The following are from an article on the independent’s website. I’ve heard a couple before, understand a few and can work out a few more. But the following ones I don’t get: 4, 5, 18, 21 and 23. Anyone care to explain?

Too clever by half: 25 highbrow jokes

1. A photon checks into a hotel and the porter asks him if he has any luggage. The photon replies: “No, I’m travelling light.”

2. “Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?”

3. What does a dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac spend most of his time doing? Staying up all night wondering if there really is a dog.

4. A TCP packet walks into a bar, and says to the barman: “Hello, I’d like a beer.” The barman replies: “Hello, you’d like a beer?” “Yes,” replies the TCP packet, “I’d like a beer.”

5. An electron is driving down a motorway, and a policeman pulls him over. The policeman says: “Sir, do you realise you were travelling at 130km per hour?” The electron goes: “Oh great, now I’m lost.”

6. Pavlov is enjoying a pint in the pub. The phone rings. He jumps up and shouts: “Hell, I forgot to feed the dog!”

7. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A fish.

8. There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that know binary, and those that don’t.

9. When I heard that oxygen and magnesium hooked up I was like OMg.

10. The barman says: “We don’t serve faster-than-light particles here.” A tachyon enters a bar.

11. A Buddhist monk approaches a hotdog stand and says: “Make me one with everything”.

12. What do you call two crows on a branch? Attempted murder.

13. An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German are walking down the street together. A juggler is performing on the street but there are so many people that the four men can’t see the juggler. So the juggler goes on top of a platform and asks: “Can you see me now?” The four men answer: “Yes.” “Oui.” “Si.” “Ja.”

14. Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

15. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None, it’s a hardware problem.

16. A student travelling on a train looks up and sees Einstein sitting next to him. Excited, he asks: “Excuse me, professor. Does Boston stop at this train?”

17. Did you hear about the jurisprudence fetishist? He got off on a technicality.

18. Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says: “Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it’s funny or not?” Gödel replies: “We can’t know that because we’re inside the joke.” Chomsky says: “Of course it’s funny. You’re just telling it wrong.”

19. A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and says: “Five beers, please.”

20. Did you hear about the man who got cooled to absolute zero? He’s 0K now.

21. An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The bartender says: “What’ll it be, boys?” The first mathematician: “I’ll have one half of a beer.” The second mathematician: “I’ll have one quarter of a beer.” The third mathematician: “I’ll have one eight of a beer.” The fourth mathematician: “I’ll have one sixteenth of a…” The bartender interrupts: “Know your limits, boys” as he pours out a single beer.

22. What does the “B” in Benoit B Mandelbrot stand for? Answer: Benoit B Mandelbrot.

23. Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French café, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress: “I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.” The waitress replies: “I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?”

24. A classics professor goes to a tailor to get his trousers mended. The tailor asks: “Euripides?” The professor replies: “Yes. Eumenides?”

25. A programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.” The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.

4 = TCPIP , I think its to do with internet traffic protocols.

21: the reducing progression tends to 1 (its limit)

4 AFAIK is just a dumb computing joke, not much to get.

5 is a speed/position uncertainty principle joke.

21 is a summation joke (the sum of 1/(2^n) tends to 1 as n tends to inf)

23 is just about philosophy.

Ha, my GF sent me the list and asked about 5, 13 and 22 😉

5: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
18: You need to know their philosophies, really
21: a mathematical limit is a thing
23: another one where it helps to know what Sartre thought

Well I’m glad you’ve all cleared those up in such an erudite, succinct and informative manner 😐

4)is to do with the way that packets traverse an IP network. When a connection is being set up between a sender and receiver, they initially do a ‘handshaking’ exercise that essentially is just them sending the same bit of info backwards and forwards- 3 times. Each time they do it, they set a certain bit to a certain value. Its to help set the connection up.

(I’ve simplified this a lot, hope you don’t mind.)

TCP Transmission control protocol. used for the interwebz and stuff. a computer sends a data packet to another computer, the receiving computer sends a message back, confirming what has been sent.

Thats more like it mr brennan! Nicely put. 10/10, gold star.

4 – TCP connections (It you are reading this then you used one) are initiated using a ‘3 way handshake’ where the client and server synchronize / acknowledge each other

Why thank you HF.

