Collection of Science Jokes P2

[Keith_McClary]

lose the field

I thought that would be catastrophic, but I didn't know about the "alternate circuit":
The magnet is designed with an alternate circuit that can protect it and keep it from burning up. This is where it gets dramatic: The alternate circuit is essentially a heater that dissipates the magnet's stored energy by boiling all the liquid helium in magnet's storage tank. A white cloud of helium comes billowing out of multiple pressure relief ports.
TIL

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I thought that would be catastrophic, but I didn't know about the "alternate circuit":
The magnet is designed with an alternate circuit that can protect it and keep it from burning up. This is where it gets dramatic: The alternate circuit is essentially a heater that dissipates the magnet's stored energy by boiling all the liquid helium in magnet's storage tank. A white cloud of helium comes billowing out of multiple pressure relief ports.
TIL

IIRC we just purged the nitrogen, not the helium. But that was a very long time ago. And I wasn't responsible for that system. So I may not remember all of the details correctly.

Purging the cooling system was a normal part of the procedure for transport. And in the early days, they might hit 2 to 4 hospitals in a day.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

My favorite new quote comes from Young Sheldon: I don't believe in a God but I sure like acting like one!

That's good.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I'm dead serious. The more the mass of ferrous metal, the greater the force. It probably did. One pulled into a D8 Cat. But I don't know if the MRI or the Cat is what slid.

View attachment 274624

A bit of personal trivia: For anyone who remembers the movie Volcano, the D8 Cat-MRI incident was at Cedars Sinai Medical Center right where the movie scenes took place - right across from the Beverly Center. That same pad was where we put the MRI [not a driven unit but more like a mobile home]. My old MRI was gone. I guess it got wiped out by the volcano. :(

 

[256bits]

He said he kept noticing cars swerving at him as they drove by

What an egocentric guy/gal - no regard for what those bewildered drivers were thinking when their own cars started acting weird pulling to one side.
I wonder how many went to garages complaining about loose steering the next day.

 

[Demystifier]

 

[Stavros Kiri]

It may have mostly been cloudy but festive Earth didn't miss it! ...

Merry Christmas!

 

[Demystifier]

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first asks for a pint of beer. The second asks for half a pint. The third asks for a quarter-pint. The fourth asks for an eighth of a pint.

The bartender interrupts to say, "I'll serve the whole group two pints, and that's your limit!"

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first asks for 1 beer. The second asks for 2 beers. The third asks for 3 beers. The fourth asks for 4 beers. The bartender interrupts to say: "Sorry, but I can't take your order. One beer is one dollar and I don't have a twelfth dollar coin to pay you."

 

[DrClaude]

 

[Keith_McClary]

Astronomy Xmas
from Damn Interesting

 

[BillTre]

 

[sysprog]

@BillTre this bookmarklet wipes the current site's cookies out of your browser (you can save it as a bookmark -- to use it you'll have to change the 'jjavascript' back to 'javascript' -- I put the extra j into get around it being flagged as possibly harmful -- it isn't harmful but it does destroy cookies):

jjavascript:(function(){C=document.cookie.split("; ");for(d="."+location.host;d;d=(""+d).substr(1).match(/\..*$/))for(sl=0;sl<2;++sl)for(p="/"+location.pathname;p;p=p.substring(0,p.lastIndexOf('/')))for(i in C)if(c=C[i]){document.cookie=c+"; domain="+d.slice(sl)+"; path="+p.slice(1)+"/"+"; expires="+new Date((new Date).getTime()-1e11).toGMTString()}})()

 

[Demystifier]

 

[BillTre]

 

[mfb]

I would think "go home" comes even earlier.

 

[BillTre]

Greta Thunburg's birthday shirt.
I like her sense of humor.

 

[BillTre]

 

[BillTre]

 

[davenn]

We all laughed in psychology class at how dumb Pavlov's dog was.
Then the bell rang and we all went to lunch.

 

[Keith_McClary]

Rabbits Against Magic by Jonathan Lemon for January 04, 2021

Lettuce is their psycho niece(?).

 

[mfb]

Dihydrogen monoxide is the main component of acid rain and accidental inhalation causes many deaths, and yet it's completely unregulated. Companies add it to food everywhere with no oversight.
http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

 

[DrClaude]

Dihydrogen monoxide is the main component of acid rain and accidental inhalation causes many deaths, and yet it's completely unregulated. Companies add it to food everywhere with no oversight.
http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

How cares about acid rain anymore? More importantly, dihydrogen monoxide was found in all those who got covid-19!

 

[davenn]

I wonder what the value of this inductor is ??

 

[davenn]

 

[phinds]

View attachment 275663

Pretty cool. I've used breadboards but this is my first encounter w/ a crackerboard.

