May Berenbaum, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois and insect popularizer extraordinaire, has just done a Five Books interview on insects, “May Berenbaum on bugs.” (By now all of my readers should know the difference between the generic use of “bugs” as “insects,” and the particular order of insects that scientists call the “true bugs”; click the link if you don’t.) Several of her books are for serious insect-philes, but the book by Tom Eisner looks good.
May also reveals that one of the reasons she studies insects is that she finds them “hilarious and inspiring,” as well as “endlessly entertaining.” I have to say that I haven’t been amused once by my Drosophila in thirty years of research, but maybe I’m just an emotionless advocate of scientism. At any rate, the interviewer asks May for her two best insect jokes. One is forgettable, but I like this one:
A man walks into a doctor’s office and says, “Doctor, you gotta help me. I think I’m a moth.” The doctor says, “It’s clear you have a problem, but I’m a pediatrician not a psychiatrist. Why did you come here?” The man says, “The light was on.”
Which brings to mind: why don’t you post your favorite science joke below? Here’s one about entropy that a physicist told me: “I cleaned my room so well that a star exploded.”
You mean you haven’t read Eisner’s book, Jerry? For shame! Ask Santa to get it for you. It is brilliant!
the barman says “we don’t serve neutrinos here”. A neutrino walks into a bar.
Yup. First one I remembered was: “neutrino”, “Who’s there?”, “Knock, knock.”
Okay, I’ll play the role of the idiot here. I don’t understand. Neutrinos aren’t superluminal, so how do these jokes work?
Thanks in advance.
Maybe the original joke used tachyons. That would work.
Cop: Do you know how fast you were going?
Heisenberg: No officer, but I know exactly where I am!
Traffic Cop: “Do you know how fast you were driving Herr Heisenberg?”
Heisenberg: “Yes but I’ve no idea where I was.”
A hydrogen atom walks into a bar and says to the bartender “Have you seen an electron around?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“Well I seem to have lost mine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m positive!”
Though my favorite will always be”
There are only 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
A neutron walks into a bar and orders a drink. He asks how much, and the bartender replies “For you, no charge!”
Someone beat me to it!
Scientist: “Why do you say induction is invalid?”
Theologian; “In my experience it doesn’t work!”
Variation of this I heard:
In the distant future, humans discover a race of aliens that deny the validity of induction. Seeing the incredible suffering and chaos it has caused for their civilization, the human ambassador asks them, “Why do you insist on clinging to this ridiculous and destructive philosophy?”
The aliens reply: “Well, it never worked for us before so…..”
The classic Drosophila jokes are Groucho’s
“Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana”
and Kermitthe Frog’s “Time’s fun when you’re having flies”
Ohh, cross posted (see below)! Your’s must be the original, I guess.
Here’s one for Jerry’s Drosophila:
Time flies like the wind
Fruit flies like bananas
That is one Steve Jones uses all the time. He also says he had Dr.Osophila on his office door.
This isn’t a joke, but a test sentence used to measure the ability of natural language processing in artificial intelligence. They can’t cope with it.
This is only science adjacent, but here goes:
A mathematician and an engineer are placed in a room, and a bag of gold is placed across the room from them. They are told that whoever reaches the gold first can have it, however, they can only move half the distance to the gold each time they move. The mathematician immediately throws his hands up, and says, “That’s impossible!” The engineer, however, begins moving towards the gold. Halfway. Halfway. Halfway, until he is within an arms length of the gold. He then reaches out, grabs the gold, and says, “Well, that’s close enough for an engineering approximation!”
A new Professor of Pure Mathematics was to be appointed. The interview panel had whittled the hundreds of applicants down to just two and could find no reason to select one rather than the other. They were about to toss a theoretically fair coin to decide the issue, when one of the panel remembered he had heard a disturbing rumour that one of the applicants for the post was not a mathematician at all but was in fact a closet engineer; they had better make sure that there were no engineers among the finalists, after all it would not do to appoint an engineer to the the post of Professor of Pure Mathematics, not even a closet engineer. So they devised some tests.
