Tag Archives: comparison

An Engineer, a Mathematician and a Fire

Title: An Engineer, a Mathematician and a Fire

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal lore, joke
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Sean Smith
  • Date Collected: 5-23-19

Informant Data:

  • Sean Smith is a 54 year old computer science professor at Dartmouth College. He teaches classes such as COSC 51, Computer Architecture, and COSC 58, Operating Systems. He is a self taught computer scientist, as there was no computer science major when he was an undergrad. He worked for the US government doing security consulting and then worked at IBM doing product development. At Dartmouth, he works on systems, as opposed to the more theoretical and mathematical side of computer science.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: This joke provides a comparison of two related but different fields, with the engineer being seen in a more positive light. The engineer is portrayed as practical and efficient, while the mathematician is implied to be disconnected from the real world because he is applying techniques used for proving mathematical theorems to a life or death situation.
  • Social Context: The joke was recorded during an in-person interview with the informant. The informant is not sure where he heard this joke, or where he would have said it.

Item:

Interview Recording:

Transcript of joke:

  • (4:18) “An engineer wakes up in a…, um, wakes up in a room and it’s on fire, but there is an empty bucket in the sink, so he fills the bucket with water and puts the fire out. A mathematician wakes up in a room and there’s a fire and there’s a full bucket of water and a sink and is like, ‘oh, now I’ve reduced it to the previous case.'”

Informant’s Comments:

  • This joke makes fun of how, in mathematical proofs, the efficiency does not matter as much as correctness.

Collector’s Comments:

  • The full interview contains lots of examples of engineering and computer science folklore other than jokes.

Collector’s Name: Ben Wolsieffer

Tags/Keywords:

  • Engineering
  • Verbal Folklore
  • Joke
  • Comparison between fields

Three Engineers, a Computer Scientist and a Broken Down Car

Title: Three Engineers, a Computer Scientist and a Broken Down Car

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal lore, joke
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Eric Hansen
  • Date Collected: 5-30-19

Informant Data:

  • Eric Hansen is a engineering professor at Dartmouth College. He teaches a number of classes at Dartmouth, including ENGS 23, Distributed Systems and Fields and ENGS 31, Digital Electronics. He grew up in California, and many members of his family and community were Scandinavian. His family has a tradition of storytelling, influenced by traditional tales such as the Icelandic Sagas.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: The joke is based on perceived differences between engineering fields and computer science. The engineers all attempt to identify the problem using technical knowledge relevant to their fields, while the computer scientist’s response is humorous because it uses a non-technical solution that is known to often work on computers. The narrative form of the joke is influenced by the storytelling culture of the informant’s family.
  • Social Context: This joke was recorded during an in-person interview with the informant. The informant was not sure where he had first heard this joke or when he would tell it, but it may have been told in a classroom setting.

Item:

Interview Recording:

Transcript of joke:

  • (6:26) “There’s three engineers and a computer scientist who are taking a ride down the road in a car and the car breaks down, and the…, uh, the mechanical engineer says, ‘well, you know, it’s, um, probably something in the drivetrain; we’re gonna have to take the…, drop the transmission out and figure out, you know, there’s probably some, you know, some broken gear or something and we gotta fix that,’ and the electrical engineer says, ‘nah, I think it’s probably in the ignition, you know, we’re gonna have to get in there and figure we’ve got a bad spark plug wire or something like that. We fix that and it could be right as rain and we’ll be back on the road. The chemical engineer says, ‘nah, no, I think it’s in the carburetion. Um, you know, that somehow the air-fuel mixture isn’t right and the fuel’s not getting where it needs to go and that’s undoubtedly the problem.’ And the computer scientist says, ‘we could just try all getting out and getting back in again.'”

Informant’s Comments:

  • This informant thought the joke had some literal truth to it, because turning things on and off again often ends up fixing problems.

Collector’s Comments:

  • From my perspective as someone who is studying both engineering and computer science, this joke seems to humorously portray how engineers usually rely on rigorous mathematical analysis of systems, while in computer science you sometimes have to just try things without understanding exactly how everything works underneath.

Collector’s Name: Ben Wolsieffer

Tags/Keywords:

  • Verbal Folklore
  • Joke
  • Comparison between fields

Fencing the Largest Area

Title: Fencing the Largest Area

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal lore, joke
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Ulf Österberg
  • Date Collected: 5-23-19

Informant Data:

  • Ulf Österberg has been a engineering professor at Dartmouth College since 1989. He teaches classes such as ENGS 23, Distributed Systems and Fields and ENGS 26, Control Theory. He was born in Gothenburg, Sweden and lived in Sweden until after he had earned his PhD in optics.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: Jokes were not common in classroom settings at the schools the informant attended, but he strongly believes that jokes are helpful for keeping students engaged and makes an effort to tell jokes such as this one in his classes. This joke includes a clever logical trick that you might expect to find in a mathematical proof to allow the mathematician to best the engineer. It also provides an example of a woman using her intelligence to beat a man who simply tries to use strength.
  • Social Context: This joke was recorded during an in-person interview with the informant. This joke was specifically intended to be told to students when it was relevant to the class. Telling jokes helps to connect students to the class and to the professor. The joke was originally heard with a cowboy and an ordinary person, but the informant turned it into an engineering joke to tell in classes.

Item:

Interview Recording:

Transcript of joke:

  • (4:54) “So what we have here is an engineer and the engineer… And its very appropriate to do it this way. This is not the way I first heard it, but in my retelling of this joke the engineer is this macho male and his opponent that he’s gonna compete against is a female mathematician. And the whole thing is that they are gonna try, from the time the sun comes up to the time the sun sets, they’re gonna try to fence in the largest area, and the engineer thinks he’s gonna win because he’s this big strong man, but he also prepares himself, so he makes sure he has a lot of posts, he has a lot of barbed wire, he looks at the terrain, you know, “I don’t want to go up in that direction, because that’s gonna be more work” and he really thinks this through to get the biggest area. Uh, the female mathematician is a little bit more or less [unknown], and is like, not too worried,  ‘yeah I have a few posts, some barbed wire, its gonna be fine.’ Ok, the day comes; the engineer is ready. He gets started immediately and, um, the female mathematician, she also gets up and puts a few posts in and some barbed wire around it and then she has a parasol and she goes and sits under it because it’s a hot sun, and there she sits, and sips some lemonade or whatever most of the day, eats and reads math books. Um, the sun sets and the judge says… You know, the engineer managed by running the last bit with the barbed wire [to] get it around the first post and really enclosing this big area and the, uh, referee says, ‘well, it’s pretty clear who won,’ and the female mathematician says, ‘well, wait a minute.’ She jumps into her little fencing thing and she says, ‘I define this as outside.'”

Informant’s Comments:

  • The informant said he grew up telling jokes in Sweden, but he had difficulty learning how to tell jokes and especially puns in English.

Collector’s Comments:

  • It is interesting to see how the informant took a joke he had heard in one context and turned it into a piece of engineering folklore for the specific purpose of performing it in a classroom.

Collector’s Name: Ben Wolsieffer

Tags/Keywords:

  • Engineering
  • Verbal Folklore
  • Joke
  • Comparison between fields