The Great Cosmic Joke - Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion

The Rule of Threes.

Threes rule many aspects of both the Macrofolly and the Microfolly. As our exploration of the comedic and tragic connections within The Great Cosmic Joke continues, we'll have more to laugh knowingly at.

Earth is the third planet from the sun. This position appears to have a deeper significance.

The surface of the earth - is one third land, two thirds water.

Three Primary Colors - using the three primary colors all other colors can be produced including white.

Atomic Number Three - Lithium deuteride is the explosive material of the hydrogen bomb and may eventually be the fuel of controlled fusion reactors. There is great power in three.

Three rocket stages - the number of stages of a rocket necessary to best achieve orbit (shockwave required, very large download) for heavy loads.

Triangulate - a way using X, Y, and Z values, of determining surface features or one's exact location on an oblate spheroid (like Earth, silly). Triangulations have the property that the circumcircle of any triangle in the triangulation contains no other vertices in its interior, interpolated values are only computed from nearby points. AND triangles have three sides.

The "rule of three" in comparativism: Tone test, Text comparison, Verb acquistion.

Rule of Three formula for determining a patient's "confidence intervals" following a medical procedure(a confidence interval is a range of values for a statistical estimate that quantifies the uncertainty caused by sampling error). If you observe n patients, and none of these patients have an adverse event, then a 95% confidence interval for the probability of an adverse event goes from zero to 3/n.

Source: Children's Mercy Hospital

Rule of Three in US Federal Hiring: requires managers to select new employees from among the top three available candidates referred to them.

Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion

First Law: The orbit of a planet around the Sun is an ellipse with the Sun at one focus.

Second Law: A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time.

Third Law: The Third Law will allow one to calculate the length of a planet's year. The squares of the sidereal periods of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their semimajor axes.

Other Three-Rule Mechanisms of Joke Structure (Adapted from Greg Dean's College of Comedy Knowledge)

Decoy: The misdirecting assumption in a joke's setup which creates the 1st story and is shattered by the reinterpretation.

Reinterpretation: An unexpected meaning or function of the connector that shatters the decoy assumption.

Connector: At the center of a joke, the one thing perceived in at least two ways. One way of perceiving it constitutes the decoy assumption; the second way of perceiving it reveals the reinterpretation.

The Three Stooges
Moe, Larry and Curly; Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

"Each sequence needs a beginning, a middle and an end. There is something magical about "threes" in dramatic and comedic structure. A joke, too, has a beginning, a middle and an end, even if it's only two lines. " - Bob Shayne