ec2-3-22-248-208.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | StuartFraser | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic Rating system in use. Please feel free to browse these quotes from the Edit page rather than normal viewing. If there are quotes you feel are particularly good, prepend a symbol to the start of them. If there are quotes you feel are particularly bad, prepend a ~ symbol. Those with several s will at some point be collected to form a Best Of. Those with several ~s may at some point be removed. Please don't cancel the symbols out: something with " ~~ " is more informative than if it had no markings.
Apologies to AlexChurchill for stealing his rating system, but it seems better to use the same one, if one is aiming to produce less confusion.
No problem... ImitationIsTheSincerestFormOfFlattery?, an' all that ^^ --AC
Lecturer Quotes
Dr. Ansorge (Mathematical Methods I)
~ “Being mathematicians, instead of having just two or three, we can have an infinite number of them.”
“At this point I want to say something slightly anarchist”
“It’s checking you understand what you’re doing, not just blindly cooking the recipe book.”
“That’s a simple solution, but I doubt you’d have seen it yourselves unless it was pointed out to you.”
~~ “By the magic of calculus”
~~ “Fractional error tends to 0 as n tends to big”
“Admittedly there’s only three of them as opposed to an infinite number but we’re not going to worry too much about that.”
“If you converge that’s good. If you don’t converge that’s not good and we really don’t want anything to do with you.”
“I think we worship the powers of 2”
“If it was a tortoise on speed or something…”
“We see with one eye on the complex plane” although this really needs some different symbol indicating 'horrendously bad pun', like a certain quote of Rob's
“Engineers often use j for this; this is thoroughly evil and you should never do it.”
~ “When things change you get a differential equation.”
“The way to find another solution is to be inspired and write it down.”
~ “The t’s cancel, as if by magic.”
"It's stuff you already know, even if you don't know it."
Dr. Wothers (Shape & Structure of Molecules, Chemistry of the Elements)
“Carbon-13 enriched Ethanol costs about £500 for one millilitre. That’s about £10,000 for a gin and tonic.”
“You could argue that the lone pairs were quite large and wanted to occupy this space. That’s one argument, but it isn’t a very good one.”
“Electrons are white.”
“The Schroedinger equation will tell you everything you want to know”
“This is actually quite exciting. [pause] I can feel the excitement in the audience.”
“Oops…that’s rather chilly.” (touching a test tube containing liquid nitrogen)
[prior to burning various things] “I thought that since we’d gone to all this trouble of making some liquid oxygen, it would be a shame to waste it…”
"This makes sense. It's not true..."
"Those of you who are really bored can spend the remainder of this lecture colouring that in."
"I promised you graphic nudity last time, so...."
Dr. Keeler (Energetics and Equilibria)
"Where does the energy come from? Well, for us mostly it comes from chocolate, obviously..."
"This is separating the variables, if you're into that sort of thing"
"This all gets a bit agonizing so we'll sweep this under the carpet and remember that although we shouldn't do this, we're going to."
"You don't know that yet, but I know that, and lots of clever people have worked it out before me. You'll just have to trust us."
"You will be aware that in Chemistry there are a large number of whizzbangs which supposedly serve some educational purpose. This one is called the barking dog and serves no purpose whatsoever. But we're going to do it anyway. Twice."
Prof. Longair (Statistical & Quantum Physics)
"Happiness flows over. We can do the integral"
~ "Anyone who comes in late now has a problem, as they can't see the steps and will fall over"
"Let us assume we know what heat is"
"3 calories per mole. Which is happiness"
~ "You've got to make that equal to x squared or y squared or whatever it is"
"This appears in an infinite number of examinations"
"An exponential! You say, with joy."
"Take a perfect drunk person, which means that they take random steps of random distance in a random direction"
"That one is almost a straight line, must have been a drunken lecturer"
"It will get better and better and better and better and more obscure as you go on."
These next eight were all on the same day:
"Take a large pile of origins"
"A little cage of atoms with 3/2kT inside of them, just dancing around."
"If you try to remove the galaxy, you get this."
"Isn't that rather ambitious, you say? No, because you can do it using Part I Physics!"
"This next section is very non-examinable."
"On a beautiful summer evening, when you're on a punt on the cam, you can look through your physics notes and appreciate the beauty of the calculation of the pressure of a photon gas."
~ "You look at that and instantly say logarithms logarithms logarithms logarithms."
