Defining Roles

A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The woman below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be an engineer!" said the balloonist.

"I am," replied the woman "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help so far."

The woman below responded, "You must be in Management!"

"I am", replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

Two engineering students were walking across campus when one said,
"Where did you get such a great bike?"

The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday
minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike.
She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said,
"Take what you want."

"The second engineer nodded approvingly, "Good choice. The clothes
probably wouldn't have fit ."

To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is
half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to
be.

A pastor, a doctor and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.

The engineer fumed, "What's with these guys? We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!"

The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such ineptitude!"

The pastor said, "Hey, here comes the greens keeper. Let's have a word with him."

"Hi George! Say, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?"

The greens keeper replied, "Oh, yes, that's a group of blind fire-fighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime."

The group was silent for a moment. The pastor said, "That's so sad. I think I'll say a special prayer for them tonight."

The doctor said, "Good idea. And I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there's anything he can do for them."

The engineer said, "Why can't these guys play at night?"

What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?

Mechanical Engineers build weapons and Civil Engineers build targets.

The graduate with a Science degree asks, "Why does it work?". The graduate
with an Engineering degree asks, "How does it work?". The graduate with an
Accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?". The graduate with an Arts
degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"

Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the
possible designers of the human body. One said, "It was a mechanical
engineer. Just look at all the joints."

Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has
many thousands of electrical connections."

The last said, "No it must have been a civil engineer. Who else would run
a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"

Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers
believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.

An architect, an artist and an engineer were discussing whether it was
better to spend time with the wife or a mistress.

The architect said he enjoyed time with his wife, building a solid
foundation for an enduring relationship.

The artist said he enjoyed time with his mistress, because the passion
and mystery he found there.

The engineer said, "I like both."

Both?

"Yeah. If you have a wife and a mistress, they will each assume you are
spending time with the other woman, and you can go to the lab and get
some work done."

An engineer was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him
and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."

He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into
a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week."

The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned
it to the pocket.

The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a
princess, I'll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want."

Again the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into
his pocket.

Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a
beautiful princess, and that I'll stay with you for a week and do
anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?"

The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a
girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool

A mathematician, a physicist, an engineer went again to the races
and laid their money down. Commiserating in the bar after the race, the
engineer says, "I don't understand why I lost all my money. I measured all
the horses and calculated their strength and mechanical advantage and
figured out how fast they could run..."

The physicist interrupted him: "...but you didn't take individual
variations into account. I did a statistical analysis of their previous
performances and bet on the horses with the highest probability of
winning..."

"...so if you're so hot why are you broke?" asked the engineer. But
before the argument can grow, the mathematician takes out his pipe and
they get a glimpse of his well-fattened wallet. Obviously here was a man
who knows something about horses. They both demanded to know his secret.
"Well," he says, "first I assumed all the horses were identical and
spherical..."

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying in a hotel.

The engineer wakes up and smells smoke. He goes out into the hallway
and sees a fire, so he fills a trash can from his room with water and
douses the fire. He goes back to bed.

Later, the physicist wakes up and smells smoke. He opens his door
and sees a fire in the hallway. He walks down the hall to a fire hose and
after calculating the flame velocity, distance, water pressure,
trajectory, etc. extinguishes the fire with the minimum amount of water
and energy needed.

Later, the mathematician wakes up and smells smoke. He goes to the
hall, sees the fire and then the fire hose. He thinks for a moment and
then exclaims, "Ah, a solution exists!" and then goes back to bed.

A physicist and a mathematician are sitting in a faculty lounge.

Suddenly, the coffee machine catches on fire. The physicist grabs a bucket
and leap towards the sink, filled the bucket with water and puts out the
fire. Second day, the same two sit in the same lounge. Again, the coffee
machine catches on fire. This time, the mathematician stands up, got a
bucket, hands the bucket to the physicist, thus reducing the problem to a
previously solved one.

Another version:

A mathematician and an engineer are on desert island. They
find two palm trees with one coconut each. The engineer shins up one tree,
gets the coconut, eats. The mathematician shins up the other tree, gets
the coconut, climbs the other tree and puts it there. "Now we've reduced
it to a problem we know how to solve."

