UTC Physics Humor 1
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Mechanics
Lorries *C
A fellow was following a truck in heavy traffic. Every block or so, when they were stopped at a stop light, the driver of the truck would jump out of the cab with a big stick and bang on the side of the cargo bay. He'd then jump back into the cab in time to drive away when the signal changed.
The first fellow observed this for several miles, until he could stand it no longer. The next time the truck driver jumped out with the stick, the first fellow jumped out and ran up to him. "I'm sorry to bother you," he said, over the din of the banging, "but I am very curious; could you tell me what you are doing?"
Without breaking rhythm, the truck driver replied, "Sure, Mac. Ya see, this here's a six-ton truck but I've got eight tons of canaries aboard, so I've gotta keep two ton of them flying all the time so I don't break an axle".
Newton's Laws of Spam
Newton's 1st Law of Spam: A slab of spam at rest will remain at rest unless it decides to get up and move...
Newton's 2nd Law of Spam: A slab of spam in motion will remain in motion because everyone moves out of the way when they see it coming.
Newton's 3rd Law of Spam: For every action involving a slab of spam there is an equal and opposite reaction. ex. - Eat spam, Hurl spam.
Barometer joke
My friend once saw a question like this on his physics final: How would you use a baramoter to find the height of a building.
1. Find someone who knows how tall the building is, and trade him the barometer for the information.< teacher rejects: not a property characteristic of the barometer>
2. Measure the height of the barometer. Scale the side of the building, measuring its height in barometer-units.< rejected: uses no basic scientific principles>
3. Drop the barometer from the top of the building. Measure the time until it hits the street. Correcting for the mass/surface ratio of the instrument, use basic acceleration equation to find the height.< rejected: barometer is no longer a barometer>
4. Tie string to top of barometer. Lower from roof to almost ground. Swing. Period of pendulum can be used to find distance from barometer's Center of Gravity to top of building. Add displacement from CG to bottom of barometer; this is height.< rejected: does not incorporate barometer's intended function>
5. Take the barometer outside on a sunny day, measure its shadow and the buildings shadow.< rejected: cloudy today>
6. Sell the barometer. Purchase a tape measure long enough to measure the height of the building.< rejected: this is not a business course.>
7. Give the barometer as a prize to the one who comes up with the most accurate measurement of the building's height.< rejected: you have to return the barometer after you finish.>
8. Measure the barometric pressure at the top and bottom of the building. Plug these into the equation in the book and spit out the answer.< accepted: Finally, what the teacher wanted.>
Oh! You want that *boring* stuff from the beginning of the term! What is something this simple doing on the final? Anyone who doesn't know that has already dropped. I assumed you wanted us to *think*!
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Gravity
IT'S NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA; IT'S THE LAW!
Original Author: GEO1 @ PSUADMIN; 03/24/94
Correction
Actually, there's no such thing as gravity--the world just sucks! Brian Pearson; 04/01/94
We can defeat gravity.
The problem is the paperwork involved.
Heavy Boots
About 1983, I was in a philosophy class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (good science/engineering school) and the teaching assistant was explaining Descartes. He was trying to show how things don't always happen the way we think they will and explained that, while a pen always falls when you drop it on Earth, it would just float away if you let go of it on the Moon.
My jaw dropped a little. I blurted "What?!" Looking around the room, I saw that only my friend Mark and one other student looked confused by the TA's statement. The other 17 people just looked at me like "What's your problem?"
"But a pen would fall if you dropped it on the Moon, just more slowly." I protested.
"No it wouldn't." the TA explained calmly, "because you're too far away from the Earth's gravity."
Think. Think. Aha! "You saw the APOLLO astronauts walking around on the Moon, didn't you?" I countered, "why didn't they float away?" "Because they were wearing heavy boots." he responded, as if this made perfect sense (remember, this is a Philosophy TA who's had plenty of logic classes).
By then I realized that we were each living in totally different worlds, and did not speak each others language, so I gave up. As we left the room, my friend Mark was raging. "My God! How can all those people be so stupid?"
I tried to be understanding. "Mark, they knew this stuff at one time, but it's not part of their basic view of the world, so they've forgotten it. Most people could probably make the same mistake." To prove my point, we went back to our dorm room and began randomly selecting names from the campus phone book. We called about 30 people and asked each this question: 1. If you're standing on the Moon holding a pen, and you let go, will it a) float away, b) float where it is, or c) fall to the ground?
About 47 percent got this question correct. Of the ones who got it wrong, we asked the obvious follow-up question: 2. You've seen films of the APOLLO astronauts walking around on the Moon, why didn't they fall off?
About 20 percent of the people changed their answer to the first question when they heard this one! But the most amazing part was that about half of them confidently answered, "Because they were wearing heavy boots."
I say, science education must be at an all time peak !!!