For test one they placed an empty glass on the table in the interview room and the chair of the interview panel announced that there was a jug of water in a hut the other side of campus and the candidate was required to fill the glass from this jug.
Candidate 1 takes the test. She walks out of the room and returns half an hour later with the jug of water and fills the glass.
Candidate 2 takes the test and he does exactly the same thing.
Then there was test two. In this test an empty glass and a jug of water are placed side by side on the table in the interview room and the candidate is required to fill the glass from the jug.
Candidate 1 simply walks up to the table and fills the glass from the jug.
Candidate 2 picks up the jug and leaves to room. He returns half an hour later empty-handed and announces “I have now reduced to problem to one with a known solution.”
I don’t need to tell you who got the job!
Hmmm. I would have taken the glass to the jug, filled it there, and returned with the glass. Much less to carry.
life of the party, you are.
LOL!
What’s purple and commutes?
An abelian grape.
(An oldie but a a goodie)
Where do group theorists store their grain in winter?
In their Sylow subgroups.
Why was the algebraist unfaithful?
Because his ring only had trivial ideals.
How many scientists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Ten – one to change the lightbulb and nine to produce a valid theory for the behavioural rectification of interrupted illumination.
A pessimist says the glass is half empty.
An optimist says the glass is half full.
An engineer says your glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
ADVANCE APOLOGIES! And I suppose mathematicians do not really count…
Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?
He worked it out with a pencil.
(groaning;-)
Did you hear about the other constipated mathematician? He worked it out in logs.
Ack! Worse!
There has to be a follow-on joke involving the “latus rectum”, but I can’t quite figure it out.
Of course mathematicians don’t really count; their research assistants do it for them!
When I heard this in high school, ca. 1969, the joke went, “Did you hear about the constipated engineer who worked it out with a slide rule?”
Yeah, and I still have a spiffy Dietzgen in the drawer of my desk.
What is the only water soluble animal?
The polar bear
Ha–that’s a GREAT one: a double=entendre joke!
This is my all-time favourite joke:
A woman walks into a bar and says “I’d like a double entendre.”
So the barman gives her one.
My favorite “science” joke in this context:
“This is not a blog!”
Awww… you guys put my physics joke up there;-)
This isn’t really a joke, but it’s why I love reading science books. It’s a line from Bernd Heinrich’s “Ravens in Winter”:
“Fortunately, I had a dead raven in the freezer.”
It was the “fortunately” part that had me rolling– because that sentence was in the middle of a paragraph about getting a radio transmitter in the mail and trying to figure out how to attach it to the back of a bird before going out into the field with it. Hence, the “fortunately”.
Ok, so maybe you hadda be there…
A man goes to see his psychiatrist (I know, not really scientists).
‘Doctor, I keep dreaming I am covered in gold paint!’
‘Ah! You must have a gilt complex.’
This was said to be quantum pioneer Niels Bohr’s favorite joke:
A physicist walks into another physicist’s office and asks the occupant “Why do you have a horseshoe on your door?”
“Because it brings good luck.”
“Surely you don’t believe that!!!!”
“No, of course not, but they say it works even if you don’t believe in it.”
“She was only the particle physicist’s daughter, but her naked bottom had charm.”
An extension of the Heisenberg speeding jokes…
Heisenberg and Schrodinger are driving to a conference together, and they are late so they are speeding. They are pulled over by a cop who asks, “Do you know how fast you were going?” Heisenberg responds, “Not really, but I can tell you exactly where I was.”
This strange response prompted the police man to search their vehicle. When he looked in the trunk he found a dead cat, and he exclaims, “Do you know you have a dead cat in your trunk?” Schrodinger sighs, “Well, I do now.”
You know why Fermi and Bose never played football (soccer for you infidels over there) together?
They couldn’t agree about the ball’s spin.
Not really a Schrodinger joke, but close enough. I can’t remember all the details, but I seem to remember it was in a book titled something like “101 uses for a dead cat”.