If you ever want to delve into it in detail:

http://www.inetdaemon.com/tutorials/internet/tcp/3-way_handshake.shtml

Sorry, I was trying to give hints so you could say “aha!” 😉

5: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says you can’t know the speed and position of a particle at the same time – so if you tell an electron how fast it’s going, it doesn’t know where it is.

18: See 5, plus Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem basically says you can’t mathematically prove everything from inside this universe, Chomsky is a linguist.

21. A mathematical limit is something that you can get closer and closer to but never reach – like Zeno’s frog.

23: Sartre was an existentialist – basically everything is related to the human experience, so the lack of milk is different to the lack of cream.

22 ?

I no understand 🙁

That’s better ben, you get the “most improved” star today.

5)Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Basically you cannot know with precision the speed and position of a particle simultaneously.

So when the electron finds out its speed it’s now lost because it can’t know its position at the same time

22: Mandelbrot was one of the originators of fractals – a mathematical thing where every part contains the whole, you can keep zooming in and in for ever.

Thanks Ben ,that just made my head hurt (and I had already googled him ) 🙂

I could tell you a joke about UDP, but I don’t know if you’d get it.

22)Mandelbrot did lots of work on fractals.

If you magnify a fractal it looks like the unmagnified image, this holds true no matter how far you zoom in.

So when you zoom in on the B in Benoit B Mandelbrot it looks like Benoit B Mandelbrot

I could tell you a joke about UDP, but I don’t know if you’d get it.

😀

Argon walks in to a bar

No one reacts

Ben and rich: now I know that, no.22 becomes amusing.

Ben you really are doing very well now, carry on like this and you’ll get a mention in assembly!

I think 25 is missing the punchline, which is something like “They had eggs”.

Mandlebrot in pictures

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAzYWM7Yf4U[/video]

the Mandelbrot one reminds me of a favourite Dilbert cartoon.

Wally is telling Dilbert how he’s embezzling funds into a phantom project called The TTP Project. “What does TTP stand for?” asks Dilbert. “That’s the best bit” says Wally “It stands for The TTP Project.”

That’ll be 80p.

I went in to the chemist and asked if they sold any Adenosine triphosphate. They said yes its 80p

My GF also sent me this one:

What do you get if you cross a lion and a tiger?

??N mod(lion) mod(tiger) cos?

(can’t get the overbar to work properly – ignore the o)

The Satre thing is because he wrote about choice being an illusion, or something of that ilk. By the cafe not having any cream, he’s no longer able to make a free choice not to have it, but is forced not to instead. The offer of no milk returns that freedom of choice. Something like that, anyway.

What’s perhaps more interesting is that the Mandlebrot thing is actually kinda true. He didn’t have a middle name, and added the B himself; there’s a fairly likelyhood that this was his reasoning.

I think 25 is missing the punchline, which is something like “They had eggs”.

Yeah. It’s also slightly annoying in that he should come back with thirteen.

Could be worse though. If she’d said “while you’re there, get eggs” he’d never have got home again.

I think 25 is missing the punchline, which is something like “They had eggs”.

It works as it stands.

They had eggs and therefore according to the syntax of the original instruction he bought 12 loaves.

nedrapier – isn’t that just a rip off of Gnu? (Gnu’s Not Unix).

13 in the OP genuinely may be my new favourite joke!

edit – though 24 is a close second…

Oh, and Chomsky was involved with “ideal” linguistics, something along the lines of ideal language being different from what people actually say. So the joke there suggests that the joke they’re discussing would actually be funny in an ideal state, but human error in the telling ruins it.

I think.

Heisenberg is obviously famous for his uncertainty principle. Godel I had to look up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an “effective procedure” (e.g., a computer program, but it could be any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.

There are some good ones there. I like a good geeky joke. Like:

It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.

(Feel free to steal that one)

I think 25 is missing the punchline, which is something like “They had eggs”.

It works as it is, but could be more clearly defined 😉

Yeah, I did physics not philosophy 😉

And on that subject:

A racehorse owner was having a lot of trouble with his best horse, who was suddenly not winning anything, so he called in a nutritionist, an animal behaviorist and a physicist.

The nutritionist studied the grass and feed the horse was getting, and made some suggestions. The behaviorist watched the horse, and made some suggestions to make the horse more relaxed and comfortable.

The physicist pulled out a pad of paper and said “right, first we’ll assume the horse is spherical…”

I like 25 as worded, too much spelling out ruins such jokes.

Over-eggs it?

Why did the French chef kill himself?

He lost the l’huile d’olive.