“If a parrot said my name wouldn’t that be an onomatopoeia” — A good friend of mine (November 27, 2008)

Quotes from ENGG 401 Finance for Engineering, Winter Semester 2008

• Nowadays we store money on electrons, we don’t even need to waste paper.
• The answer to question one is “c”
• Sometimes I invest in things that won’t make money, my wife disapproves of this because she could buy shoes.
• The world is set up so that no-one makes much money.
• I don’t want to deal with cheaters and liars, could all of the cheaters and lairs swap their registration to the other section of this course.
• When I make a graph I always put it in color because then I can say things like “Look at this color graph” that makes people believe our calculations to six decimal places.
• The answer to one of the questions on the midterm is “groupthink”
• The answer to one of the questions on the midterm is “Democratization of Knowledge”
• I can’t let you guys use a laptop with excel during the midterm exam because I realized this would make it possible for me to catch the cheaters and liars in this class and I already told you that I don’t want to deal with cheaters and liars.
• I already told you, below the line means that it needs to be below the line.
• I was talking to someone one who was complaining about not being able to gain weight. I asked her if she had even thought of going to Kentucky Fried Chicken and buying a bucket of chicken and then just eating the skins. Well then her response was “Don that’s gross” so I told her she must not really care about gaining weight if she’s not willing to do the things it takes to gain weight. The exact same thing happens if you want to get rich, you have to sometimes eat lots of chicken skins, Warren Buffet is rich because he knows that.

Quotes from PHYS 481 Electrodynamics number four, Fall Semester 2007

• This is where mathematics can take control of you if you don’t pay attention to what’s going on.
• That is the general case which includes both plucked and hammered types.
• I am not discovering a powder, you have all seen this before.
• This is really easy, you just add it and then bend your mind.
• kx – wt is my favorite way.
• That’s kind of tricky when there is a war going on.
• Sorry, I’m feeling slightly disorganized today.
• The assignment that was due yesterday is now going to be due on Friday at 4:00pm

Quotes from PHYS 472 Quantum Mechanics II, Fall Semester 2007

• Watch out: log-log scales always tend to fool you.
• You are all eligible to make a mistake with a delta function, I have been making mistakes my whole life.
• I can’t prove Bloch’s theorem so I will tell you a story instead.
• Those guys cannot appreciate physics, therefore we’re better than them.
• It’s just an integral! well I guess it’s two integrals, in three dimensions, so I guess really it’s just six integrals, but it’s still just an integral.
• If there were no h-bar we’d just have classical mechanics
• Sines and Cosines have a greater impact on your life than Airy functions.
• The reason you’ve not heard of Airy functions is just because they’re not a button on your calculator
• I’m treating this isotropically so the mass is the same in all directions.
• All the even ones are odd
• This notation is a disaster, don’t try this at home
• So, if anyone ever asks you how to make a hermite polynomial out of sine functions remember you only need about 25 of them.
• The Zeno paradox is actually kinda cute.
• My comments last class about keeping the final exam to two hours are probably a bit false.
• Could someone please look up the word cumulative in the dictionary for him
• Bonus points for Devon
  
  < Ross’s response > Dammit
  
  Bonus points are worth zero
  
  < Ross’s re-response > Yeah! Integrate that!

Quotes from EEBE 540 Digital Image Processing, Winter Semester 2008

• Man I’m brain dead today < pause > let me show you a picture
• Can I tell you that that is true? < pause > never trust a prof!
• Some people can whip it out fairly quickly
  
  < Followed almost inevitably by the distasteful comment from the back row >
  What? their Weiner Functions?

Quotes from EE 456 Introduction to Nanoelectronics, Winter Semester 2008

• Who can tell me what we’re going to get when we take this integral?
  
  <My response:> -13.6 eV!
  
  <pause> … right
• It’s not that Physicists don’t do useful things. They just do different things.
• There is no reality behind phenomenon, merely more phenomenon
• I’m not prepared to make any statements today, geometrically I’m a bit slow.
• To implement periodic boundary conditions, boundary conditions, to implement periodic boundary conditions, the system is modified, system is modified, modified, the system is modified by adding a term of -t_o, of -t_o, -t_o to the corners, corners where they otherwise would have been zero, the corner elements would have been zero but we modified them by adding a term of -t_o. This modification makes the matrix invertible, the matrix becomes invertible and that makes the system solvable or the equations linearly independent, the system becomes solvable because the equations are now linearly independent.
• Just trust me and you’ll be alright.
• If you do what I say you’ll be fine
• Don’t freak out on me; I’m not trying to psyche you out.