Most discussions of the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment go on endlessly about the selection of the quantum-controlled death machine, the sealing of the box etc, but leave out one of the most important parts of the experiment : the cat. In particular, the cat’s opinions on it’s impending death (or not, as the case may be). Now, cats are intelligent organisms (look at how they’ve got themselves devoted staff and a really cushy life!), and you can just bet that in any real implementation of Schrodinger’s experiment, the cat is NOT going to sit there in a dark box, waiting to die. It’s going to do something about it. But it’s in a sealed box with a ticking radioactive time bomb and some serious poison gas. What’s it to do?
By a process of logic that I forget the details of, to the proposition that attempting to perform a real Schrodinger’s cat experiment would result in the cat developing time travel.
Seems perfectly sensible to me.
Definitely not a joke : at some point in the 1960s, John Wheeler made a proposal to explain why all electrons have the same mass and other properties (presumably the theory can be extended to other elementary particles) : there is only one electron, and it zips through the universe in space and time, visible to us as an electron when it’s travelling through time in the same direction as us, and as a positron when travelling in the opposite direction.
That’s when I decided to stick to being a geologist ; I don’t have the imagination necessary for physics.
FWIW, I’d heard this proposal/thought originally attributed to Dirac.
How about some computer-related poetry:
“There was a young man from Big Blue
Whose poems all stopped at line two”
And, of course, the classic:
“There was a young lady from Sun”
Maybe this is tangential (ba da bum), but the best mathematics pick up line I’ve heard: “Do you want to come up to my apartment so I can show you the exponential growth of my natural log?”
A Higgs-boson walks into a church. The priest says to him, “You have to leave. We don’t allow your kind in here.” The Higgs-boson replies, “Okay… but without me how can you have mass?”
GET IT?! 😀
Was gonna be my offering. D’oh.
A zoology postdoc is eating his lunch in a landscaped courtyard with a reflecting pond. While he’s munching a frog hops over.
“Sir,” says the frog, “I am in truth a beautiful princess who is under an evil spell. If you kiss me I will revert to my original self and as your reward for rescuing me from this fate you will become my husband and live with me in great wealth.”
The student responds by picking up the frog and placing it carefully in his shirt pocket. The frog cries, “Sir, did you not hear me?”
The postdoc replies: “Look lady, I heard you. I’m sorry, I just don’t have time for a girlfriend right now. On the other hand a talking frog is like the coolest thing I have ever seen!”
Yours is the best one, congrats.
Thx, bonus religion joke: why did the blonde go to church?
She heard there was a guy hung like THIS
Grizzled physicist notes during lecture: “Entropy isn’t what it used to be.”
My favorite though, that likely most have heard:
“There is this dairy with cows and everything. The dairy farmer wants to increase his production of milk. To do this, she hires three consultants – an engineer, a psychologist, and a physicist.
After a week, the engineer comes back with a report. He said: “If you want to increase milk production, you need to get bigger milk pumps and bigger tubes to suck the milk through.”
Next came the psychologist. He said: “You nee to make the cows produce more milk. One way to do this is to make them calm and happy. Happy cows produce happy milk. Paint the milking stalls green. This will make the cows think of grass and happy fields. They will be happy.”
Finally, the physicist came to present her ideas. She said: “Assume the cow is a sphere….””
… of uniform density.
Thermodynamics in a nutshell : you can’t win ; you can’t even break even ; and you’re not allowed to stop playing.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/309537_307973849216013_100000102019801_1399196_2061195345_n.jpg
Saw this the other day and laughed myself silly.
[Laughs]
Dad was an industrial chemist.
One of his lab colleagues (this may be a “dire warning” type story that I’ve mis-remembered) was in the silly habit of having a beaker of water on the bench to drink from while doing analyses. One day he was doing an analysis which used KCN solution as a reagent.
There was a funeral.
“He’s so dense light bends around him.”
There was a lady from Bright
Who could run the speed of light
She left one day in a relative way
And arrived the previous night.
I’ll have to see if I can find John Cleese’s Monty Python sketch on (The sex life of) Molluscs.
