These engineering and science tech-centric
jokes, song parodies, anecdotes and assorted humor have been collected from friends
and websites across the Internet. I check back occasionally for new fodder, but
it seems all the old content is reappearing all over (like this is). The humor is
light-hearted and clean and sometimes slightly assaultive to the easily-offended,
so you are forewarned. It is all workplace-safe.
Humor #1,
#2, #3
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from
here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the
top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?" One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a
toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using
a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position
to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index
to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with
the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the
toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype." The second advisor, a computer scientist,
immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast,
they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects
of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker
that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete.
If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years." "With
this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods.
Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with
grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry
divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes." The ham
and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and
poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time,
the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics
of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than
to scrambled eggs." "Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary
requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements.
Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs
to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required too." "We must not forget the user interface.
The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product
unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy
boot on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu
and click on the foods they want to cook." "Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the
design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386
with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object-oriented
language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the
difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit
microcontroller!)." The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
...from the Rutgers State University of NJ web site. |