Joke of the Day

The following sentence is from an article about Larry Squire, a neuroscientist at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Diego.

[About Squire:]He is a leading investigator of the organization and structure of mammalian memory and pioneered the brain-based distinction between declarative and procedural memory, or as he later refined it, between declarative and nondeclarative memory systems.

What got me chuckling, and of course, a reporter wrote the article, not Professor Squire, was the word in the above quote: "refined." In the context, and to a non-scientist, the opposite of refined seems to be a better description.  Quite apart from the general giggles descriptions of academic stuff can produce.

The Backyard

One man found a treasure in his backyard. He dug up a gold lantern.
But he did not dig up any candles, so the lantern was of little use.