1. Experimental physicist is walking down the hall at a prestigious research institute carrying a data plot of his latest results. Coming the other way is his associate, a theoretical physicist. Examining the graph, the theoretician proclaims, “Ah, I have a theory that explains that effect.” The next day the experimentalist meets the theoretician and says, “By the way, yesterday I was holding the plot upside down.” The theoretician proudly announces “Even better!”.
2. An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician travel to Great Britain for a technical conference in Scotland. They decide to take a train from London to Edinburgh to see the countryside. On the way, the engineer notices a black sheep standing at the crest of a hilly pasture. “Look, there are black sheep in England!”, he says. The physicist looks and says, “Well, this only shows that England has at least one black sheep.” The mathematician observes, “Actually, this only proves that England has at least one sheep that is at least half black!”.
Oh my gosh, Jerry — this first letter from one of Andrew Sullivan’s “readers” sounds precisely like you. At any rate, it’s an excellent observation that Andrew invents his own religion as he goes along.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/11/what-is-god.html
People are divided in 10 kinds of people.
There are those who understand binary digits, and those who don’t.
Physics double entendre: I’d like to tunnel through her classically forbidden region.
You mean you’d like to penetrate her potential barrier?
A priest, a rabbi and an engineer are being sent to the guillotine. The priest is locked into the stock, and the blade is released.
But the blade sticks, halfway down, and after some discussion among themselves, the executioners decide the priest must be let go.
The rabbi is then put in, and the same thing happens. He too is released.
When it’s the engineer’s turn, he says, “Hey. How about putting me in there upside down?”
The executioners shrug and grant him his request. And before the blade is released, the engineer laughs and says, “Aha! I see your problem!”
A theoretical physicist asks a biologist “Is a cat in an enclosed box alive or dead?”. The biologist replies “You got a cat to stay inside a box?! That proves there’s no Free Will!”
From my chemistry days:
1. Two chemists meet at a conference. One is American, the other British. The Brit asks the American: “So what
do you do for research?” The American responds: “Oh, I work with arsoles.”
The Brit: “Yes, sometimes my colleagues get on my nerves too.”
2. What do you call a tooth in a glass of water?
A one molar solution.
3. My favourite:
Old chemists never die: they reach thermodynamical equilibrium.
Two behaviorists meet on the street. One says, “you’re fine, how am I?” Or, similarly, two behaviorists have just had sex. One says, “It was great for you, how was it for me?”
My biology teacher wife came up with this alternative:
A man walks into a doctor’s office and says, “Doctor, you gotta help me. I think I’m a moth.” The doctor says, “It’s clear you have a problem, but I’m a pediatrician – I only treat caterpillars and pupae.
A P.I. and two postdocs are walking across campus when they come across a magic lantern. They rub it, a genie appears and grants them each a wish.
The first postdoc says “I want to be relaxing on a Caribbean beach, sipping martinis”. There is a puff of smoke and she vanishes.
The second postdoc says “I want to be skiing in powder snow on a perfect spring day in Aspen” and he, too, vanishes in a puff of smoke.
The genie turns to the P.I. who looks at his watch and says “I want those two back in the lab by lunchtime”.
Why do all graduate students necessarily have straight hair? Because «curl grad = 0.»
Not a joke as such, but for anyone with a passing interest in chemistry Things I won’t work with is highly entertaining. In fact it’s probably pretty amusing even if you don’t know the first thing about chemistry.
That blog is an absolute classic. I’ve fallen in love with chlorine trifluoride (“Sand won’t save you this time”).
Okay, obligatory joke:
A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer were each given a red rubber ball and asked to find the volume.
The mathematician measured the diameter and evaluated a triple integral.
The physicist filled a jug with water and measured the displacement.
The engineer looked up the part number in his red-rubber-ball table.
Archeology is a kind of science, right? Then:
” A team of archaeologists were working in Jerusalem when they found a slab of rock with five figures carved on it. In order the figures were:
1) A Woman. 2) A Donkey. 3) A Shovel. 4) A Fish. 5) A Star of David.
