On Friday I was in New York for some expert witness consulting work. I had the pleasure of being deposed (my favorite thing to do, save having a root canal). Strangely enough, though, the good thing about this job is the lawyers.
IP lawyers, especially those that might be working on a case that would require the services of a lithographer, are not your normal breed of lawyers. Most of them started out as engineers or scientists. And even after decades of wearing suits and working in New York high-rises with views of the Statue of Liberty, it only takes a little encouragement for them to show you their true geeky nature. So on Friday, a high-powered lawyer in an expensive suit told me this Limerick from memory:
Concerning the nature of light,
It is hard to know which is right.
Is it particle or waves?
In both ways it behaves,
But we know it is absent at night.
How can you help but like a guy who has that poem at the tip of his tongue?
I once knew a girl named Miss Bright
Who could travel much faster than light.
She left one day,
In an Einsteinian way,
And came back on the previous night.
Not a limerick, but I had reason to use this today when Mark came into my office with coffee stains all over his notebook:
“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.” Paul Erdos
I guess in Jeff Byers’ case it is "A theoretical physical chemist is a device for turning strong coffee into lithography comprehension."
You really have to love a guy who takes the time to tell you a limerick while someone is paying him $500 an hour…
That’s a $2 limerick by my calculation, assuming it takes 15 seconds to say it.
A lithographer named Jeff once toted
A cup full of coffee creosoted
It started quite clean
With washing would gleam
But Jeff liked drinking it coated
From my brother, a lawyer.
Prosecution is boring as hell,
but the tedium pays pretty well.
So I go home at five
and the checks still arrive
And I claim that it’s all pretty swell.
All,
As the source ofhe original limerick, and in the interest of full disclosure, I heard it from my dad. Turns out the guy who wrote it was a researcher at Bell Labs named Barry Weissman. My dad didn’t stay in touch with him, but I checked my 1995 AT&T Bell Labs directory (the last one printed) and he was still there then.
Jim