Buttered Toast and Cats
Q. This question was posed to the Usenet Oracle: If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the floor butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window or other high and towering place, it will land on it's feet. But what if you attach a buttered piece of bread, butter-side up to a cat's back and toss them both out the window? Will the cat land on it's feet? Or will the butter splat on the ground? -Mike
A. And in response, thus spake the Oracle: Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment yourself you should be able to deduce the obvious result. The laws of butterology demand that the butter must hit the ground, and the equally strict laws of feline aerodynamics demand that the cat can not smash it's furry back. If the combined construct were to land, nature would have no way to resolve this paradox. Therefore it simply does not fall.
That's right you clever mortal (well, as clever as a mortal can get), you have discovered the secret of antigravity! A buttered cat will, when released, quickly move to a height where the forces of cat-twisting and butter repulsion are in equilibrium. This equilibrium point can be modified by scraping off some of the butter, providing lift, or removing some of the cat's limbs, allowing descent.
Most of the civilized species of the Universe already use this principle to drive their ships while within a planetary system. The loud humming heard by most sighters of UFOs is, in fact, the purring of several hundred tabbies. The one obvious danger is, of course, if the cats manage to eat the bread off their backs they will instantly plummet. Of course the cats will land on their feet, but this usually doesn't do them much good, since right after they make their graceful landing several tons of red-hot starship and pissed off aliens crash on top of them.
And now a few words on solving the problem of creating a ship using the aforementioned anti-gravity device. One could power a ship by means of cats held in suspended animation (say, about -190 degrees Celsius) with buttered bread strapped to their backs, thus avoiding the possibility of collisions due to tempermental felines. More importantly, how do you steer, once the cats are all held in stasis?
I offer a modest proposal: We all know that wearing a white shirt at an Italian restaurant is a guaranteed way to take a trip to the laudromat. Plaster the outside of your ship with white shirts. Place four nozzles symmetrically around the ship, which is, of course, saucer shaped. Fire tomato sauce out in proportion to the directions you want to go. The ship, drawn by the shirts, will automatically follow the sauce.
If you use t-shirts, you won't go as fast as you would by using, say, expensive dress shirts. This does not work as well in deep gravity wells, since the tomato sauce (now falling down a black hole, perhaps) will drag the ship with it, despite the counter force of the anti-gravity cat/butter machine. Your only hope at that point is to jettison enormous quantities of Tide. This will create the well-known Gravitational Tidal Force.
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Temperature
"Absolute zero is cool."
Superconductor
Researchers in Fairbanks Alaska announced last week that they have discovered a superconductor which will operate at room temperature.
Cold Fusion: Looney Theory of the Week
"Hey Mike?"
"Yeah, Gabe?"
"We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah."
"I thought you fixed that last century!"
"No, no, not that. Someone's found a loophole in the physics program. They're getting energy out of nowhere."
"Blessit! Lemme check..."< tappity clickity tappity> "Hey, I thought I fixed that! All right, let me find my terminal."< tappity clickity tap... save... compile> "There, that ought to patch it."
Boy Scout Story (true)
Three years ago, when we took the scout troop of which I'm an assistant scoutmaster to summer camp, the first aid class got a first hand look at frostbite, not an easy task on a 98 degree Arkansas day. Two of the boys were playing with a can of deodorant and discovered evaporative cooling. Being the aforementioned 98 degrees, one of them thought it would be cool (bad pun-I know) to keep spraying it on. Before long the damage had been done.
Other interpretation of dreams
Last week I took a b*tch of a stats test (a required course for all first year psyc grad students at my university), and afterwards I was plaqued with some of the worst dreams I've had in my lengthy college career. The worst one, however, was when not only did I fail the test, but I received a negative 40. I distinctly remember commenting in my dream "Only in North Dakota can you get 40 below zero on a test." (For those that don't know, it gets mighty cold up here, and 40 below zero is the same on both the celcius and Farenheit scales. And come January, that'll be the daily high temp!) David
Heaven is hotter than Hell
It is perhaps worth pointing out that Heaven is actually hotter than Hell. My full source for this is a book called "A Random Walk in Physics", published by the UK Institute of Physics, but apparently the original is in Applied Optics, II, A14 (1972).
In summary, the argument uses Isaiah 30:26 "The light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." After various complex arguments (and using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth-power law, which is familiar to you all, I'm sure) this gives the equation:
(H/E) ** 4 = 50, where H is the temperature of Heaven and E is the temperature of Earth.
This implies the temperature of Heaven is 525 deg. C. By contrast, the temperature of Hell must be less than 445 deg. C, the temperature of the lake of boiling sulphur (see Rev 21:8.) If it were any hotter, the sulphur would be a gas, not a lake. Thus Heaven is hotter than Hell.
