Warning - Math Humour

Pretty Little Polynomial and Curly Primal Instinct

Once upon a time (1/t) pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never, ever enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient, and made her way in amongst the complex elements.
Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents approached her surface, and she became tenser and tenser. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, became unstable, lost all sense of directrix, tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf, and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. She was completely divergent by the time she reached the turning point. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone in a non-euclidean space.
She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was she convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once.
Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his lower series extended. She could see at once his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms, and knew he was irrational. “Arcsinh!” she gasped.
“Hey, what’s your sine?” he asked. “What a symmetric set of asymptotes you have!”
“Stay away from me!” she protested. “I haven’t got any brackets on!”
“Calm yourself, my dear!” said the smooth operator.. “Your fears are purely imaginary.”
“i, i, …” she thought, “Perhaps he’s not normal, but homologous.”
“What order are you?” the brute suddenly demanded.
“Seventeen,” replied Polly.
Curly leered, “I suppose you’ve never been operated upon?”
“Of course not. I’m absolutely convergent!” Polly replied quite properly.
“Come on,” said Curly: “Let’s go to decimal place I know of, and I’ll take you to the limit.”
Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places, and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly Nomial! The algorithm method was now her only hope. She felt him approaching her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy; Curly was a heavy side operator. His radius squared itself and Polly’s loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed Runge-Kutta on her. He even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he satisfied her hypotheses, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.
When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly’s denominator increased monotonically. Finally, they took her to L’Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.
The moral of this tale is: “If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.” Now that’s what I call getting your Mathematical Pundamentals right.

Battle of the professions

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost.
He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted,
“Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”
The woman below replied, “You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”
“You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist.
“I am,” replied the woman, How did you know?”
“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is, technically Correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help so far.”
The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.”
“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”
“Well,” said the woman, you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault”.

(last one)

If Dr. Seuss did Technical Writing

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
and the double clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
and your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn’t hash,
then your situation’s hopeless and your system’s gonna crash.

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
that’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
then you may as well reboot it and go out with a bang,
'cause as sure as I’m a poet, that sucker’s gonna hang.

When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy on the disk,
and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk,
and you have to flash your memory and you want to RAM your ROM,
quickly turn off your computer and be sure to tell your mom.

My favorite geek based humor is the comic xkcd.com
Even if I don’t always understand the joke.

Hee hee! I say with absolute glee!
A tech writer I am, indeed, that’s me.

I was expecting something more like this

How to tell you’ve pissed off an engineer:

http://img112.imageshack.us/img112/141/engineerpissedjc2.jpg

ok, so the math is not 100% correct, but I did not write the explanation.

What is the correct math?

it’s e^i pi which i = -1 so e^-3.1459 is approximately 1 so the check is made out for $2

I know I’m a geek because I normally do get the joke… XKCD is also one of my fav’s out there

i doesn’t really equal -1.. i^2 = -1

e^(i * pi) = Cos(pi) + iSin(pi) = -1 (EULERS FORMULA… Cos(pi) = -1, Sin(pi) = 0)

The Last part is a power series that if memory serves correctly comes out to 1 -> it equals 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64… after an infinite time equals 1…in a finite time it can only come infinitely close to 1

0.002 + -1 + 1 = 0.002$…

Why are you guys inserting Primal Instinct (which is a pheromone) into the math equations? LOL, is this like sideways arithmatic (not sure if you read that book, but that’s what is seems like).

By the way that first joke was hella funny! I don’t think everyone would get it though, and I had a bit of a challenge following…haven’t touched calculus since a few years ago.

actually it is because Primal Instinct is automatically converted from PI by the forum

actually it is because Pie is automatically converted into primal instinct when spelled without the e, by the forum.

(eyes rolling up in head)

And I had to ask…