Alan's Humor Archive : Engineering

A mathmatician, a physicist, and an engineer were all given a red
rubber ball and told to find the volume. 

The mathmatician carefully measured the diameter and evaluated a triple integral.
     
The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball in the water, and measured the 
total displacement.
     
The engineer looked up the model and serial numbers in his red-rubber-ball table.

Here are the winning entries from a recent contest for "new scientific theories."

THE RUNNERS-UP:

 4th runner-up--  The earth may spin faster on its axis due to
deforestation. Just as a figure skater's rate of spin increases
when the arms are brought in close to the body, the cutting of tall
trees may cause our planet to spin dangerously fast.

 3rd runner-up--Communist China is technologically underdeveloped
because they have no alphabet. The lack of an alphabet means
the Chinese cannot use "acronyms"; thus, they cannot communicate
their ideas at a faster rate.

 2nd runner-up-- The 'Why Yawning Is Contagious' Theory: You yawn
to equalize the pressure on your eardrums. This pressure change
outside your eardrums unbalances other people's ear pressures, so they
must
yawn to even it all out.

 1st runner-up--If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an
infinite
number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of
shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will
eventually produce all the world's great literary works in Braille.

HONORABLE MENTION: The quantity of consonants in the English language
is absolutely constant. If consonants are omitted in one
geographic area, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his
"cah", the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his
car and invest in "erl wells."

GRAND PRIZE WINNER: When a cat is dropped, it ALWAYS lands on its feet;
and when toast is dropped, it ALWAYS lands with the buttered side facing down.
Therefore, I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat.

When dropped, the two will hover, spinning inches above the ground,
probably into eternity. A "buttered-cat array" could replace pneumatic
tires on cars and trucks, and "giant buttered-cat arrays" could easily
allow a high-speed monorail linking New York with Chicago.

- consider themselves well dressed if their socks match.
     
- buy their spouses a set of matched screwdrivers for their birthday.
     
- have a non-technical vocabulary of 800 words.
     
- repair their own cameras, telephones, televisions, watches, and automatic transmissions.
     
- say "It's 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 25 degrees Celsius, and 298 degrees Kelvin" 
  and all you say is "Isn't it a nice day?"
     
- wear badges so they don't forget who they are.  Sometimes a note is attached saying 
  "Don't offer me a ride today. I drove my own car".
     
- politics run towards acquiring a parking space with their name on it and an office with a window.
     
- know the "ABC's of Infrared" from A to B.
     
- know how to take the cover off of their computer, and are not afraid to do it.
     
- think that the real heroes of "Apollo 13" were the mission controllers.
     
- briefcases contain a Phillips screwdriver, a copy of "Quantum Physics", 
  and a half of a peanut butter sandwich.

Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None, it's a hardware problem.

Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None, you can fix anything with software.

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary
telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and 
it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

---Albert Einstein

- your favorite James Bond character is "Q".
     
- you see a good design and still have to change it.
     
- you still own a slide rule and you know how to use it.
     
- your family haven't the foggiest idea what you do at work.
     
- you have ever saved the power cord from a broken appliance.
     
- you have owned a calculator with no equal key and know what RPN stands for.
     
- you make four sets of drawings (with seven revisions) before making a bird bath.
     
- you have trouble writing anything unless the paper has horizontal and vertical lines.