Quotes from ENGG 405 Engineering Business and Society, Winter Semester 2007

• I don’t endorse any of this, but I’ll admit that I do turn my head.
• If you’re going to drink with people, Newfoundland is the place to be, those people really know how to get along and have a good time.
• Anybody who plans to live on CPP will at some point ponder the question “Is dog food edible?”
• In 1964 there was 1 female chemical engineering student in my class, I dated her. She dropped out, but that’s completely unrelated.
• Human Vision has evolved to detect the smallest movements at the largest distance. Now that’s not very useful for reading and engineering textbook!
• If you have a riot in the US you end up with a lot of dead people; if you have a riot in France noone dies but alot of cars get burned.

Quotes from PHYS 381 Electrodynamics Winter Semester 2007

• If there is a bomb here, I am going to run there, along a radius.
• Engineers are working very hard to make our lives easier, they are not always successful but what can we do.
• There are 24 letters in the alphabet! maybe we should use the Chinese alphabet then we’d have 6000 letters to choose from? No? well then let’s learn it, use it, and be happy
• You need to tell the solvee how things behave on the boundary.
• You need to know something if the “wild guess” method is going to work.
• The “wild guess” or “lucky guess” better sometimes work, this isn’t lotto 649
• Remember the laws! you’re not allowed to visualize incorrectly.
• I lied! I just made two functions look different, it was like writing sin² + cos² and pretending that it didn’t equal 1.
• The Laplace equation gives nice and cozy solutions.

Quotes from PHYS 372 Quantum Mechanics Winter Semester 2007

• Scientists are always trying to use bigger and bigger particles, eventually someone is going to try and shoot a baby
• I’m what you guys would call “Old School”
• …so we’ve become accustomed to using h-bar. I’m not sure if this is partly because we would all rather be drinking
• You just gave two solutions which are not mutually orthogonal so I can’t say yes or no
• ^A+ shouldn’t be anything mysterious
• It’s not a little pain, it’s a big pain.
• When I was in school I didn’t like it when people called the sines and cosines and logs and polynomials the “elementary functions” because I thought they were pretty tough. Now that I have studied Hermite Polynomials and Legendre polynomials I can certainly understand why they are called elementary
• Sorry, I will try to write louder
• How can something possibly be bound by something that it cannot even feel?
• You’re going to get some baby Gaussians Trailing after the big momma Gaussian
• This quantum mechanics stuff is really smart, it’s going to sit and wait to see if I’m going to flick the switch.
• Quantum mechanics is great, I hope you’re going to teach your children about it
• The beauty of Linear algebra is that you can do an example and still keep it completely abstract.
• I don’t know how to explain it you just need to treat bras differently than kets.

Quotes from PHYS 311 Statistical Physics Fall Semester 2006

• We are always interested in things that are of no interest.
• There is one plus a little bit, but now that little bit is really huge. (Why e^x doesn’t equal 1+x at large x)
• It’s difficult to visualize a billion dollars, but we hear about it all the time.
• If you think you life is a mess, just wait… unless a mess is your normal equilibrium state.
• The fact that we don’t understand 90% of quantum mechanics doesn’t really bother us because we have the means to calculate it anyways.
• My cat and I have 3 legs on average. Now, what have we learned about my cat or me? (noting that the average of the BE & FD distributions (Boltzmann distribution) is pretty much useless)
• Three is really close to two pi. We’re talking orders of magnitude!
• That’s the philosophy of it. Now let’s try to calculate it…. now we have a problem.
• Red eyes are not black bodies.
• If you ask a kid on the street if energy is continuous or quantized he will say “quantized, sir”.
• Let’s assume the cow is spherical and discuss the properties of the cow.
• I will be hiding some things under the rug to get Bose Einstein condensation…
• Well, “now” really means “for the last ten years”.
• We are in the world that we are in, so our mind has learned to think about the world in terms of things of our world – that is, waves and particles.