> familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.
I took high school and college physics courses (in the US) and have spent 15+ years developing physics-related software and I don't recall ever hearing gravity expressed in ft/sec^2. I can't gauge whether this "familiar" principle is itself a joke or if there are places where gravity is taught as 32 ft/sec^2 rather than 9.8 m/sec^2...
You youngin's arguing about where you were taught ignore that more important might be when you were taught. Your high school years might have been when I was already working on my second marriage and buying a house. And therefore, ft/second^2, bitches.
I find that to be...disappointing. I mean, is there a U. S. high schooler today that couldn't handle a metric measurement? When I was in high school we were trying to get there with dual measurement road signs (km/miles) and metric soft drink bottles. Then Reagen got into office, viewed the metric system as some sort of communist plot, and axed the Bureau of Metric Whatever back in the 80s. So we had an excuse.
These days I'd think it almost unconscionable to teach kids scientific measurements in anything but metric.
For example, muzzle velocity is always given in ft/s in the US. So for ballistics problems (faster than a speeding bullet...), ft/sec^2 would probably be used.
Reminds me of the puff of smoke that used to animate the removal of objects from the OS X dock. In a blatant violation of cartoon law this animation was sadly removed from current OS versions.
Old Macs weren't powerful enough to draw fancy zoom effects. Instead, classic Mac OS, at least through System 7, would draw a series of rectangles[1] (third and fourth pictures) from the icon you double-clicked to the location of the window to show it opening.
Yet another classic example of Internet humor at work. In this case, the classic formula of describing something decidedly non-intellectual in an intellectual manner. Never gets old.
Old-school internet humor. Writing-based (as opposed to visual), and with a lot of in-depth thought and time going into it. That you used to find on BBS and the like. Where can you find it today?
Through miscellanious old sites and The GNU Humor collection. It's hard to find new material: it's out there, but the signal:noise on the internet sucks, so you have to be really lucky.
Oh, and BOFH is still going strong. So go read that if you haven't yet. The official archives are down, but there are mirrors, of you want to read '95-'99.
In general, people in community A talking about disparate community B in the language of community A will find it funny.
For example, programmers at a baseball game talking about baseball in terms of programming, like calling one team emacs and the other vi or one Linux and the other Windows, and then following where it goes.
Even as a kid I always wondered why the heck Acme Inc. seemed to offer lines of credit to just about anyone, including homeless coyotes living in the desert.
Their sheer range of product offerings was also astounding, as was their apparent complete lack of after sales support and user training for said products.
They also seemed to have an incredible logistics team able to get huge and complex items out to the middle of nowhere in record time. Never once did the coyote have to wait a long time for delivery, or have to converse with shipping support reps to see why his package was never delivered.
Dynamix's computer game Sid and Al's Incredible Toons [1] [2] is a wonderful cartoon-physics based game, the sequel to The Incredible Machine [3] [4], a Rube-Goldbergesque game like Mouse Trap [3].
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For some reason this reminded me of Discworld's Ambiguous Puzuma:
A big cat with a unique black and white check coat, the ambiguous puzuma is the Disc's fastest animal. Due to the Disc's standing magical field, which slows down light to approximately the speed of sound, the puzuma can actually achieve near-light-speed. Therefore, seeing a puzuma in motion means it isn't there. Puzumas commonly die from complications caused by Sangrit Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; they lose concentration because they cannot simultaneously know who they are and where they are, frequently causing them to crash into an obstacle. Many males also die from ankle failure caused by excessively running after females who aren't present.
i wish i could express just how much i disagree with your sentiment. i think it's a rather elegant attempt at conveying the humorous laws of reality in a classic cartoon existence. But hey, I guess not everyone can find it funny.
As I've first read Murphy's law and some other humorous "laws", there was an impression of the author making an insight and then formulating it in a minimalistic way typical for the real scientific laws, which is what makes the laws interesting and funny on two levels at once: there's an "a-ha" moment and the "similarity" to the "real" laws.
As I've seen enough cartoons, for me this list appears just to be a clumsy description of some gags. It fails on the appearance of insight and it fails on the appearance of the real-law minimalism. That's why it's not funny. YMMV, I see there are people who like it.
I took high school and college physics courses (in the US) and have spent 15+ years developing physics-related software and I don't recall ever hearing gravity expressed in ft/sec^2. I can't gauge whether this "familiar" principle is itself a joke or if there are places where gravity is taught as 32 ft/sec^2 rather than 9.8 m/sec^2...