engineering jokes

[VK5RC]

5 Doctors go duck hunting, the first turn is the Family doctor, "I think they are ducks, but I am not sure" while he hesitates, they fly away. Next is the Psychiatrist, " They are ducks, I wonder if they know they are duck" While he is pondering this, they fly away.
Next is the Consultant Physician " Ducks definitely , are they the Grey Spotted duck, the Eastern Migrating duck?" While he ponders this, they too fly away.
Next is the Surgeons turn, as soon as small specs appear over the horizon, he let's go with both barrels, turns to the Pathologists and says" Go and see if they are ducks thanks".

[CatalinaWOW]

Time to drag some old ones out of the vault.  The attached text came to me on a DEC Rainbow 100, in their proprietary email scheme.  Some of you will be able to place that somewhere between the dinosaurs and sabre tooth tigers.

[CatalinaWOW]

Another one.  As I recall I got this from the Standards Manual at the second engineering job I held about 50 years ago.  Who says electric power companies don't have a sense of humor.  Those who don't deal well with traditional units will have to figure out how to do translations in a few places.  Back then virtually no one in the US thought metric.

Dredging this up also brought me face to face with Microsoft's inability to read equations in older word documents.  The original blue line from the standards manual was imported in Word sometime in the late eighties, and current word just said there were embedded equations.  Thank heavens for Libre Office which seems to understand that older writings still have current use, unlike the geniuses in Redmond.

[coppercone2]

It's not well known, but after communism fell and there was more air travel between the eastern bloc countries and the west, commercial pilots noticed that the aircraft started to behave more erratically, especially when the autopilot was engaged.  As reports piled up it was found that the effect correlated with the number of polish nationals on board.  Further investigation ruled out malicious intent and no-one had any ideas.  One day, an EE heard about the problem and instantly figured it out;  to be stable, the poles have to be on the left side of the plane.

-----------------

Edison was famous for saying that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Tesla, who once worked for Edison, was reported to have said that if Edison had learned some math, he could have avoided 90% of the perspiration.

there is a critical flaw in your joke. The USSR did not actually fall, well it did, but this is my current best model. Imagine the end of terminator 2, but instead of taking place in a steel works, a sewer treatment plant.

The t-1000 (USSR) fell into a waste tank, and re-emerged as the Golgothan from Dogma.

[ewaller]

Q:  How is a dog like Cauchy?

A: They both leave residuals at poles.

[mtdoc]

An engineer is flying to Rome and excited to be flying first class for the first time.  He finds his seat and is shocked to see that sitting next to him is the Pope!.  He pauses, and thinks, "oh great, I have nothing in common with the Pope. What will we talk about".  The Pope introduces himself and then asks the engineer what he does.  The Pope says "great, you must be good at puzzles".  The engineer thinks proudly to himself "yes I am".  The Pope continues: I'm working on this crossword puzzle and I'm stuck.  "What's a 4 letter word for a woman that ends in UNT"   Briefly the engineer is excited and about to answer but quickly panics and stops himself. He shrugs his shoulders and slumps back into his seat.  Several minutes later it comes to him "AUNT!" he says.  The Pope looks at him and says "Damn, do you have an eraser?"

[vk6zgo]

A Technician, Engineer, & an Accountant had a dog & a cat.
They each got sick of opening the door to let their pets out to "do their thing" in the garden.

The Tech bought a  "doggy door", & both animals used it.

The Engineer bought a "doggy door" & a "cat flap", & devised a special system so each animal could only use its allocated exit/entrance.

The Accountant bought a "cat flap" & tried to push the dog through it.

[metrologist]

[newbrain]

Well, not a joke, real life, but fantasy names, many, many (too many) years ago.

My manager and all our (small) team are in the meeting room, when the new hire is brought in.
Usual half-formal welcomes, round of introductions, some small talk - nothing out of the ordinary.

Then the manager: "Well, you are an engineer, as most of us here, so let's see if you have one of the skill we really value: being able to make precise estimations!".
"Let's see...how wide is this desk?", the new person have a look then hazards "About 130cm".
"Well, yes, about... but maybe one can do better - Pat, your guess?"
"128.7cm I'd say".
Someone is sent to the lab to get a tape measure, and the desk is proven to be 128.4cm.
"See? This is what we expect from people working here! Let's try again, how much does this pencil weight?"
Already a bit baffled, "10g..." is offered.
"Bob?"
"12.2"
After another run to the lab, to get a scale, the pencil is of course 12.3g!
This goes on for a number of items, with objects (furniture, stationery...) chosen by us and by the new employee: we never fail to estimate the size or weight to less than 0.5%.

They look more and more depressed, so after a while we dismiss the meeting.
We offer encouragement and tell not to worry too much, as we all were newbies once.
Giving them the tape measure and the scale, we recommend to practice as much as possible.

The new hire is seen going around  for a whole week with a notebook, scale and tape, measuring everything from coffee machine to doors, to trays at the canteen, under the increasingly worried looks of other co-workers.

I must admit that they took it with grace, when finally we revealed that we had previously measured and weighted absolutely everything in that room!

[coppercone2]

 

this is really brilliant actually

[tom66]

this is really brilliant actually

It also indicates the failure mode if overvolted.  Eventually, the cap breaks down and passes DC anyway!