Hell is the same temperature
There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible. -- Richard Davisson
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Sound
Things That Don't Make Any Noise
Paint
Bricks
The Moon
A banana
Electricity
Small spiders
Busted amplifiers
One hand clapping
People who are dead
Disconnected speakers
Explosions in a vacuum
Clocks that have stopped
Anything floating in space
A dormouse wearing slippers
Someone who's lost their voice
Kylie Minogue (wishful thinking!)
My misses (well, Phil Shipley's misses)
Trees falling in a forest if there's nobody there to hear them
All the alarm bells going off on cix's computer on Monday night (at least according to their integrity checker!)
Stealth fighter
An acoustic-guided submunition call the BAT may be good against tanks, but not against an F-117. A reader who works on the stealth fighter in Saudi Arabia says bats (the natural ones) occasionally work their way into F-117 hangers [sic]. One night a hungry bat turned right into an F-117 rudder and fell stunned to the floor. He flew away groggily, leaving behind a heightened impression of the aircraft's stealth. "I don't know what the radar return is for the vertical tails of the F-117 but I always thought it had to be more than an insect's," the reader said. "I guess I was wrong." There may be some "science" in this -- the ultrasound wavelengths used by bats are roughly the same as X-band radar. (From Aviation Week and Space Technology, Oct 17, 1991 excerpted without permission)
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Light
Darksuckers
DARK CONSPIRACY INVOLVING ELECTRICAL POWER COMPANIES SURFACES: Updated 8/7/88 W0PN
For years the electrical utility companies have led the public to believe they were in business to supply electricity to the consumer, a service for which they charge a substantial rate. The recent accidental acquisition of secret records from a well known power company has led to a massive research campaign which positively explodes several myths and exposes the massive hoax which has been perpetrated upon the public by the power companies. The most common hoax promoted the false concept that light bulbs emitted light; in actuality, these 'light' bulbs actually absorb DARK which is then transported back to the power generation stations via wires. A more descriptive name has now been coined; the new scientific name is for the device is DARKSUCKER.
This newsletter introduces a brief synopsis of the darksucker theory, which proves the existence of dark and establishes the fact that dark has great mass, and further, that dark is the fastest known particle in the universe. Apparently, even the celebrated Dr. Albert Einstein did not suspect the truth.. that just as COLD is the absence of HEAT, LIGHT is actually the ABSENCE of DARK... light does not really exist!
The basis of the darksucker theory is that electric light bulbs suck dark. Take for example, the darksuckers in the room where you are. There is much less dark right next to them than there is elsewhere, demonstrating their limited range. The larger the darksucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Darksuckers in a parking lot or on a football field have a much greater capacity than the ones in used in the home, for example.
It may come as a surprise to learn that darksuckers also operate on a celestial scale; witness the Sun. Our Sun makes use of dense dark, sucking it in from all the planets and intervening dark space. Naturally, the Sun is better able to suck dark from the planets which are situated closer to it, thus explaining why those planets appear brighter than do those which are far distant from the Sun. Occasionally, the Sun actually oversucks; under those conditions, dark spots appear on the surface of the Sun. Scientists have long studied these 'sunspots' and are only recently beginning to realize that the dark spots represent leaks of high pressure dark because the Sun has oversucked dark to such an extent that some of actually leaks back into space. This leakage of high pressure dark frequently causes problems with radio communications here on Earth due to collisions between the dark particles as they stream out into space via the black 'holes' in the surface of the Sun.
As with all manmade devices, darksuckers have a finite lifetime. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This condition can be observed by looking for the black spot on a full darksucker when it has reached maximum capacity... you have surely noticed that dark completely surrounds a full darksucker because it no longer has the capacity to suck dark at all.
A candle is a primitive darksucker. A new candle has a white wick. You will notice that after the first use the wick turns black, representing all the dark which has been sucked into it. If you hold a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, the tip will turn black because it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle. Unfortunately, these primitive darksuckers have a very limited range and are hazardous to operate because of the intense heat produced.
There are also portable darksuckers called flashlights. The bulbs in these devices cannot handle all of the dark by themselves, and must be aided by a dark storage unit called a battery. When the dark storage unit is full, it must be either emptied (a process called 'recharging') or replaced before the portable darksucker can continue to operate. If you break open a battery, you will find dense black dark inside, evidence that it is actually a compact dark storage unit.
The darksuckers on your automobile are high capacity units with great range, thus they require much larger dark storage units mounted under the hood of the vehicle. Since there is far more dark available in the winter season, automobile dark storage units reach capacity more frequently than they do in the summer, requiring 'recharging', or in severe cases, total replacement.
Dark has great mass. When dark is drawn into a darksucker, friction caused by the speed of the dark particles (called anti-photons) actually generates substantial heat, thus it is unwise to touch an operating dark sucker. Candles represent a special problem, as the dark must travel into a solid wick instead of through clear glass. This generates a great amount of heat, making it very dangerous to touch an operating candle.