 

[Vanadium 50]

this is my first encounter w/ a crackerboard

I believe it is what they call a breadboard.

 

[BillTre]

 

[fresh_42]

View attachment 275920

The problem is, that there is still a 'D' in the model for quite some time:

Vaccinating roundabout 4 billion people (twice) ...

 

[Keith_McClary]

SMBC

 

[Keith_McClary]

Rabbits Against Magic by Jonathan Lemon for January 10, 2021

 

[Ibix]

From Romesh Ranganathan: I'm very sorry to be leaving my post as maths teacher. I'm not sure why I was fired. I've always felt I was giving 110% effort.

 

[etotheipi]

From Romesh Ranganathan: I'm very sorry to be leaving my post as maths teacher. I'm not sure why I was fired. I've always felt I was giving 110% effort.

Maybe, it also had something to do with this...

 

[davenn]

 

[berkeman]

Maybe, it also had something to do with this...

OMG, that killed me!

 

[davenn]

 

[BillTre]

 

[theycallmevirgo]

OK, so I'm not going through the whole thread to see if these have been posted yet, but these are my absolute favorites

THE AI KOANS (Basic familiarity with Rinzai Zen buddhism and AI research at MIT recommended but not required)

Some AI Koans

These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of note, that Tom Knight was one of the Lisp machine's principal designers, and that David Moon wrote much of Lisp Machine Lisp.

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Moon instructs a student
One day a student came to Moon and said: “I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons.”

Moon patiently told the student the following story:

“One day a student came to Moon and said: ‘I understand how to make a better garbage collector...

[Ed. note: Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with circular structures that point to themselves.]

Sussman attains enlightenment
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Drescher and the toaster
A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal.

“I would like to give you this personality test”, said the outsider, “because I want you to be happy.”

Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster, saying: “I wish the toaster to be happy, too.”

[from The Jargon File]

 

[theycallmevirgo]

Age and IQ TEST
View attachment 94761

Classy

 

[BillTre]

 

[DennisN]

 

[DennisN]

 

[fresh_42]

Physicists might call it fusion barrier,
Archaeologists might think of petroglyphs,
Meteorologists might associate arid climate,
Biologists a desert habitat,
Astronomers have it simple as heavy stuff,
Experimental physicists criticize it for too much friction,
Engineers demand more primer,
Mathematicians might think of Markus,
Chemists name it Iron(II)- and Iron(III)-oxide,
Geologists understand sandstone,
but in the end it's all RUST.

 

[sysprog]

. . . Chemists name it Iron(II)- and Iron(III)-oxide,
Geologists understand sandstone,
but in the end it's all RUST. . . .

When we were 11-12-year-old kids in chem class (advanced placement) the Professor had us to collect rust for a thermite reaction $-$ he put some of our rust together with some purified iron oxide and some purified zinc dust in a crucible $-$ he used a shield, told us to not stare, started the reaction by lighting a little piece of magnesium ribbon that he'd stuck into the mixture, and holy heck, that stuff turned rust into liquid iron at over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit $-$ and it broke the crucible $\dots$

 

[BillTre]

 

[Keith_McClary]

turned rust into liquid iron

I've seen thermite welding on a transit rail on the street.
Two minute video:


No safety glasses!

 

[Jonathan Scott]

When we were 11-12-year-old kids in chem class (advanced placement) the Professor had us to collect rust for a thermite reaction $-$ he put some of our rust together with some purified iron oxide and some purified zinc dust in a crucible $-$ he used a shield, told us to not stare, started the reaction by lighting a little piece of magnesium ribbon that he'd stuck into the mixture, and holy heck, that stuff turned rust into liquid iron at over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit $-$ and it broke the crucible $\dots$

Near the end of my last chemistry class at school, the teacher demonstrated the thermite reaction in the yard, with such caution and keeping us so far back that we could barely see it, which was somewhat disappointing. We then went back inside and he demonstrated some other reaction (I don't remember what, but I think it also involved magnesium) on a tile on his front bench, which turned out to be much more spectacular. A blinding white cloud the size of a melon formed, started rolling up in the middle into a torus then rose vertically from the bench, passing straight through the overhead ceiling tile as if it did not exist, leaving a hole with charred edges with flickering light and hissing and crackling coming from inside for a few more seconds. At that point we were urged to leave the room very rapidly and various technicians started rushing around with fire extinguishers. I don't think any damage was done apart from the ceiling tile, but it was clear that the level of caution could have been better balanced between the two experiments!

 

[Keith_McClary]

some other reaction (I don't remember what, but I think it also involved magnesium)

 

[fresh_42]

What is this?

Spoiler

Euler-Maccheroni-Mascheroni Constant

 

[DrClaude]

 

[Keith_McClary]

Today's SMBC .
Sciencey, but politicalish, in a generic way.