Category: Personal

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. Hat tip to Annabelle Mark who is a constant source of this type of material

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

The answer by one student was so ‘profound’ that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, ‘It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,’ and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct……leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh my God.’

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+

Hell explained by a Chemistry Student
Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:56:34 GMT

I’ve always been a bit mystified by the notion that these stories need to be set up as "an actual exam question" to make them worthy of reading. If I simply enjoy the story on its own (see Snopes for more background) does that mean that I’m somehow dull and boring? To me these are all in the category of the lyric from "Johnny Tarr:"

Even if you saw it yourself, you wouldn’t believe it,
But I wouldn’t trust a person like me, if i were you
I wasn’t there I swear i have an alibi
I heard it from a man who knows a fella who says it’s true!

This has been making the rounds. Most of the commentary has been along the lines of the future of executive life and work. Feels to me more like an accurate version of the consulting life as it’s always been.

via Doc and Euan among others.

We could all benefit from this level of energy and commitment

With a hat tip to Espen for finding and sharing this.

Just managing some administrivia for bloglines. Please ignore

Today is my seventh blogiversary.

Over time, we’ve seen a proliferation of tools and services that give us ways to connect and interact. Today we have Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. All are ways to improve our chances of connecting. As you can see in the sidebar, I  maintain some presence on most of them.

This space is the place where I try to get my thinking straight and immerse myself in the ongoing conversation of others trying to get their thinking straight. Some of them think in like-minded ways, others in very different ways, and all are important to the journey.

Social technologies must be lived in to be understood. You can’t understand from the sidelines. I think this is one of the impediments that larger organizations face in managing adoption. They are comfortable with the illusion of carefully crafted plans. They need to become reacquainted with the less well-marked paths of real learning.

What I said in 2005 is still true:

I remain interested in the challenges of making organizations better places for real people to work in and still believe that the effective use of technology makes a difference. I suspect that large organizations are nearing the end of their useful life and that the evolution toward new forms will continue to be painful and noisy. I worry about leaders and executives who choose to ignore facts and who can t or won t distinguish between the theory of evolution and the theory of who shot JFK. [McGee s Musings]

In years past, I’ve tried to acknowledge the interesting people I’ve managed to cross paths with as one of the primary benefits of choosing to participate in the read/write web. As those numbers continue to grow, that’s becoming unwieldy. I’m also reluctant to single out only those people who happen to blog themselves. Today’s environment is too rich for me to be that restrictive. Regardless of whether you’re another blogger on a similar journey, a friend by way of one of today’s social networks, a microblogger, or commenter here, thanks for participating and thanks for sharing. I will give one shout out to a new friend, Liz Strauss, to momentarily borrow her tagline…”you’re only a stranger once.” Tell me more about you and your experience.

I’ll be heading to San Francisco at the end of the month to participate in the upcoming “Social Media Strategies” conference being held there on October 29th and 30th. If you’re interested in joining me, here’s a sign-up link that will get you a discount on the registration fee:

I’m planning on talking more about the notion of “Technology for Us” that I’ve been developing over the last several months. If you do plan on attending, let me know here so we can plan on connecting face-to-face.

Paul Myers and I were colleagues back in Boston back in the early 1990s. Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, LinkedIn, and RSS we reconnected and I came across his excellent blog and found this little gem this afternoon. I suspect that your politics might influence exactly how funny you find this, but I think everyone ought to be able to appreciate it at some level.

A teaser on the front page of this week’s Simmons Voice, the college newspaper, declares "Student questions Palin’s qualifictions [sic]." That last word was a typo – obviously the intended word was "qualification" – but when you think about it, "qualifiction" is a dandy word for false or misleading credentials. On resumes, people commonly stretch the truth of their experience by taking more credit for some accomplishment than they probably deserve. But lies presented as truths are, in a sense, fictions. Thus a new word for the week – "qualifiction: the outright misrepresentations of job titles, degrees, or achievements that are presented to bolster one’s suitability for a job." Pass it on!

Neologism of the Day: Qualifiction
professormyers@professormyers.com
Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:58:41 GMT