Somewhere a rocket scientist brain surgeon physicist with a knack for economics who wears Velcro shoes is having a stress breakdown.
When I was a professional ballroom dance instructor, one of my coworkers was having a tough time teaching a step to her student. As he gets more frustrated she tells him “it’s ok- you’ll get it- this isn’t rocket science.”
There is an awkward pause as her student stares back at her. “No” he agrees, “this isn’t rocket science. That I can do. This is some sadistic step designed specifically to torture rocket scientists.”
And that’s how we found out he worked for NASA.
Reblogged for that story
Your daily reminder that no, seriously: “difficult” is a matter of context.
isn’t rocket science a form of physics
Buddy if you’re doing rocket science and quantum physics at the same time, then multiple things have gone seriously, seriouslywrong.
Yeah, and you can also get tired of criticizing something you love. You can get completely fed up with it and decide, “You know what? Flaws aside, I love this thing, and I don’t have to waste hours of my life admitting its flaws to strangers on the Internet in order to somehow justify my love of it.” You can get sick of watching others gleefully tear it apart, for no reason other than that it’s popular and they hate that you love it. You can get sick of watching others tearing it apart with good intentions, too.
In the end, it’s just a cartoon, or a book, or a movie. It’s not that serious, and you can enjoy it without hyper-focusing on its flaws. You don’t need to justify your love of something to someone else, least of all a person you don’t even know.
I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.
There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one “sonic hedgehog” because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.
Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.
And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle “the ferrous wheel”. We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.
The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHOO.
Half a byte of data is a nibble.
An unidentified, repetitive computer error is called a Bug, because the first one of those they discovered to be the fault of a moth fluttering against the vacuum tubes.
I think we need to admit that academics and engineers are lonely, stressed people whose brains go funny places when deprived of sleep and fed too much coffee instead.
missionlameturtle 