A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician were sitting in
a street cafe watching the crowd. Across the street they saw a man and a
woman entering a building. Ten minutes they reappeared together with a
third person.

- They have multiplied, said the biologist.

- Oh no, an error in measurement, the physicist sighed.

- If exactly one person enters the building now, it will be
empty again, the mathematician concluded.

Several scientists were all posed the following question:

"What is 2 * 2 ?"

The engineer whips out his slide rule (so it's old) and
shuffles it back and forth, and finally announces "3.99".

The physicist consults his technical references, sets up the
problem on his computer, and announces "it lies between 3.98 and 4.02".

The mathematician cogitates for a while, then announces: "I
don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you, an answer exists!".

Philosopher smiles: "But what do you mean by 2 * 2 ?"

Logician replies: "Please define 2 * 2 more precisely."

An chemist, a physicist, and a mathematician are stranded on
an island when a can of food rolls ashore. The chemist and the physicist
comes up with many ingenious ways to open the can. Then suddenly the
mathematician gets a bright idea: "Assume we have a can opener ..."

A mathematician is asked to design a table. He first designs
a table with no legs. Then he designs a table with infinitely many legs.
He spend the rest of his life generalizing the results for the table with
N legs (where N is not necessarily a natural number).

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician were asked to
hammer a nail into a wall.

The engineer went to build a Universal Automatic Nailer -- a
device able to hammer every possible nail into every possible wall.

The physicist conducted series of experiments on strength of
hammers, nails, and walls and developed a revolutionary technology of
ultra-sonic nail hammering at super-low temperature.

The mathematician generalized the problem to a N dimensional
problem of penetration of a knotted one dimensional nail into a N-1
dimensional hyper-wall. Several fundamental theorems are proved. Of
course, the problem is too rich to suggest a possibility of a simple
solution, even the existence of a solution is far from obvious.

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were traveling
through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the
train.

"Aha," says the engineer, "I see that Scottish sheep are
black."

"Hmm," says the physicist, "You mean that some Scottish
sheep are black."

"No," says the mathematician, "All we know is that there is
at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one
sheep is black!"

A Mathematician (M) and an Engineer (E) attend a lecture by
a Physicist. The topic concerns Kulza-Klein theories involving physical
processes that occur in spaces with dimensions of 9, 12 and even higher.
The M is sitting, clearly enjoying the lecture, while the E is frowning
and looking generally confused and puzzled. By the end the E has a
terrible headache. At the end, the M comments about the wonderful lecture.

E: "How do you understand this stuff?"
M: "I just visualize the process"
E: "How can you POSSIBLY visualize something that occurs in
9-dimensional space?"
M: "Easy, first visualize it in N-dimensional space, then
let N go to 9"

A team of engineers were required to measure the height of a
flag pole. They only had a measuring tape, and were getting quite
frustrated trying to keep the tape along the pole. It kept falling down,
etc. A mathematician comes along, finds out their problem, and proceeds to
remove the pole from the ground and measure it easily. When he leaves, one
engineer says to the other: "Just like a mathematician! We need to know
the height, and he gives us the length!"

One day a farmer called up an engineer, a physicist, and a
mathematician and asked them to fence off the largest possible area with
the least amount of fence.

The engineer made the fence in a circle and proclaimed that
he had the most efficient design.

The physicist made a long, straight line and proclaimed "We
can assume the length is infinite..." and pointed out that fencing off
half of the Earth was certainly a more efficient way to do it.

The Mathematician just laughed at them. He built a tiny
fence around himself and said "I declare myself to be on the outside."

To mathematicians, solutions mean finding the answers. But to
chemists, solutions are things that are still all mixed up.

A mathematician, an engineer, and a chemist were walking
down the road when they saw a pile of cans of beer. Unfortunately, they
were the old-fashioned cans that do not have the tab at the top. One of
them proposed that they split up and find can openers. The chemist went to
his lab and concocted a magical chemical that dissolves the can top in an
instant and evaporates the next instant so that the beer inside is not
affected. The engineer went to his workshop and created a new HyperOpener
that can open 25 cans per second.
They went back to the pile with their inventions and found
the mathematician finishing the last can of beer. "How did you manage
that?" they asked in astonishment. The mathematician answered, "Oh, well,
I assumed they were open and went from there."

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