“I gave a similar but much more complex and informative presentation last year called “Chicken, Rooster, Egg, Chicken, Rooster, Egg.”

The only problem I have with the chicken seminar is that the audience was able to stay awake during it. Then again, he did fly through it in about 3 minutes….

Turns out that the dude in this video will be the keynote speaker at The 2007 Ig® Nobel Prize Ceremony and Lectures, held at Hahvahd this Thursday.

Details here: http://www.improbable.com/ig/2007/2007-details.html

A few years back, I was in a university research group, and down the hall one professor had posted a paper (not actually submitted, alas) that consisted almost entirely of the word “Blah”, including the captions to graphs and most of the references.

Was the professor’s name Bob Loblaw by any chance? (Say it out loud).

Lessee… exams…

I’ve seen this one twice. The first time I saw it, I had to re-read a couple times to make sure my dyslexia wasn’t biting me in the thinnest part of my jeans:

(pick your subject)

Name_________________

Exam preface: This exam is worth [some percentage] of your final grade in this class. There are 100 questions. Each question answered will count 1% against the exam score.

I also LOVE professors who have a habit of saying “Read all the questions first, then answer the easy ones first..” I actually saw one of them use “Don’t bother with the other questions. Simply sign your name, wait 25 minutes, and hand in the test.” as his last question. As I recall, only 4 or 5 of us in a class of 75 caught it. Even so, I never really did come to like chemistry.

In conclusion, I’ve noticed that, sadly,if you are in the chicken audience, the really funny jokes tend to go right over your head. Ergo, spam spam spam spam spam baked beans and spam.

One time a math prof got frustrate that most of the class did not show up for a certain lecture every week he gave everyone you showed a huge hint on their next assignment. Not exactly the answers to the exam but that as close as it did for me.

Science profs never seemed to do stuff like that, although one of the math professors was very big on “read the whole question before answering” and his exams often had long questions where, if you read the whole question would have instructions like “this is a longwinded question, so prove that 3 is an odd number”, but if you just started reading and answering you’d get some brutally hard proof (prove Fermat’s last theorem in the margin of your exam booklet).

We wore black/navy blue uniforms most of the time, so one of the solid-state physics profs found it particularly funny to whack people with dusty chalkboard brushes. it worked… nobody slept in that class – if you did you might be lint-brushing for a LONG time. But he’d never put the exam on the board or write trick questions.

It’s an old trick.

Back in 1985 my economics prof put a copy of the FINAL exam on the blackboard rack. Of 70 students, only a handful of us even noticed and took notes from it during breaks.

On the last day of class he picked it up, told everyone what it was, and put it away. Needless to say, more than a few people wished they had paid more attention to what was going on around them.

Love the badgers, though!

Apparently nobody clucked. The Prof noticed the addition to his notes about half way through the lecture but didn’t let on. He wasn’t sure if nobody clucked because they didn’t take it seriously or just because they didn’t look at the notes.

Maybe this is an old trick, I’d never heard of it before.

In terms of explanation, I feel it’s mostly about how experts (for real hard core people who know their field) are usually near incapable of holding a talk to average or so-so people because they instantly race ahead and have soon lost everyone, mostly speaking in near-tounges to an audience who mostly doodle and try to decide if it’s socially acceptable to get up and leave or if you have to fake nausea, stomach ache or a heart attack. Invariably they all sit around politely, hoping perhaps some later part will start making sense.

My second calculus teacher approached this from the other direction. He’d explain, at length, everything everyone already sort of knew including details everyone knew. People would one by one simply start working quietly exchanging notes and whispers in pairs or threesomes on the matter (a slightly more useful and hands on way to get it). He would, every so often, ask obvious questions everyone knew, people were engrossed in discussion and didn’t really want to answer. He’d say “You know, if no one is listening anyway there is really no point at all in me standing here talking”. You could almost feel 30 minds internally saying “Damn straight – go talk one on one with the slower people or move on”. He’d say “Well, lets try this..” and launch into another problem or topic no more interesting then the first. Good times.

J. D.

( http://weebls-stuff.com/toons/badgers/ if you don’t know what I’m talking about)

You win the thread.

My wife will love it….

I don’t eat fast food.