Tag Archives: jokes

Surrealism Jokes

What is it that is red and white, polka-dotted, filled with moisture, and hangs from trees in the winter?

 

Unity

 

Is funny because …… it’s more true than truth. Whatever claims to be unity must include the red and white, polka-dotted, moist items that hang from trees. Otherwise it wouldn’t be unity. Surrealism jokes should not be confused with Zen Jokes. Eg this. and that.  As a practical matter, you can tell surrealists from Buddhists because surrealists are drunks and have hair. And you know why Dali wore a mustache?

 

To pass unobserved

Dali's mustache without dali; notice how the mustache obscures the man.

Dali’s mustache without Dali, from Dali’s Mustache, the only book (to my knowledge) about a part of an artist. There are many books about Picasso, for example, but none about his left foot.

See how it’s true. The mustache takes the place of the man, standing in for him, or here the lack of him. Surrealism sees the absurd dream realism that is beyond the surd. “If you act the genius you will be one.” See? It even speaks for him, when needed.

Dali and his mustache agree, they love art for art's sake.

Dali and his mustache agree, they love art for art’s sake.

So how many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  The fish.

by R. E. Buxbaum, June 14, 2013

Zen and the hotdog vendor (a joke)

What did the Zen master ask from the hot dog vendor?

“Can you make me one — with everything?”

The vendor (so the story goes) replied “That will be $1.50.” The Master handed him $10 and the vendor handed him a hot-dog and said, “change comes from within.” (thought you’d like to know).

If you think this is funny, you may also like my previous Zen joke or (for all I know), my recent personal relationship cartoon.

Statistics Joke

A classic statistics joke concerns a person who’s afraid to fly; he goes to a statistician who explains that planes are very, very safe, especially if you fly a respectable airline in good weather. In that case, virtually the only problem you’ll have is the possibility of a bomb on board. The fellow thinks it over and decides that flying is still too risky, so the statistician suggests he plant a bomb on the airplane, but rig it to not go off. The statistician explains: while it’s very rare to have a bomb onboard an airplane, it’s really unheard of to have two bombs on the same plane.

It’s funny because …. the statistician left out the fact that an independent variable (number of bombs) has to be truly independent. If it is independent, the likelihood is found using a poisson distribution, a non-normal distribution where the greatest likelihood is zero bombs, and there are no possibilities for a negative bomb. Poisson distributions are rarely taught in schools for some reason.

By Dr. Robert E. Buxbaum, Mar 25, 2013. If you’ve got a problem like this (particularly involving chemical engineering) you could come to my company, REB Research.

Joke about antimatter and time travel

I’m sorry we don’t serve antimatter men here.

Antimatter man walks into a bar.

Is funny because … in quantum-physics there is no directionality in time. Thus an electron can change directions in time and then appears to the observer as a positron, an anti electron that has the same mass as a normal electron but the opposite charge and an opposite spin, etc. In physics, the reason electrons and positrons appear to annihilate is that it’s there was only one electron to begin with. That electron started going backwards in time so it disappeared in our forward-in-time time-frame.

The thing is, time is quite apparent on a macroscopic scales. It’s one of the most apparent aspects of macroscopic existence. Perhaps the clearest proof that time is flowing in one direction only is entropy. In normal life, you can drop a glass and watch it break whenever you like, but you can not drop shards and expect to get a complete glass. Similarly, you know you are moving forward in time if you can drop an ice cube into a hot cup of coffee and make it luke-warm. If you can reach into a cup of luke-warm coffee and extract an ice cube to make it hot, you’re moving backwards in time.

It’s also possible that gravity proves that time is moving forward. If an anti apple is just a normal apple that is moving backwards in time, then I should expect that, when I drop an anti-apple, I will find it floats upward. On the other hand, if mass is inherently a warpage of space-time, it should fall down. Perhaps when we understand gravity we will also understand how quantum physics meets the real world of entropy.

Joke re: SI pressure

Einstein, Newton, and the two Pascal brothers are playing hide and seek. Einstein has his eyes covered and is counting. The two Pascal bothers run and hide but Isaac Newton does not. He draws a square around him in the dust and stands waiting. When Einstein finishes counting he says, “I see you Sir Isaac standing there.” “No you don’t.” says Newton. “You see two Pascals: there’s one Newton in half a square meter area.

Dwarf joke

I tripped over a dwarf the other day; I know — bad news. The fellow gets all huffy with me, and seems to think I was looking down on him (So weird, if I’d been looking down on him, I’d never have tripped!).

