At this page you can get an idea of my sense of humor...Well, as you would normally expect from an engineer, they are mainly products of a "mad scientific mind" :)
A nice quote: "Humour, anthropologists tell us, is a flexible tool for managing the social environment. It can be used to draw people in by sharing, to keep people away by intimidating, to build charisma, to impress, to entertain, to relieve tension, to test and challenge oneself and others. But it is an especially useful tool in science, and particularly physics, precisely because it engages, fosters and celebrates the same values that the field itself depends on - namely cleverness, play and imagination."
Robert P Crease (from http://physicsweb.org/article/world/16/12/2)
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At most, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to dress himself, bathe, and not make messes in the house." Robert Heinlein
The mathematician Paul Erdös was fond of saying, "Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.
Do engineers overcomplicate things?
The story is almost certainly apocryphal. At the University of Copenhagen,
about a hundred years ago, a physics student appealed his grade on an exam. He
got a zero. He maintained that the answer was correct and he should not have
gotten a zero. The instructor maintained that the answer exhibited no
knowledge of physics and, therefore, deserved a zero. They appealed to some
great and good physicist, sometimes said to be Sir Ernest Rutherford, although
what he was doing in Copenhagen I don't know.
The question was: Explain how to measure the height of a building using a
barometer.
The student had written:
Go to the top of the building with a barometer and a long string. Tie the
string to the barometer and lower it over the side of the building. When it
touches the ground, mark the spot, measure the string, add the height of the
barometer, and that's the height of the building. [shouts of audience
laughter] I submit to you that this is a correct answer; yet the instructor
was right: this doesn't actually tell you much about the physics the
instructor was trying to test.
The adjudicator said as much to the student, and asked, "Do you have any other
answers that exhibit more knowledge of physics?"
"Oh, yes," the student said. "Take a stopwatch. Drop the barometer over the
side of the building. Listen for the impact; time it. Plug it into this
equation. Check the precision: if the precision is not sufficient, then use
the estimated height to correct for the speed of sound being
non-instantaneous, and make that adjustment. [shouts of audience laughter]
"Second, you can scale the building, marking barometer lengths, and
multiply by the height of the barometer. [audience laughter]
"Measurement adjustment is an important part of physics.
"Take a spring scale (you have to have a good spring scale for this method).
Measure the weight of the barometer at ground level, go to the top, weigh it
again, calculate the difference in measured weight for the same mass, and put
it into this equation.
"Or measure the barometric pressure and put it into this other equation ...
but that's not very interesting ... [shouts of audience laughter]
"Probably the best way, though, is to go to the basement, knock on the
superintendent's door, and say, 'My dear sir, would you like this barometer?
I'll give it to you if you tell me how high the building is.'"
[howls of audience laughter]
The part of this story that is almost certainly apocryphal is the association
of the student with Niels Bohr. Not because the student doesn't show the kind
of imagination and ingeniousness that Bohr had, but because Bohr was a
theorist, not an experimentalist.
But this is what experimental physics is like. If you are doing an experiment
in experimental physics, and you have equipment that was designed to do the
measurement that you wish to take, it's almost certainly not publishable
because someone's already done it. If you want to be doing physics that is
publishable, you will (at least sometimes) be taking measurements that no one
has ever thought of taking before. That means you are going to have to be
letting barometers over the side of the building with strings, because there's
no other way to do it.
Computer Users' Ode to Dr.Seuss
Here's an easy game to play.
Here's an easy thing to say.
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash,
Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash.
You can't say this? What a shame, sir!
We'll find another game, sir.
If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of Gauss,
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go with a bang,
'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!
And the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disc,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc,
Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM,
Quickly turn off your computer and be sure to tell your mom!
--Anonymous, from the Editor's mail
IEEE Control Systems, February 1996
Q: What do you get if you cross a pig with a rat?
A: Pig rat sine theta.
Click here for a very funny little mathematical story (kindda alice in wonderland thing).
Click here for why women should go for computer programmers for mating ( cos they respresent the new evolutionary step in Homo Sapiens!)
A man was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said,
"If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."
He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said,
"If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will tell everyone how smart and brave you are and how you are my hero".
The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said,
"If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will be your loving companion for
an entire week."
The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket. The frog then cried out,
"If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for a year and do ANYTHING
you want."
Again the man took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll stay with you for a year and do
anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?"
The man said,
"Look, I'm a programmer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is cool."
Dilbert writes a poem and presents it to Dogbert:
DOGBERT: I once read that given infinite time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare.
DILBERT: But what about my poem?
DOGBERT: Three monkeys, ten minutes.
Scott Adams, Dilbert comic strip, 15 May 1989.
Since I hurt my pendulum
My life is all erratic.
My parrot, who was cordial,
Is now transmitting static.
The carpet died, a palm collapsed,
The cat keeps doing poo.
The only thing that keeps me sane
Is talking to my shoe.My Shoe -- Michael Leuning
When love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom.
Hi, Mom!
--Hi Mom ! -- Laurie Anderson
A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.
Engineer: What's with these guys? We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!
Doctor: I don't know but I've never seen such ineptitude!
Priest: Hey, here comes the greenskeeper. Let's have a word with him. ...Hi George. Say George, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow aren't they?
George: Oh yes. That's a group of blind fire fighters. They lost their sight while saving our club house last year. So we let them play here anytime free of charge!
(silence)
Priest: That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.
Doctor: Good idea. And I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there's anything he can do for them.
Engineer: Why can't these guys play at night?
Heisenberg was driving down the Autobahn whereupon he was pulled over by a policeman. The policeman asked, "Do you know how fast you were going back there? Heisenberg replied, "No, but I know where I am."
How Hot Is It In Hell? (A True Story from a Yale professor)
A thermodynamics professor had written a take home exam for his graduate students. It had one question: "Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Support your answer with a proof."
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools off when it expands and heats up 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 that souls are moving into Hell and the rate 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. Some of these religion state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and since most people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and 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.
Second, 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 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. Of course, 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 Miss Theresa Banyan during my freshman year that, "It will be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded with her, then #2 cannot be true, and so Hell is exothermic."
The student got the only A.