"Trust me, I'm a physicist."
[Mentioning error analysis] "There has to be a statutory groan at this point"
"A mathematician would work it out analytically. A physicist just writes them all down and gets the answer."
"The chance is infinitely zero."
"If you do the sums you work out that you'll make infinitely more money by not playing the lottery and using the money you saved to buy my textbook."
"I discovered the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th quasars. And nobody remembers who discovered the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th!"
"We've got two points, and we've got a straight line! Happiness." -[Laughter] -"At this point, don't stop the experiment."
"We're going to hit the Schroedinger wave equation like you've never done before."
"Bohr said: "The electron stays in the stationary state because I say so.""
"Physicists are fixated on second order differential equations."
"You have pleasant dreams about complex numbers."
Dr. Worster (Mathematical Methods 2)
"When faced with a real situation it's often difficult to figure out how to count things properly"
"Which is 5/11" - [He writes 5/22] - "Whatever"
"You might be worried that there's a p lurking in this q that I haven't differentiated."
"I'm in a big space of p and q"
"Without very much loss of generality"
"Under the pressure of an exam you might forget which way a bottle unscrews."
Prof Willis (Mathematical Methods III)
I think I ought to set the scene for these first six quotes. It's the first lecture of term. The course is, for this lecture alone, being held in a tiny Mill Lane lecture theatre. As the seats overflow and first the aisles and then the floorspace at the front begin to fill up, Prof Willis turns to the board and writes:
"The person who books rooms is someone in Chemistry."
Unable to reach the OHP because it's surrounded by students, he continues:
"Finally, you will be invitied to commit crimes. I mean crimes in the sense of mathematics."
[5 minutes in] "I'd say I'll stop there, but I don't think I can stop this early."
"There's a zero vector, which means you do nothing. There is an inverse of it..."
"There's another example, which might be more of a mathematician's example, you'll probably think it's daft."
"For anyone who wants to ask the question, "why on earth do you want to do that?" I don't have a very good answer for you."
Today's lecture lost all pretence at mathematical rigour:
"In the general case, y'know, it probably isn't going to happen"
"So you can see it's x divided by some little array with lines down it, which is defined as what we want it to be."
~ "Which you may know already or you may not know already."
"This is a bold A, that's why I've put this funny line underneath it."
"Pretty obviously it's going to be more or less true."
"I like to tell you these sort of things because they're true, and some of you may actually care about that. Many just want calculations which would be useful in your lives [pauses] or at least in physics."
"I haven't exactly proved that."
"We've proved by assertion that..."
"I hope I've said enough on this now, you're probably getting bored and I certainly am."
"Don't ask why, just shut up and do it!"
"For the sake of some symbolism, we'll write the next line."
"That is not a 3. It came from copying that [pointing to something which is obviously a 2]"
"That number is whatever it comes out to be."
"Let's take this equation, which I don't know is going to work...well, of course I do, but in principle..."
"There's going to be a singularity over there, but let's not worry and solve this anyway."
"I'll call it, just because I want to, g'2(q)"
"I'll just write something that is not necessary, but I'll write it anyway"
"We can, by brute reasoning, develop the general solution."
"That's a statement of God's truth for all x"
"If I look at time zero, there's not too much space here but I can fit it in."
"What about the bottom limit? Well, I don't really know what to choose, so I've chosen 0 for the hell of it."
"There's no law that says I can't call a constant -alpha-squared."
"We only know two methods for solving partial differential equations. There are others but I say we only know two."
"It could be expressed more systematically, and more systematically...did I say that twice?"
"You put some nerve gas or whatever it is into the atmosphere and it diffuses out."
"Do you know what a Bessel function is?" - [audience]: "No" - Prof. Willis: "Who cares."
"Given any epsilon > 0. [pause] That's mathematician's talk for you. It means 'think of a small number.'"
"What's that going to be? It's going to mean I run out of space, for one thing..."
"I'll call this one number 1 and this one number 2 because I have to christen them somehow."
Other Academic
Anze Slosar (Physics supervisor): "It's like taking infinity, screwing it up into a little ball and bringing it over here."
Dr. Balasubramanian (Introduction to organic chemistry): "Organic chemists describe all their thinking in curly arrows"
Dr. Riley (Fields, Oscillations and Waves): "So there you are, an exponentially decaying snowman"
Dr. King (Computing in physical sciences)"Let's assume you're on a desert island and have a burning desire to solve this differential equation."
