Science Humor: A Wide Selection

[BobG]

Technological One-Upmanship
After digging to a depth of 1000 feet last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years, and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network a thousand years ago.

Not to be outdone, in the weeks that followed, English scientists dug 2000 feet and headlines in the U.K. Papers read: "English scientists have found traces of 2000 year old optical fibre, and have concluded that our ancestors already had an advanced high-tech digital network a thousand years earlier than the Scots."

One week later, the Irish newspapers reported the following: "After digging as deep as 5000 feet, Irish scientists have found absolutely nothing. They have concluded that 5000 years ago, our ancestors were already using wireless technology."

 

[BobG]

The Pizza Theorem

The volume of a pizza can be found by the following method. Let z equal the radius of the pizza and let \alpha equal the thickness of the pizza. The volume can be found by multiplying the area of the top of the pizza by the thickness of the pizza. The area of the top of the pizza is equal to Pi times the radius squared (the radius times itself).

Or, the final equation:

V=Pi z z \alpha

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Back in the late sixties/ early seventies, after it was discovered that the outer planets would soon all be in the same general area of space at the same time - an event that happens once every 175 years, and what made the Voyager missions possible - the director of NASA declared: "The last time this happened Jefferson was President, and he blew it!"

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Hey, this really IS funny. Have you ever looked in on a class of freshman physics students taking a test on vectors and cross products?

All of the contortions remind me of interpretive dance.

 

[Atomos]

didnt read the entire thread but I ran a thread search and this one has not come up yet:

Pretty Little Polynomial and Curly Pi​

Once upon a time (1/t) pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never, ever enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient, and made her way in amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents approached her surface, and she became tenser and tenser. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, became unstable, lost all sense of directrix, tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf, and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. She was completely divergent by the time she reached the turning point. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone in a non-euclidean space.

She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was she convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once.

Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his lower series extended. She could see at once his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms, and knew he was irrational. "Arcsinh!" she gasped.

"Hey, what's your sine?" he asked. "What a symmetric set of asymptotes you have!"

"Stay away from me!" she protested. "I haven't got any brackets on!"

"Calm yourself, my dear!" said the smooth operator.. "Your fears are purely imaginary."

"i, i, ..." she thought, "Perhaps he's not normal, but homologous."

"What order are you?" the brute suddenly demanded.

"Seventeen," replied Polly.

Curly leered, "I suppose you've never been operated upon?"

"Of course not. I'm absolutely convergent!" Polly replied quite properly.

"Come on," said Curly: "Let's go to decimal place I know of, and I'll take you to the limit."

"Never!" gasped Polly..

"Abscissa!" he swore a violent oath. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places, and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly Nomial! The algorithm method was now her only hope. She felt him approaching her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy; Curly was a heavy side operator. His radius squared itself and Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed Runge-Kutta on her. He even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he satisfied her hypotheses, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally, they took her to L'Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.

The moral of this tale is: "If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom."

Now that's what I call getting your Mathematical Pundamentals right.

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~pjbk/humour/polynomial.html

 

[topsquark]

Not a science joke, but I like it:

Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today?
1. Writing his memoirs of the Civil War.
2. Advising the President.
3. Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
-- David Letterman

 

[topsquark]

Again, not science...well, maybe psychology?

A husband walks into the bedroom holding two aspirin and a glass of water. His wife asks, "What's that for?"

"It's for your headache."

"I don't have a headache."

He replies, "Gotcha!"

 

[quasar987]

Answer on a blonde's geometry test

------------------

 

[Mk]

That looks like one of my tests.

 

[Mk]

"Calm yourself, my dear!" said the smooth operator.. "Your fears are purely imaginary."

"i, i, ..." she thought, "Perhaps he's not normal, but homologous."

"What order are you?" the brute suddenly demanded.

"Seventeen," replied Polly.

Curly leered, "I suppose you've never been operated upon?"

"Of course not. I'm absolutely convergent!" Polly replied quite properly.

"Come on," said Curly: "Let's go to decimal place I know of, and I'll take you to the limit."

"Never!" gasped Polly..

"Abscissa!" he swore a violent oath. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places, and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly Nomial! The algorithm method was now her only hope. She felt him approaching her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy; Curly was a heavy side operator. His radius squared itself and Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed Runge-Kutta on her. He even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he satisfied her hypotheses, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally, they took her to L'Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.

The moral of this tale is: "If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom."

But the poor little girl got raped.

