All the great physicists of the ages are playing tag, in Heaven, I guess. Einstein is it, and he begins chasing after Newton. As soon as Newton sees this, he quickly pulls a piece of chalk from his pocket* and draws a square on the ground,** easily big enough for him to stand inside of. He makes no attempt to run away, and Einstein quickly gets closer and closer to him. Finally, Einstein tags old Isaac, and shouts, “I’ve got you, Newton!”
To which he quietly replies, “But I am Newton, over a square meter. So actually, you’ve got Pascal.”
*Do they have pockets in heaven?
**What about ground? Well, let’s say they do.
An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are locked in cells with nothing but a tin can and asked to open the can by any means necessary.
So the engineer does it after 10 minutes, and when asked how, he says, “Easy, I just beat the can until its failure point and there it is.”
Then the physicist comes out and says, “I just had to apply the right force in the right direction and it popped open.”
But after three hours, the mathematician is nowhere to be seen. So the other two peer into his cell and see the mathematician sweating, shaking and staring intently at the can, chanting, “Assume the can is open, assume the can is open…”
I can’t see DEAD without imagining BEEF in the next 16-bit word. Yes, I said 16-bit word. I’m an old fart. Get over it. I spent way too many years with the 1750.
A farmer hires a Zoologist, an Engineer and a Mathematician to build him an enclosure for his 100 cows. He says he’ll give a bonus to whomever can build a pen using the least amount of fence.
First, the Zoologist (which is pronounced zoh-ologist (I just found that out in a previous thread(aren’t parantheseis fun?))) determined that each of these types of cows needs 25 square ft of room. Since each cow would need a pen that is 5’X5’, all the cows would need 500’X500’ which works out to 2000’ of fence.
The engineer chimes in. He says, it would take 2000’ if you used a square pen! If you use a circular pen, you can enclose the same 250,000 square feet using only 1772.45’ of fence.
The farmer agrees and is about to give the engineer the bonus when the mathematician steps up and says he can do it with only 10’ of fence. The farmer clarifies, “You can give my cows at least 250000 square feet of pen with only 10’ of fence?”
“Sure!”, says the mathematician. He then builds a small fence around himself and says, " I define myself on the outside".
How can you tell an extroverted mathematician from a regular mathematician?
– The extrovert looks at your shoes.
There’s about a million variations to this one, but it’s pretty funny:
An engineer is walking down the street, and sees a programmer from his lab driving a new, red sports car. He’s impressed, so he goes up and asks, “Wow, where’d you get that?”
The programmer explains, “Well, I walk walking along, and this gorgeous blond drives up in the car, stops in front of me, strips her clothes off and tells me, ‘Take what you want!’”
The engineer nods in understanding. “Good choice. Her clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you.”
I saw in college why that’s sage advice. I think the culprit was the math major who once described himself as a machine that turned caffeine into theorems.
It turns out it can be a bad idea to mix tetrahydrocannibinol with foreign-language homework (don’t drink and conjugate?), but I found out to my surprise a couple years ago that I can–if the need arises, I guess–kick ass at general chemistry despite/because of the effects of the Devil-Weed. That first pop quiz scared the hell out of me, though!
I had just walked away from the boards and went over to Icanhascheezburger (thanks Rockle for sending me there), and found a photo that’s purrfect for this thread.
Noah is letting all the animals off the ark. To each he says “Be fruitful and multiply!”
The adders (it’s a type of snake!) go past, and Noah gives them the same admonition, to which they say:
“Alas, adders can’t multiply…”
Several weeks later, Noah is in his back yard getting firewood. He is searching through a big pile of timber when he sees the two adders surrounded by a host of baby adders.
“I thought you told me that adders can’t multiply!” he exclaims.
The adders reply (wait for it):
“Well, with logs they can…” yuck.
Logs = logarithms. All us geeks over a certain age were taught how to multiply two very large numbers together by adding their logarithms. If you have no idea what a logarithm is, don’t worry; you haven’t missed anything useful.
Hint: The meaning of the joke is also important to a certain type of mechanical device that has, alas, disappeared from our modern world. Anybody know what I’m talking about?