Frank King, perhaps?
Yep
Dr. King: "Some problems in physics are sufficiently difficult that your only hope is to throw random numbers at them in the hope that sufficient will end up in the right place."
Prof. Bonfield (Bio-medical materials):"Your entire body is going through a stress-strain curve"
"If, on the other hand, you try and break your bones slowly, as you walk."
StuartFraser has obviously "arrived" as a collecter of quotations; my friends now email me them.
Many congratulations. You'll now find most likely that it never stops... but it's still worth congratulating on ;) --AlexChurchill
From Part 1A Geology:
"I have to issue a health warning with this map."
"This invokes thoughts in those of us prone to global hypotheses."
"If that happens, the crust gets too weak for its own strength."
Said by the A-level history teachers of one of my NotGirlfriends:
"If you can't read my writing on the board, you're in the same position as real historians when they're trying to decipher ancient manuscripts."
"You can't just do a Richard III, and take a throne out of a bush at Bosworth and put it on your head."
"You're too old to need a hole punch."
(StuartFraser notes that his own A-level history teachers were not any better: "Most of these documents were written by people")
Family Quotes
Dad: "It isn't a fruit fly, but it is a seed potato"
Becci: "Those two are team-mates, aren't they? Even though they don't play for the same club."
[D family]Nurse: Do you want a painkiller? - Dad (indicates me and mum): No, there's only two of them, and they'll be leaving soon...
Becci: "It stang me!" - Stuart: "Stang being the past tense of stung?" - Becci: "It is in my language"
Becci: "Stop making it simple! I don't understand it then!"
Stuart: "I have M&MS next Friday, Physics on Saturday, Chemistry & Maths I on Monday, and Maths II on Wednesday" - Mum: "Don't eat the orange ones then"
Mum: "I'm supposed to be working out an approach to Key Skills, but I think retreating as rapdily as possible would be the best idea..."
Dad: "Most people, when they say "I'm just going to the toilet" don't then immediately open the oven"
Dad [non-sequitur]: "We should hire a sheep."
Mum: "Why is that door open? Oh yes, to get the airing cupboard out."
Dad: "I'm sure you can put the carpet in the bath if you think it'll be more comfortable."
Mum [looking at clock]: "It's 5 to time I ought to be doing some work"
Dad: "It could have been an old grain mill. Or a cotton mill. No, that wouldn't have been "the flower place" would it?"
Mum: "Where's the teapot lid?" - Dad: "Because I didn't put it back on." - Mum: "Oh, it's hiding behind the gravy" - Dad: "Cowardy cowardy teapot lid"
Friends Quotes
Four quotes rediscovered from the mists of time!
Ted: People to go. At a cannibal takeaway.
Unknown: "When you put three things together, all hell breaks loose."
Alex Foley: "If no-one starts it, then nobody will."
Syngenta safety report: "There is enough liquid nitrogen in the NMR room to reduce the oxygen concentration to less than 0%."
Chris: "It's quite hard to sink the shore"
Sally: "I'm not a roleplayer, I'm a girl"
James: "Cthulu ate the IRS"
Stuart: "You're not going to get Armageddon in a box" [-Chris: If it was Pandora's box, you might]
Chris: "Oh, it's an angel. I thought it was an upside down insect"
~ Joanna: "Rainbows, fish and trees are cool"
James: "Pedantry will be rewarded with tentacles"
Abi: "I think everyone should have a big metaphorical iron fist"
Abi: "Metaphors are great to conk fellows round the head with, generally"
Abi: "I need a new freezer. Preferably one with non-union pixies" - Stuart: "That's boring, you can't pour freezers on things to make ice cream."
Stuart: "No, "because the little yellow men told us to" is not a good reason for appearing on quiz shows."
Ted: In fact my tea is in a mug...so a morning suit would be a far better idea - Stuart: I suspect that a mug would be far preferable to a morning suit to drink tea out of. [- Ted: But I cant really go to the Master Cutlers Lunch in a mug - Stuart: You could try sneaking in disguised as a piece of crockery]
Tim Richardson: "For those of you keeping score, we're up to sign five of the apocalypse."
Jacob: "Mental exercise is very important between now and then, so I want you all to imagine doing fifty press-ups a day."