If you put it on in code its just fine.

 

[Alkatran]

Again, not science...well, maybe psychology?

A husband walks into the bedroom holding two aspirin and a glass of water. His wife asks, "What's that for?"

"It's for your headache."

"I don't have a headache."

He replies, "Gotcha!"

That took way too long for me to get.

 

[QueenFisher]

very bad joke from my maths teacher

intergrate __1__ d cabin
cabin


edit. ok so that didn't work. must learn to use latex. the cabin should be under the 1.

 

[eax]

That took way too long for me to get.

I still don't get that joke.

 

[physicsuser]

I still don't get that joke.

someone explain

 

[zanazzi78]

someone explain

Explain what? The joke or why eax doesn`t 'get it' ??!?

 

[physicsuser]

Explain what? The joke or why eax doesn`t 'get it' ??!?

Do the chickens have large talons?

 

[DaveC426913]

I still don't get that joke.

eax:

Q: What is the #1 reason women use to get out of having sex?
A: They have a headache.

 

[eax]

Ah yeah lol. Now the joke makes sense.

 

[topsquark]

Q: How many Microsoft technicians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three. Two to hold the ladder and one to hammer the bulb into a faucet.

-Dan

 

[topsquark]

An Oxford philosopher was giving a lecture on the philosophy of language at Columbia University, and came to a curious aspect of the English language. "You will note," said the stuffy Oxford scholar, "that in the English language, two negatives can mean a positive, but never is it the case that two positives can mean a negative." To which someone in the back responded, "yeah, yeah."


-Dan

 

[topsquark]

Researchers in Fairbanks Alaska announced last week that they have discovered a superconductor which will operate at room temperature.

-Dan

 

[topsquark]

SCIENCE: BREAD IS DANGEROUS

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.

2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.

3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.

4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.

5. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat, begged for bread after as little as two days.

6. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cream cheese.

7. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey, bread-pudding person.

8. Newborn babies can choke on bread.

9. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 450 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than two minutes.

10. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

-Dan

 

[topsquark]

A pessimist, and optimist, and an engineer were having breakfast together. They all had their glasses half full of whatever they were drinking when they stopped to look at them.
The pessimist says, "My glass is half empty."
The optimist says, "My glass is half full."
The engineer says, "What moron made this glass? It has twice the mass required to hold the fluid!"


-Dan

 

[QueenFisher]

the twisted logic of my french teacher:

'who agrees with sarah?'
'who doesn't?'
'who can't be bothered to put their hand up?'

worryingly, i was the only one who saw the flaw.

 

[topsquark]

the twisted logic of my french teacher:

'who agrees with sarah?'
'who doesn't?'
'who can't be bothered to put their hand up?'

worryingly, i was the only one who saw the flaw.

You know I once asked my 7 AM class to put their hands up if they were sleeping. Only two students raised their hands!

-Dan

 

[neutrino]

A physicist, an engineer, a mathematician, and an accountant attend an interview for a job.

Interviewer: What's 2+2?
Phy: It's 4 +/- 0.001.

Int: What's 2+2?
Eng: It's 3.99 to a good approximation.

Int: What's 2+2?
Math: I have no idea what 2+2 is, but I do know that a solution exists.

Int: What's 2+2?
Acc: *Looks around to make sure that no one's listening and says* What do you want it to be?

 

[Moonbear]

Hey, this really IS funny. Have you ever looked in on a class of freshman physics students taking a test on vectors and cross products?

All of the contortions remind me of interpretive dance.

I haven't read this thread in a while! I used to get the biggest kick out of peeking in the door during physics exams and watching them all trying to use the right-hand rule...and looking for the one student in the room who is using their left hand to do it! (There's always at least one.)

 

[BobG]

Understanding Engineers
A priest, a doctor and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.
The engineer fumed, "What's with those guys? We've been waiting 15 minutes!"
The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such inept golfers!"
The priest said, "Here comes the greens keeper, let's ask him."
He said, "Hello, George! What's wrong with the group ahead of us? They're rather slow aren't they?"
The greens keeper replied, "Oh, yes. That's a group of blind fire fighters.
They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime."
The group fell silent for a moment.
The priest said, 'That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight."
The doctor said, "Good idea. I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there's anything he can do for them."

The engineer said, "Why can't they play at night?"

 

[neutrino]

Here's a one-liner...

String Theory

 

[Jeff Ford]

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term exam. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.


So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you, and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The porollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"