S&T Geek humor

[Defiant]

Fellow science geeks will get this.

From the front page of this week's "The Onion" (print edition):

Rogue Quantum Physicist Wanted Dead And Alive

I found myself giggling about it all day...

 

[Zulu Romeo]

 

[trekkiedane]

A physicist has been conducting experiments and has worked out a set of equations which seem to explain his data. He asks a mathematician to check them. A week later, the mathematician calls "I'm sorry, but your equations are complete nonsense." "But these equations accurately predict results of experiments. Are you sure they are completely wrong? "To be precise, they are not always a complete nonsense. But the only case in which they are true is the trivial one where the field is Archimedean..."

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Larry Wall is one of my favorite sources for geek humor.

"And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is."

"Real programmers can write assembly code in any language."

"Just don't create a file called -rf."

"Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time."

"Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi."

"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."

switch (ref $@) {
    OverflowError =>
warn 'Dam needs to be drained';
    DomainError =>
warn 'King needs to be trained';
    NuclearWarError =>
die;
    }

"Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'."

"We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..."

"In computer science, it is said that premature optimization is the root of all evil."

 

[Lindley]

"...and then we tell you that induction is really just a CMU hazing ritual and that no such thing exists."
-A professor at Carnegie Mellon

"Hello.
My PID is Indigo Montoya.
You kill -9'ed my parent process.
SIGINT."
-Unknown

 

[Meredith]

10 PRINT LOOK AROUND YOU
20 GOTO 10

RUN

 

[Zulu Romeo]

10 PRINT LOOK AROUND YOU
20 GOTO 10

RUN

No such variable at line 10
>

 

[trekkiedane]

^Heh, true that.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

It should have been:

10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
RUN

ZR, silly

 

[trekkiedane]

^Xactly!

Though: in Comal the second " and the ; could have been omitted while typing the program (but a [30 END] should've been there)

 

[Zulu Romeo]

Incidentally, I love BBC BASIC error messages. Type in AUTO 0,0 at a command prompt to get a silly one.

Anyway... another oldie:

 

[trekkiedane]

^I've always loved that one!

So, erhm, how geeky is the SciFi you read? -will you get this one?

Or do you already know it?

 

[Lindley]

http://www.gpf-comics.com/comics/gpf20100507tpBBI.png

 

[sojourner]

So, what's the punch line to the old joke? Oh yeah....

.....And the physicist says "first, assume a spherical cow".

 

[trekkiedane]

^Spheres, eh?

Here's one oldie that time and time again has made me laugh; I suppose I know too many engineers

A Mathematician was put in a room. The room contains a table and three metal spheres about the size of a softball. He was told to do whatever he wants with the balls and the table in one hour. After an hour, the balls are arranges in a triangle at the center of the table. The same test is given to a Physicist. After an hour, the balls are stacked one on top of the other in the center of the table. Finally, an Engineer was tested. After an hour, one of the balls is broken, one is missing, and he's carrying the third out in his lunchbox.

And while we're at it I've always loved this one:

A biologist, a statistician, a mathematician and a computer scientist are
on a photo-safari in Africa. They drive out into the savannah in their
jeep, stop and scour the horizon with their binoculars.

The biologist: "Look! There's a herd of zebras! And there, in the middle:
a white zebra! It's fantastic! There are white zebras! We'll be famous!"

The statistician:
"It's not significant. We only know there's one white zebra"

The mathematician:
"Actually, we know there exists a zebra which is white on one side"

The computer scientist:
"Oh no! A special case!"

Would you believe it: I tried out studying both engineering and computer science

ETA:

I don't remember if I've posted this on this board before:

 

[Jadzia]

"Actually, we know there exists a zebra which is white on one side"

This is the sort of thing I enjoy pointing out to people who make assumptions.


But in the three spheres test, at the end of the hour I would have four spheres, which would be stacked up as a pyramid. There would be no explanation for where the fourth sphere came from.

 

[FPAlpha]

Jesus.. i enjoy Big Bang Theory (the comedy show) because i get most of the scientific jokes but the ones in this thread made me feel really dumb and illiterate (i understood maybe 10-20% )

 

[trekkiedane]

^Then just google the things you don't get

 

[Jadzia]

trekkie, what is this crossword puzzle in your avatar?

 

[trekkiedane]

QR Code! (identifiable by the three corner 'pieces')

You scan it with your mobile device and it translates the code (also known as a 2-D barcode) into a text string -usually a URL.

As all weird things this started in Japan; so much simpler to just use the camera to catch something than having to write down the URL (or e-mail address or whatever) people have their facebook page on their T-shirt in this manner !

There are of course on-line services where you can enter any ol' image containing a QR Code and get it decoded, here's one: http://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx

ETA:
Actually, my using this as an avatar fits perfectly into the S&T geek humour thread