Stuart: "I have a ladybird generator in my wardrobe." - Eleanor: "You're cloning ladybirds?" - Stuart: "Yes! I will take over the world with my ladybirds! MuHaHaHa"
Sally: "Don't knock the motivation. It might stop working."
Nada: "When you say catastrophic explosive failure, what do you mean by that?"
Liz Day: "Alice is the magnetic north pole or something"
Rob: "What does Charisma do again?"
Abi [deliberate, but still]: "I think everyone should have a cardboard sheep that agrees with everything they say."
Tom: "I will probably be trying to sleep frantically at that point." - Stuart [looks around]: "I am the senior quotes collector present, yes?"
Chris: "I think life's about fifteen pounds."
Random CDC committee member: "The ball is on Thursday 12th June, the friday before May Week."
Chris [describing beginners learning a quickstep group]: "Like a well-oiled machine. Possibly with a mildly elliptical cog."
At this point, AbiBaker? had a birthday party. As a result, well...
Tom: "Conclusion: tie Ric down before being nice to Abi."
[D]Laura: "If people think you're mad they let you get away with so much more"
James (Osborn): "I'd have to be incredibly drunk to even think about suggesting that. Except that I just did."
Abi: "Think the duracell bunny. No, not the durex bunny."
James: "She is also my only new friend, but still my best new friend."
Tom: "Run! He has a Beard? and he's not afraid to use it!"
James: "There's no such thing as 80p"
Adam: "Are you requiring behind him to be on the globe, or in a straight line?" -Hannah: "Do you need more alcohol..[pauses]..yes, you do."
[misheard by Jacob]Ric: "You actually won the gender game earlier, didn't you?"
Hannah [threateningly]: Did you say CompSci to me?
Adam: "Assassins, does anyone know if there's a limit to how large a bus can be?"
Abi: "Well, you can put Australia on [the quotes page] if you really want to."
StuMo?: "I think you're as impatient a zero as I can imagine."
Stuart: "...and if you do do drunk, don't do James."
Tom: "It's a bit like masturbation, only subtly different." [maliciously left completely out of context...MuHaHaHa]
Re. Snapdragon throwing a frisbee to himself. Ha! Evil plan foiled! Scotsman?
Ian[going into an exam]: "We're all doomed." -[person next to Ian shrugs] -Ian: "Don't shrug, you're doomed too..."
Tom Morley: "I hereby call this meeting. I hereby call this meeting James, because we've got lots of them already so one more won't make much difference."
Joanna [at 1am during a MayBall]: Don't let me drink another coffee, it'll go straight to my head.
James: "I think we have to rule stabbing someone with an antitank rocket as a double kill."
Chris: "I wouldn't swap, but it does add another layer to the onion of the 168 hours in a week."
Nicky Miles: "The third way to dance this is on your own with a partner."
Liz Day [asked "what is your favourite number"]: "I can't think of a pink number. It's probably seven even though that's lime green."
Assuming that's the trait where you assosciate a distinct and well-defined colour with each number (for whatever definiton of number is appropriate), then PaulCooper? is [Synæsthetic]. Nice digraph, by the way. --CH
Edith: "If you integrate over a ceilidh, do you get a rave?"
Jason: "Draft starting over here now" -random person: "Argh, I've got to move house again."
Chris: "Here, mtg.com .com .com .com! Good website!"
Exam Quotes
My mother teaches Chemistry and Biology to A-level. This means she marks a large number of examination papers; which means she reads a large number of highly funny answers. Including:
"Crude oil is produced by dividing it into fractions"
"This greatly increases the yield of a specific entity"
"Intermediate products"
"Greater diversity in the efficiency"
"The benzene ring is activated by the presence of the benzene ring"
Most of (it would be all, but I haven't thought up people to dedicate them all to yet) my [other quotes][pages] have dedications on them. So, erm...page dedicated to MoonShadow, without whom the wiki (and therefore this page) would not exist.
Erm, thanks! *blush* But, but.. NotMyFault. [Someone else] wrote the software, and [someone else] came up with the concept, and lots of ToothyWikizens make the wiki what it is ^^; still, it's very nice of you! *^^* : ..BTW, what RPG is it that permits Cthulhu to eat the IRS? *likes the idea* - MoonShadow
Well, it's your server and (I believe) this one was your idea. IsTooYourFault? -RA
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