At any rate he says, “I’m not happy.” “That’s OK.” I say, “So which one are you?” And he gets all upset. These dwarves are all the same, they’re so small. 

Heisenberg joke and why water is wet

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I love hydrogen in large part because it is a quantum fluid. To explain what that means and how that leads to water being wet, let me begin with an old quantum physics joke.

Werner Heisenberg is speeding down a highway in his car when he’s stopped by a police officer. “Do you know how fast you were going?” asks the officer. “No idea” answers Heisenberg, “but I know exactly where I am.”

The joke relates to a phenomenon of quantum physics that states that the more precisely you can know the location of something, the less precisely you can infer the speed. Thus, the fact that Heisenberg knew precisely where he was implied that he could have no idea of the car’s speed. Of course, this uncertainty is mostly seen with small things like light and electrons –and a bit with hydrogen, but hardly at all with a car or with Dr. Heisenberg himself (and that’s why it’s funny).

This funky property is related to something you may have wondered about: why is water wet? That is, why does water cling to your hands or clothes while liquid teflon repels. Even further, you may have wondered why water is a liquid at normal conditions when H2S is a gas; H2S is a heavier analog, so if one of the two were a liquid, you’d think it was H2S.

Both phenomena are understood through hydrogen behaving as the quantum car above. Oxygen atoms are pretty small, and hydrogen atoms are light enough to start behaving in a quantum way. When a hydrogen atom attaches to an oxygen atom to form part of a water molecule, its location becomes fixed rather precisely. As a result, the hydrogen atom gains velocity (the hydrogen isn’t going anywhere with this velocity, and it’s sometimes called zero-point energy), but because of this velocity or energy, its bond to the oxygen becomes looser than it would be if you had heavier hydrogen. When the oxygen of another water molecule or of a cotton cellulose molecule comes close, the hydrogen starts to hop back and forth between the two oxygen atoms. This reduces the velocity of the hydrogen atom, and stabilizes the assemblage. There is now less kinetic energy (or zero-point energy) in the system, and this stability is seen as a bond that is caused not by electron sharing but by hydrogen sharing. We call the reasonably stable bond between molecules that share a hydrogen atom this way a “hydrogen bond.” (now you know).

The hydrogen bond is why water is a liquid and is the reason water is wet. The hydrogen atom jumping between water molecules stabilizes the liquid water more than it would stabilize liquid H2S. Since sulfur atoms are bigger than oxygen atoms, the advantage of hydrogen jumping is smaller. As a result, the heat of vaporization of water is higher than that of H2S, and water is a liquid at normal conditions while H2S is a gas.

Water sticks to cotton or your skin the same way, hydrogen atoms skip between the oxygen of water molecules and of these surfaces creating a bond. It is said to whet these surfaces, and the result is that water is found to be wet. Liquid teflon does not have hydrogen atoms that can jump so there is no band that could be made from that direction (there are some hydrogen atoms on the cotton that can jump to the teflon, but there is no advantage to bonding of this sort as there are only a few hydrogen atoms, and these already jump to other oxygens in the cotton. Thus, to jump to the teflon would mean breaking a bond with other oxygen atoms in the cotton — there would be no energy advantage. This then is just one of the reasons I love hydrogen: it’s a quantum-y material.

Newfie joke (Newfie’s are Canadians from Newfinland)

Here’s a Newfie joke; it was originally another joke, but I tweaked it because I was in Frankenmuth today watching folks snow sculpt and ice-fish. As for Newfinland, it’s basically the Appalachia of Canada. The folks there aren’t considered to be particularly bright. Anyway.

So this Newfie decides it’s time he took up ice fishing. It’s winter and all his other Newfie friends ice fish. So he gets a setup with an ice drill, a few short fishing poles, a plastic pail to sit on, and a little tent, and he goes to set it up on the ice early one morning.

He finds a nice, empty spot, but as soon as he’s set up the pail and tent but he hears a voice from somewhere around him, “Go home, there are no fish under the ice.” He looks all around but he can’t see anyone. Who said that? Was that comment for him? He goes back to start drilling, and he hears the voice again. “Go home; there are no fish under the ice.” Well, he still can’t see anyone, but figures that maybe he should go to a different spot. He picks up his stuff, moves about 50 feet away and starts to set up again, when he hears the voice again, just as loud. “Go home, there are no fish under the ice.” “Who are you?” yells the Newfie to no-one in particular, “God?” “I’m the rink manager. There are no fish under the ice.”