Amusing Engineering Recruitment Poster

[cepheid]

Maybe I have a quirky sense of humour, but I found the poster on this webpage (also attached here) to be hilarious:

http://www.engineering.ubc.ca/prospective_students/undergraduate/index.php

It's especially funny that it comes as an illustration on a webpage that essentially attempts to tackle the question, "What does an engineer do?" My friend came up with an amusing caption for it:

"When you're computing the trajectory of a snowboarder who's in the middle of an awesome jump, be sure to take into consideration the accelerating universe."


Maybe the good members of PF can do even better?

I know some people may need an explanation, but that would ruin the joke for those who don't. So I've hidden it:

Spoiler

The equation on the poster is the Einstein Field Equation from general relativity, which expresses the relationship between the curvature/geometry of spacetime, and its mass/energy content. This version includes Einstein's infamous "cosmological constant", whose presence is now used to explain the observed accelerated expansion of the universe. I do understand that the equation is central to theory the explains what gravity is, and that this poster is depicting a situation in which gravity is important. HOWEVER, I can assure that no engineer has ever had to deal with this equation in his career, or even his/her schooling for that matter (and I'm not trying to belittle engineers at all with that statement. It's just not too relevant for most of the physical systems they deal with). Therefore its presence on a webpage that is supposed to explain "what engineering deals with" is especially absurd. Not only that, but the actual subject matter of the poster is specially-designed crash pad for snowboarders, which makes it even more incongruous.

 

[Evo]

Nice catch.