[RobK_NL]

Engineers and scientists will never make as much money as business
executives and sales people. Now we have a mathematical proof that
explains why this is true:

Postulate 1:  Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2:  Time is Money.

As every engineer knows:

                  Work
         Power = -------
                  Time

Since, as everyone knows from the postulates,

Knowledge = Power and Time = Money, we have:

                      Work
         Knowledge = -------
                      Money

Solving for Money, we get:

                   Work
         Money = ----------
                 Knowledge

Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero (like in the social sub-group
indicated from above), Money approaches infinity regardless of the
amount of Work done!

[DDunfield]

Optimist: The glass is half full.
Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Engineer: The glass is too big.

Me: Are you going to drink that?

[basinstreetdesign]

This one actually sounds plausible.

The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That is an exceptionally odd number. Now, why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the U.S. Railroads were built by English expatriates. Why did the English build them that way? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons,which used that wheel spacing. So why did the wagons have that particular odd spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old,long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. So, who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? The ruts in the roads, which everyone had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. The U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.  Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back end of two war horses. Thus we have the answer to the original question. Now the twist to the story... When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank. These are Solid Rocket Boosters or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass!!! Don't you just love engineering?

[radar_macgyver]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/horses-pass/

[vk6zgo]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/horses-pass/

Yes, a moment's thought reveals the error in the clever story.
Railway rolling stock always have a lot of hangover, so extrapolating between the width of horse drawn carriages, where everything sits between the wheels, is a false trail.

The commuter trains in my home city run on 3ft 6in gauge rails, but the interior width is the same as those that run on "Standard gauge".

indeed, in the days of horse drawn wagons, many flat topped "drays" had high load areas, which overhung the wheels considerably, so it doesn't even work for them.

[Roeland_R]

The commuter trains in my home city run on 3ft 6in gauge rails, but the interior width is the same as those that run on "Standard gauge".



Are the horses in your homecity smaller[emoji41]

[Berni]

Oh and another 'nice round number' in railways is also the power they run on. The standard power for electric locomotives was 15kV at 16 ²/₃ Hz. This is still used today on a few lines while more modern lines in Europe tend to use 25kV 50Hz.

So why is it 16 ²/₃ Hz ? Well it turns out this is exactly 1000 cycles per minute. This makes AC motors run at nice round RPM numbers of 1000 rpm 500 rpm 333 rpm 250 rpm etc..

They probably need some rather giant rotary converters to convert 50Hz to 16.7Hz in order to power these lines.

[RobK_NL]

Trains in The Netherlands run on 1500V DC.

[vk6zgo]

The commuter trains in my home city run on 3ft 6in gauge rails, but the interior width is the same as those that run on "Standard gauge".



Are the horses in your homecity smaller[emoji41]

Dunno, Rail security wouldn't let me compare my horse's bum with the rail spacing.

[Berni]

Trains in The Netherlands run on 1500V DC.

Here in Slovenia they run on 3kV DC. There is not a whole lot of standardization in terms of this. But in general the 15kV 16.7Hz stuff is still used because they keep using the old trains while the most modern high speed rail lines seam to be using 25kV AC. Id guess the motivation for 25kV AC is cheaper infrastructure.

[Kleinstein]

The 16 2/3 Hz frequency is still used in the German Rail system.  It is 1/3 the normal 50 Hz mains. Most of the power is directly from separate power stations. There are a few converters to transfer power between the 2 nets.

The supposed reason for the lower frequency was the use of mechanical rectifiers in the early days. These work better at low frequency.

[IanMacdonald]

Two protons are going round the 'big ring' are CERN:

"Wha--heey! This is fun! It must be the fastest we've ever been since the Big Bang! 
"Yes, but I do have a kind of, well, sense of dread about this. It might have a bad ending"
"Oh? Why?" 
"There might be one coming the other way."
"Nonsense. You're just trying to scare me." 

[radar_macgyver]

They probably need some rather giant rotary converters to convert 50Hz to 16.7Hz in order to power these lines.

To say nothing of the transformers on board the trains to step down the 15 kV to ~3kV to drive the motors. Gives new meaning to the term 'big iron'.

So here's one I've heard:

An ME, an EE and a CS major are on a road trip. Suddenly, the car sputters and they pull over and immediately start trying to analyze the problem. "It's the engine!" says the ME. "Let me inspect the fluid levels and find out where the problem is". "Nonsense!" says the EE, "It's got to be the electricals. Let me inspect the wiring and distributor, and find out where the problem is". The CS major is silent for a moment, then in a flash of inspiration says "OK, everybody get out of the car and get back in"

[schmitt trigger]

This is a very old one: but worth re-telling:

There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Another one:

A mathematician and an engineer find themselves together in a room, with an exceedingly beautiful woman on the other side. A genie appears and proclaims: "The woman will belong to either one of you who reaches her first. But there is one condition: your first movement consists of half the distance between you and the woman. The second movement, half of the first movement. The third movement, half of the second, and so on."
The mathematician starts crying. He knows that it will take him an infinite time to reach the woman. But the engineer is all smiles: "I work with 10% tolerances"