Collection of Science Jokes P2

[jack action]

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I love AI.

I can just enter my major bullet points for a document, and have AI create an elegant and comprehensive long form paper from those bullet points.

I send it to a colleague who then scans it with his or her AI and reduces it to the major bullet points.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It seems the internet has been training us for AI use all along - You never want to be polite to your AI.

According to Sam Altman, it costs tens of millions of dollars to process added politeness.

 

[fresh_42]

I love AI.

I can just enter my major bullet points for a document, and have AI create an elegant and comprehensive long form paper from those bullet points.

I send it to a colleague who then scans it with his or her AI and reduces it to the major bullet points.

Reminds me of Kishon. When chess computers came up, he let one of his figures say: "Buy a second computer and let them play against each other, while we are going to have a coffee."

 

[jack action]

 

[berkeman]

Edit/Adding link to XKCD 2848, "Breaker Box", https://xkcd.com/2848/ from Jonathan below. Thanks Jonathan.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

View attachment 367388

The terms of use for the XKCD website mean you should provide a link or give credit. That's XKCD 2848, "Breaker Box", https://xkcd.com/2848/

 

[berkeman]

The terms of use for the XKCD website mean you should provide a link or give credit. That's XKCD 2848, "Breaker Box", https://xkcd.com/2848/

Thanks Jonathan! I always include the attribution to the person posting it on FB or wherever, but it they posted it without attribution to the source, that's not good. I'll keep an eye out for that in the future.

 

[DaveC426913]

Thanks Jonathan! I always include the attribution to the person posting it on FB or wherever, but it they posted it without attribution to the source, that's not good. I'll keep an eye out for that in the future.

Not to pile-on but:

1. It is also customary with XKCD to add the alt text under the pic.

Alt: "Any electrician will warn you to first locate and flip the house's CAUSALITY circuit breaker before touching the CIRCUIT BREAKERS one."


2. XKCD attributions seem almost redundant at this point, it's so well known.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

Not to pile-on but:

1. It is also customary with XKCD to add the alt text under the pic.

Alt: "Any electrician will warn you to first locate and flip the house's CAUSALITY circuit breaker before touching the CIRCUIT BREAKERS one."

2. XKCD attributions seem almost redundant at this point, it's so well known.

My primary concern is that PF users should try to comply with any license conditions, so 1 is much less important and 2 is not a valid excuse. Obviously the original fault lay with the Facebook poster, but as this was obviously XKCD and I was aware of the license (as I have used other excellent XKCD comics myself in the past) I provided the appropriate link.

 

[fresh_42]

My primary concern is that PF users should try to comply with any license conditions

This can be not easy these days, especially as the origins are not always obvious. I'm very cautious about scientific copyright. So, for a while, I judged the legitimacy of references by their URL, you know, Western addresses can be trusted, Eastern not so much. That was a mistake. I have found a few copies of protected books on a university server in Scotland over time, and another American address that notoriously violates copyrights. So, if even serious material cannot be trusted, how much more jokes going viral?

 

[fresh_42]

References:

Andrew Gelman (2025)
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/.../string-theory.../
Examines the string-theory debate as a sociological alignment problem rather than a scientific one.

Peter Woit (2024) — “Susskind: String Theory is Not the Theory of the Real World”
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14059
Reports Susskind saying outright that string theory isn’t a theory of our world as it stands.

Peter Woit (2024)
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15206
Argues string theory persists institutionally despite having no empirical foothold.

Peter Woit (2023)
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14200
States that after decades the theory has not progressed toward describing the observed universe.

Peter Woit (2023)
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14321
Notes declining momentum in the Strings conference series as a sign of internal fatigue.
Physics World review of Grimstrup’s The Ant Mill (John Horgan://physicsworld.com/a/jesper-grimstrups-the-ant-mill-could-his-anti-string-theory-rant-do-string-theorists-a-favour/
Acknowledges that even harsh critiques reveal a widely recognized stagnation.

John HSabine Hossenfelder//johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-encounter-with-string-theorist-and-nave-realist-edward-witten
Highlights the disconnect between high theoretical elegance and lack of empirical grounding.

Sabine Hossenfelder (2022 lecture)
Search: Hossenfelder string theory wrong unscientific 2022
https://www.theguardian.com/.../physicist-sabine...
Asserts that a theory without testable predictions is not science but metaphysics.

Sabine Hossenfelder — Lost in Math (2018)
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/.../physicists-still...
Argues that aesthetic bias, not data, led high-energy physics into conceptual dead-ends.

Peter Woit on Susskind distancing from Krauss (c. 2018)
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4519
Interprets Susskind’s comments as a retreat from earlier claims that the multiverse could explain cosmology.

Philosophy of Physics (LSE, 2022)
https://philosophyofphysics.lse.ac.uk/.../10.31389/pop.100
Examines the landscape problem: if all universes are allowed, predictivity collapses.

IAI Magazine (2021)
https://iai.tv/articles/string-theory-under-fire-auid-2506
Critiques the long-standing institutional dominance of string theory despite its limited empirical return.
.
Scientific American (2019)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/.../supersymmetrys.../
Reports SUSY’s experimental collapse, removing a key hoped-for bridge between string theory and observation.

 

[fresh_42]

 

[fresh_42]

 

[berkeman]

 

[fresh_42]

 

[DaveC426913]

This is very Wile E. Coyote-esque.

 

[BillTre]

This is very Wile E. Coyote-esque.

Ha!

I have always found this similar relationship interesting.

Hella Planitia on Mars.
form this paper:

from wikipedia:
5 km deep! About 2,300 km (1,400 mi) in diameter!

Antipodal to the impact basin is a large disrupted area (Tharsis Bulge) contains several large volcanoes, including mount Olympus.

Maybe this is way there is no significant geomagnetic field left on Mars. Dynamo disrupted?

 

[DaveC426913]

Ha!

I have always found this similar relationship interesting.

Hella Planitia on Mars.
form this paper:
View attachment 367761
View attachment 367762

from wikipedia:
5 km deep! About 2,300 km (1,400 mi) in diameter!
View attachment 367763

Antipodal to the impact basin is a large disrupted area (Tharsis Bulge) contains several large volcanoes, including mount Olympus.

Maybe this is way there is no significant geomagnetic field left on Mars. Dynamo disrupted?

Yup. In my 'Everything Mars' phase I always thought that was cool. Made an interactive webpage of the topology (too bad it only worked for IE).

In my opinion, Valles Marineris was likely created at the same time, cracking like an egg shot with a bullet.

So its presence in the image would be anachronous:

 

[fresh_42]

 

[fresh_42]

 

[dextercioby]

 

[berkeman]

 

[BillTre]

From an online list of stupid stuff I saw:

 

[jbriggs444]

View attachment 184236

I have that T-shirt.

 

[berkeman]

 

[Ibix]

View attachment 368267

The first one is off by $10^6$, no? A million microphones is a phone and a trillion would be a megaphone.

The SI unit of beauty is the milli-Helen, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship

 

[DaveC426913]

The graham cracker one is in error.

It should be 453.6

 

[Baluncore]

The SI unit of beauty is the milli-Helen, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship

The practical "Troy system" unit of beauty, something we are more likely to encounter, is the micro-helen, the beauty required to push a single plank into a mill pond, on a dark night.

 

[collinsmark]

'More of an engineering joke, but we've all debugged stuff before.