Collection of Science Jokes P2

[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.

 

[mfb]

The Fermi exclusion principle only applies to indistinguishable particles. If women and men cannot occupy the same state they must be indistinguishable.

Observations show that many men and women can be in the same state. Millions of them, in fact. They must be bosons.

 

[fresh_42]

They must be bosons.

Guess we still have to detect some really, really heavy stuff then.

 

[fresh_42]

 

[DrClaude]

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/scalars

 

[DennisN]

 

[Borg]

View attachment 276740

And the other one is put into the ground?

 

[jack action]

 

[fresh_42]

View attachment 277029​

That only happens because all the exercises started with: friction, and air resistance will be neglected.

 

[Borg]

I'm sure that he won't be ignoring friction when he hits the ground.

 

[DrGreg]

I wonder if the cartoonist was

• correctly thinking of air resistance, or
• incorrectly thinking that all objects fall vertically downwards regardless of initial horizontal velocity?

 

[jbriggs444]

Air resistance is negligible given the depiction of the other person's hair braids and the lack of ripples on the water.

How fast would a guy be driving on a one lane paved road anyway, one wonders.

 

[fresh_42]

Air resistance is negligible given the depiction of the other person's hair braids and the lack of ripples on the water.

Hidden assumptions: a) the hair is not otherwise fixed and b) water.

 

[sysprog]

Excuse for doing Physics without Mathematics

 

[jack action]

 

[Keith_McClary]

Did we already have this? (Cartoon too tall to post.)

You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends!
Posted By Stuart Ritchie & Zach Weinersmith on Jul 29, 2020

Also, today's SMBC.