Twice in two days. From now on, I’m not going to trust myself with the “Quick Reply” button when quoting. This is the post to which I was referring.
It was a warm afternoon in June when our very proper, very British head of the ChemE department turned into a complete nutter during our Unit Ops class.
There we were, dozing along his droning on about thin film evaporation, when he suddenly began hopping around on one foot, hissing and spraying saliva over the only nerd who dared sit in the front row. By the time it gradually dawned on us that something odd was occurring, he’d gone back to staidly writing equations on the board, without further comment.
We sat there, blinking for a few moments, before realizing that he’d been imitating a water drop evaporating.
He got weirder and weirder as the sememster ended, as he was retiring. On the day before our final, he trooped into our study room with a box full of engineering texts, which he upended as he announced that based on our performance we’d dearly need these books, which he no longer required. Kicking one for good measure, he cheerfully trooped back out as we gaped at him.
I also remember an unfortunate marketing professor when I was getting my MBA, glibly informing the class that “dihydrogen dioxide” read like some horrible chemical, but was actually harmless to drink (!).
Most of the class turned to look at me – the chemical engineer with the reputation for being ruthless – and waited. I took great glee in pointing out that he’d just told everyone it was safe to drink hydrogen peroxide which would do all kinds of nasty things to your innards, what he actually should have written was “hydrogen hydroxide” – water – and that I expected his consulting fees must be pretty reasonable.
He dismissed the class at that point, only halfway through. Despite being a nitwit, he turned out to be pretty okay, since I ended up with an “A”. He did kind of give me sidelong looks when he was making some goofy urban-legend claim as a marketing example (we also got the “Bite the wax tadpole” one, and the “Chevy No Va” one).
Heh. Our physics and engineering departments were fond of ideal sphereical uncompressable chickens. Usually being fired out of cannon.
A friend of mine collects professor quotes. Most of them are from physics or astronomy professors (she recently got her PhD in astronomy).
He might have been trying to say “dihydrogen monoxide”.
Yes, he was. I far prefer “hydrogen hydroxide” to “dihydrogen monoxide”, but I’d’ve let it pass.
Just like I’d prefer “hydrogen peroxide” to “dihydrogen dioxide”, but they both mean the same thing: that my erstwhile marketing prof bit the wax tadpole on that one.