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My Geek Credentials
I was perusing, and enjoying, The Week In Pictures at Power Line when I encountered the image below. It produced the only audible chuckle of the entire post. I’m a geek. Case closed.
If you don’t understand the humor, you’re normal. Lucky you.
Published in Humor
Tell me about it, pal…
Isn’t that the fifth Monkee?
When Valerie takes that Last Train to Clarksville, I want to be there.
Doppler shift and Lorenz contraction combined – relativistic effects at highway speeds. A geek joke for sure :-).
It was the Sci-fi reading that enabled me to puzzle it out.
Certain highway jokes don’t work unless you have a subconscious ability to grasp intuitive math. For example, a single panel of a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic strip of the Seventies: three bushy-bearded men are staring out a car windshield at a California freeway sign: Disneyland 1 Mile. “Aww…I guess we’d better smoke these last three joints”. The laugh is based on the incongruence between two facts:
1. at highway speed, that means they’ll be at the turnoff in one minute; and
2. Even for the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, this is a preposterously short amount of time to do it in.
Maybe the joke is that they wouldn’t be going at highway speeds.
I might buy that, but let’s do the opposing math. Three experienced Seventies hippies, three joints…a reasonable guess is each one takes one and spends 20 minutes on it. One mile in twenty minutes is 3 mph. So my logical and utterly humor-blind guess is, that’s not it.
That’s some credential you got there.
This is a multi – thread joke. Three joints in one minute to be sure. But: ’70’s / L.A. “freeways:” No, three mph or less isn’t a bit out of the question.
I got it as soon as I realized it was the same car. But somebody suggested the observer’s nose should be longer in frame two. Why would that be? Was he thinking speed-of-light / time warp?
One flaw though – the green foliage changes, albeit slightly.
Somebody tell the joke about the speeding physics student, the cop and the traffic light. With the answer.
Ya, I’ve been accused of being a geek. But I have a geek friend who constantly proves that I’m no more than a geek wanna-be.
I’m sending him the picture.
Very subtle. Them young whippersnappers always driving too fast.
I have a tee shirt with a drawing of Einstein in a police uniform. It says, “186,000 miles per second is not only a good idea – it’s the law.”
When I saw the cartoon, I was reminded of the costume Sheldon wore to Penny’s Halloween Party on Big Bang. Everybody thought he was a zebra. That was funny too.
Even physics knows that lefties have the blues ’cause Trump is right.
One of the cleverest cartoons in a while. We got a chuckle when we saw it on PL.
Casey and Andy covered it.
Heisenberg gets pulled over for speeding.
The cop asks him, “Do you know how fast you were going?”
Heisenberg replies, “No, but I know exactly where I am!”
The officer looks at him confused and says “you were going 78 miles per hour!”
Heisenberg throws his arms up and cries, “Great! Now I’m lost!”
Shouldn’t the top of the tires (in the right panel) be redder? I suppose in the left column they should be less blue. Or maybe the bottoms should be less red/more blue. And the length distortion should reflect the difference in velocity ….
Geeky jokes invite extrapolation.
Not to quibble with a joke, but shouldn’t the car be shortened in both panels? Lorentz contraction (as I understand it) is a function of v/c only, not direction of travel.
Jokes like this are meant to be quibbled with.
I’ll confess. I don’t know anything about that. I just figured that red wavelengths are longer, so maybe the car should be, too.
I was being self-deprecating and making fun of myself.
Not everything has to do with Trump; it was nice to have a break from all things Trump.
Keep on Dopplering.
Yeah, my husband’s response was that according to the laws of physics, you shouldn’t be driving that fast.
Escape velocity is only a little above 25,000 mph, so you won’t stay on the surface for very long.
You guys who take cartoons so literally must be a lot of fun (sarcasm) watching a James Bond or similar movie. :-)
Well, my alma mater’s mascot made it into a Bond movie. That was cool to see, even if he’s working for the Russians. Now that I’m supporting the directed energy field, I haven’t gone back to watch Goldeneye and see how much they got wrong. Or maybe what they got right.
Well, some members of my family won’t watch movies with me.
Shouldn’t, Couldn’t, and Wouldn’t are very different things.
I would vote couldn’t.