Chem Jokes
Posted By Caulimovirus on February 20, 2008
“Mathematicians Get All the Best Nerd Jokes”
.: Killing time during my Cell Fizzzz class the other day, I and the girl next to me gazed upwardly at the periodic table adorning the upper third of the wall. She wrote on her notebook “Xenon: Warrior Princess” and immediately the game was on.
.: I responded with the equally cringe-worthy “Jason and the Argon-auts” and followed it with “Yttrium: Helping nerds win at scrabble since 1794.” She fired back with “Einsteinium only got a 99.”
.: Most of my attempts were simply awful (“V for Vanadium” and “Don’t phase me, Br!”), but that didn’t stop me from appreciating them. I was particularly fond of the headline: “Plutonium Relegated to Dwarf Element Status.”
.: I couldn’t muster enough comic genius to make something out of Holnium and Halfnium, which is great because I later learned the actual elements names are Holmium and Hafnium. Then there was my pair of borderline racist jokes:
“Excuse me, senor, does this look like silicon to you?”
“Si!”
and
“Excuse me, senor, do you know what the symbol for potassium is?”
“Que?”
.: Were I a better artist, I could have drawn a king, queen, prince, and princess in the form of neon lights with the all too obvious subtitle below: The Noble Gases. However, I lack the effort to ever seriously develop an artistic talent. It is this same lack of effort that is responsible for my final joke: “Hey, do you know which element has atomic number 116?” “Uuh, I don’t know.”
.: My alternative title claims that mathematicians have all the best nerd jokes. If my post wasn’t enough to convince you, allow me to offer the following:
An Engineering, a Physicist, and a Mathematician are staying in a hotel. In the middle of the night, the fire alarm goes off. The Engineer is the first to wake. He runs out to the hall, sees a fire off in the distance, and gets to work. He runs back to his room, grabs his ice bucket, fills it with water, and runs quickly back to the hall to douse the flames. Later, the alarm goes off again, this time waking the Physicist. The Physicist sees another fire in the hallway, runs back to retrieve the ice bucket, patiently fills it with just enough water put out the fire (keeping in mind the rate at which the fire spreads while he’s filling the bucket), walks carefully to just the right distance from the fire, and gently tosses the water from the bucket, forming a perfect arc and putting out the fire without a drop of excess water. The fire alarm goes off a third time, and the Mathematician wakes up. He runs outside of his room, sees the fire in the hall, remembers the ice bucket in his room, thinks “Aha! A solution exists!” and goes back to sleep.
2imperturbable