Frazz by Jef Mallett for January 17, 2013

The saddest point of any STEM major’s life is when they start to understand those nerdy jokes and one-liners.

“Don’t drink and derive,”still makes me LOL.

How many trolls does it take to ruin the comments section? Just one.

I have to wonder what Jung would have made of this in terms of his idea of synchronicity:Yesterday I was reading a book that contained an anecdote about a mathematician who posed a problem whose answer was an Indiana telephone number, which, when you called it, produced a recorded message of the mathematician’s voice saying that you got the right answer, but ‘try again’. The weird thing is that the problem was based on a Fibonacci-like series, only instead of the iterative rule being a(n) = a(n-1) + a(n-2) it wasa(n) = a(a(n-1)) + a(n-a(n-1)).

prrdh said, less than a minute ago

Then there are geology jokes.Once Ferdinand Feghoot went on a wilderness hike with a bunch of Hollywood stars, including Lee Marvin and Sally Field. On the third day, their farthest point from civilization, Ms. Field realized that she was out of Lithium and would suffer a recurrence of her bipolar disorder on the way back. Feghoot said that he had a small chemical lab in his backpack that he could use to extract the element from a suitable ore, but no such ore was to be found. After a few minutes of deliberation, Feghoot sprang to his feet and dug through the liquid refreshments that had been cached at the campsite. Holding up a can of Miller Lite, he crowed in triumph. Pointing to Mr. Marvin, he directed him to polish of the case from which Feghoot had extracted the can.“But I hate that horse piss,” Marvin protested.“But you have to do it for Ms. Fields’ sake,” Feghoot insisted. Turning to the others, he explained, “Don’t you see? If Mr. Marvin does as I say, in twenty minutes we’ll have lepidolite”.

Did you hear about the guy who thought Polish notation was how Rimsky-Korsakov wrote music?

No?

Oh, well. You know what they say – there’s 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

After Noah told the animals to “go forth and multiply”, two snakes remained. They told him, “We can’t multiply, we’re adders.”

Noah went to the top of Mt. Ararat to ask God for guidance, but when he came back, the ark was full of snakes. He said to the parents “I thought you couldn’t multiply because you were adders.”

They replied, “See that table over there? It’s a log table.”

ba-dump-bump.

My dad’s an engineer, so’s my hubby, my mom taught accounting and HR management I have heard so many math and science jokes I don’t even notice them as different from Knock knock or dumb blond jokes any more. .If I were going to rant about jobs and “affermitive action” I’d point out that Mom was a professor because in the Deep South it’s perfectly O.K. for women to be teachers but NOT managers but that would be OT. . .

An SQL query walks into bar, sees two open tables, and asks, “May I join you?”

Sorry, a little computer humor.

Since the comic hasn’t rolled yet, I have a chance to put in my two penn’orth. Inside humor is funny to insiders. Past, present and future walked into a bar. It was tense.Later, conditional and subjunctive came in; they were moody.Last of all came a noun who asked for a beer. He was declined. The joke about “do you want fries with that” has been applied to any number of majors from Liberal Arts to Philosophy to Psychology and numerous others. Why is everyone ripping on Nebuchadnezzar? (I like that spelling better, it’s easier to remember). His comments about the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs are spot on, and our economy is still in the toilet. A good belch joke trumps any witticism about tensor calculus any day. On the other hand, Integral zee squared dee zeeFrom one to the cube root of threeTimes the cosineOf three pi over nineEquals log of the cube root of e. Even language majors can appreciate math jokes – all you have to do is run them through a universal translator.

@ealeseth – no, he does not think that women are incapable. He said women who were hired only because they were women and lacked real qualifications