04-25-2008, 11:18 PM
http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/sayings.html
Some of them are funny because of typos, some of them are generally word-garbled which makes them hard to understand (though many of these also show the student didn't really understand the concept - these remind me of answers I've given on quizzes, except that usually I did understand what I wanted to say, but it came out wrong). Some of them (especially the ones published in journals) are just meant to be humorous.
Some of them you have to understand the concept to get why it's funny; others it doesn't really matter.
Some of my favorites:
Some of them are funny because of typos, some of them are generally word-garbled which makes them hard to understand (though many of these also show the student didn't really understand the concept - these remind me of answers I've given on quizzes, except that usually I did understand what I wanted to say, but it came out wrong). Some of them (especially the ones published in journals) are just meant to be humorous.
Some of them you have to understand the concept to get why it's funny; others it doesn't really matter.
Some of my favorites:
Quote:
These smaller planets are said to be fragments produced by collisions and some of the larger ones were named by the collisions.
Quote:
Most impacts on the Earth's surface are impact craters.
Quote:
During a solar eclipse the sun tends to stay out longer and is much more damaging - it takes longer for the earth to rotate. The lunar eclipse means less sunlight and the earth rotates faster.
Quote:
"...growth of both the earth and the moon from pronto planets..."
Quote:
The Sun is one of the clearest stars to be seen on earth because it has the largest animosity.
Quote:
When the Sun goes down, darkness illuminates the sky...
Quote:
The sun provides heat for Earth as a whole, and although this may at the same time have negative effects, such as the greenhouse effect and skin cancer, it's a positive influence overall.
Quote:
While ultra-violent waves would allow revealing hot, excited regions, hot stars and hot gas.
Quote:
Even though each constellation varies in brightness and size, without the moon to light up the night sky we would not be able to examine the constellations, we probably would not even know that they existed.
Quote:
Our conclusion is that we cannot satisfactorily account for the broad hump. Thus unbridled speculation is presumably in order. [Grandi and Phillips, "Large and small-scale structure in the continuum energy distributions of quasi-stellar objects and Seyfert 1 galaxies", ApJ 239, 475 (1980)]
Quote:
..preliminary estimates indicate that the alcoholic content of this cloud (Sgr B2), if purged of all impurities and condensed, would yield approximately 10^28 fifths at 200 proof. This exceeds the total amount of all of man's fermentation efforts since the beginning of recorded history. [B. Zuckerman et al., ApJLett 196, L99, March 1975; at the end of the article they appended a "Note added on proof"]
Quote:
Conclusion: is left to the reader (see Table 2). Acknowledgements: I wrote this paper for money. [A.A. Chastel, A critical analysis of the explanation of red-shifts by a new field, A&A 53, 67 (1976)]
Quote:
Note that once the LSR is chosen the Sun immediately begins to drift away from it, implying that we would effectively need to redefine the reference point constantly. In reality this is not a significant problem because the orbital period of the LSR (perhaps 230 million years) is very long compared to the lifetime of a typical research grant, so there is not sufficient time for the effect to become noticeable.[Carroll and Oslie, An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, contributed by Summer Ash]
.
<--like you're new Avatar Silky. 