After months of studying the rock and figures on it, the leader took the rock and went on a lecture tour. He said the carvings were several thousands of years old but even so they revealed a lot about the people of that time.
1) The woman being placed first in the line of figures indicated that women were held in very high esteem. It was most likely a family oriented culture.
2) The donkey indicated they had domesticated animals. They probably used the donkey to till the fields.
3) The shovel shows they were highly intelligent as they knew how to make tools.
4) The fish shows they knew how to augment the crops they raised by also reaping from the sea.
5) The Star of David of course indicates they were a very religious group of people.
A little old man in the front row finally got the attention of the speaker. When acknowledged he said “I’m sorry to harm your conclusions, but you were reading it left to right. In Hebrew we read from right to left. That way it reads:
“Holy mackerel dig the ass on that woman!”
Okay, not really a science joke, but a math joke, and I’ll use it because I added a second punchline when I heard it:
Who was the roundest knight at King Arthur’s round table?
Circumference!
(He got that way because he was always having two pis)
Oh yeah, here’s one:
http://cowbirdsinlove.com/46
An engineer, mathematician, and physicist are walking on a grassy plain when a man appears with a bunch of fence and challenges them to enclose the greatest area with the fixed amount of fence. The engineer takes out some paper, makes blueprints, and erects a perfect octagon. The physicist says “you’re an idiot, engineer”, and builds a circle. The mathematician takes a small amount of fence, makes a small enclosure, goes inside, and says, “I declare myself the outside”.
This may be the first physicist/engineer/mathematician joke I’ve ever heard where the mathematician actually does something smart.
A physicist, an engineer and a mathematician were all in a hotel sleeping when a fire broke out in their respective rooms. The physicist woke up, saw the fire, ran over to his desk, pulled out his CRC, and began working out all sorts of fluid dynamics equations. After a couple minutes, he threw down his pencil, got a graduated cylinder out of his suitcase, and measured out a precise amount of water. He threw it on the fire, extinguishing it, with not a drop wasted, and went back to sleep. The engineer woke up, saw the fire, ran into the bathroom, turned on the faucets full-blast, flooding out the entire apartment, which put out the fire, and went back to sleep. The mathematician woke up, saw the fire, ran over to his desk, began working through theorems, lemmas, hypotheses , you-name-it, and after a few minutes, put down his pencil triumphantly and exclaimed, “I have *proven* that I *can* put the fire out!” He then went back to sleep.
Since people are stretching it beyond science into just geek-y jokes, here’s one:
A technician, an accountant, and an IT guy are riding in a company car when the engine start backfiring and the exhaust starts belching smoke. The technician gets out, opens the hood, and start poking around. The accountant starts calling local garages to get the cheapest estimate on repairs. The IT guy closes all the windows, turns off the car, and then starts it back up again.
1) Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?
To get to the same side.
2) Three statisticians go duck hunting. They quickly come across their first potential ‘victim’, which flies up out of the reeds. The first statistician fires his shotgun, but his shot is two feet high. The second fires, but alas, his shot is two feet low. The third one yells “We got him!”
3) A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician are watching a house across from a bar. They see two people go in and after a while, three come out.
The biologist says, well, they must have procreated. The physicist says, nonsense, there must have been an error in the initial measurement. The mathematician says, whatever, but if we add one more person to the house there will be nobody in it.
Copper Wire Discovered
After having dug to a depth of 10 feet last year outside of New York City, New York scientists found traces of copper cable dating back 150 years. They came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 150 years ago.
Not to be outdone by the New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed, a Los Angeles , California archaeologist dug to a depth of 20 feet somewhere just outside Oceanside . Shortly after, a story in the LA Times read: ” California archaeologists report a finding of 200 year old copper cable, have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the New Yorkers.”
One week later, a local newspaper in Chattanooga, Tennessee reported the following: “After digging down about 30 feet deep in his pasture near the community of Quick, Bubba, a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing. Bubba has therefore concluded that 300 years ago, Tennessee had already gone wireless”.
Just makes a person proud to be from Tennessee