Category Archives: jokes

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.

Some people have noticed that I’m wearing a rather dapper suit during the recent visit of the press to my lab. It’s important to dress sharp, I think, and that varies from situation to situation. Fashion is an obligation, not a privilege; you’ve got to be willing to suffer for it, for the greater good of all.

Do you think Lady Gaga finds her stuff comfortable?

Do you think Lady Gaga finds her stuff comfortable? She does it for the greater good. 

R.E. Buxbaum. You are your own sculpture; Be art.

 

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.