Because dark has such great mass, it is very heavy. If you swim just below the surface of a lake, you see a lot of 'light' (absence of dark, to be more precise). As you go deeper and deeper beneath the surface, you notice it gets darker and darker. When you reach a depth of approximately fifty feet, you are in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake, making it appear 'lighter' near the surface.
The power companies have learned to use the dark that has settled to the bottom of lakes by pushing it through turbines, which generate electricity to help push the dark into the ocean where it may be safely stored for their devious purposes.
Prior to the development of turbines, it was much more difficult to get the dark from the rivers and lakes to the ocean. The Indians recognized this problem, and developed means to assist the flow of dark on it's long journey to the ocean. When on a river in a canoe travelling in the same direction as the flow of dark, they paddled slowly, so as not to impede the flow of dark; but when they travelled against the flow of dark, they paddled vigorously to help propel the dark along its way.
Scientists are working feverishly to develop exotic new instrumentation with which to measure the actual speed and energy level of dark. While such instrumentation is beyond the capabilities of the average layman, you can actually perform a simple test to demonstrate the unbelievable speed of dark, right in your own home.
All that is required for the simple test is a closed desk drawer situated in a bright room. You know from past experience that the tightly shut drawer is FULL of dark. Now, place your hand firmly on the drawer's handle. Quickly yank the drawer open.. the dark immediately disappears, demonstrating the blinding speed with which the dark travels to the nearest darksucker!
The secrets of dark are at present known only to the power companies. Dark must be very valuable, since they go to such lengths to collect it in vast quantities. By some well hidden method, more modern power 'generation' facilities have devised methods to hide their collection of dark. The older facilities, however, usually have gargantuan piles of solidified dark in huge fenced in areas. Visitors to these facilities are told the huge black piles of material are supplies of coal, but such is not the case.
The power companies have long used code words to hide their activities; D.C. is Dark Conspiracy, whole A.C. is Alternate Conspiracy. The intent of the A.C. is not yet known, but the D.C. is rapidly yielding it's secrets to the probing eyes and instruments of honest scientists around the world. New developments are being announced every day and we promise to keep the public informed of these announcements as they occur via this newsletter. Les Dark, Editor
Lasers
Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Galvini's, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic appliance that emits a beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer two thousand yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from "VAPORIZE BULLDOZER" to "DELICATE." ... also from the book Bad Habits by Dave Barry (it's superb).
Why the Sky is Blue by John Ciardi
I don't suppose you happen to know
Why the sky is blue? It's because the snow
Takes out the white. That leaves it clean
For the trees and grass to take out the green.
Then pears and bananas start to mellow,
And bit by bit they take out the yellow.
The sunsets, of course, take out the red
And pour it into the ocean bed
Or behind the mountains in the west.
You take all that out and the rest
Couldn't be anything else but blue.
Look for yourself. You can see it's true.
Sun light
That reminds me of an exchange which I observed back then, at the University of Arizona. A couple were walking across campus just ahead of me. As we passed the newly sodded area around a recently completed building, the coed commented about how fast the grass was growing.
"Yes," nodded her date knowingly, "that's because of the extra hour of daylight it gets."
"Oooh," she said, as her eyes widened and she gave this paragon of wisdom an admiring glance. Bob Terry RATerry@SAUmag.edu
Optician
Q: What do you call an eye doctor who works in the islands off Alaska?
A: An Optical Aleutian.--Seymore Butts
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Time
My Extra Second
Well, folks, we get an extra second today at 7 P.M.. CST (USA) on July 1, 1994. What are YOU going to do with all this extra time on your hands? Personally, I've decided to save mine. I figure if I live at least 60 years, that gives me one extra minute. I'm asking God to give me that one saved-up minute on my death bed when they all think I've finally croaked to raise back up and get that one last word in edgewise! BO10@UTMARTN.BITNET or asanders@utm.edu
Snail Humor
When a snail crossed the road, he was run over by a turtle. Regaining consciousness in the emergency room, he was asked what caused the accident. "I really can't remember," the snail replied. "You see, it all happened so fast."
Time Travel
Those three boys are in the schoolyard bragging of how great their fathers are.
The first one says: "Well, my father runs the fastest. He can fire an arrow, and start to run, I tell you, he gets there before the arrow".
The second one says: "Ha! You think that's fast! My father is a hunter. He can shoot his gun and be there before the bullet".
The third one listens to the other two and shakes his head. He then says: "You two know nothing about fast. My father is a civil servant. He stops working at 4:30 and he is home by 3:45"!!
Time travel seminar
To whom it may concern,
There will be a seminar given on the subject of time travel in the 21st century.
It will be held on Thursday, January 1, 1920 at 12:00:01AM.
Please to have marked your calendars.
updated 28 May 95
