now, the joke can be considered funny because of the mathematical constants associated with it: π and e.  This creates a situation where we have slightly subtle humor, and it makes sense that only Einstein understands the joke.  However, it does seem strange that this, then, isn’t the reason for him explaining why the joke is funny.  So, while this does add some humor to the anecdote, it’s hard to say this is the definitive reason why the joke is funny.

3. e shaped π

OK, here’s where the really subtle humor comes in.  π and e are both considered “Transcendental Numbers” — that is, a number which can not be expressed with algebra.  Both π and e, it turns out, fit this description: there’s no way to describe their exact value other than saying “π” or “e“.  However, we figured out that e is transcendental before we figured out that π is transcendental.  Additionally, the proof that π is transcendental is based on the proof that e is transcendental.  In this way, e “shaped” π.  Again, this is very subtle humor.

So, what was the original meaning of the joke?  With no way to contact Steve Martin, I really can’t be sure.  My guess is that the joke wasn’t really meant to be funny at all, and was just meant to set up a situation where one character tells a joke that clearly isn’t funny, so another character can randomly find it funny.  However, there is some more humor to be found in the setup.