Funny Friday

I got this in an email and it was actually funny!

-CH

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington
chemistry mid-term.

The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it
with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have
the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic
(absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law
(gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.
One student, however, wrote the following:

"First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we
need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate
at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a
soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different
religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state
that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.
Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not
belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to
Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number
of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's
Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay
the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls
enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase
until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in
Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes
over.

So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during
my Freshman year that, 'It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with
you,' and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night,
then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic
and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it
follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore,
extinct...leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine
being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting 'Oh my God.'"

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

First 10 Minutes With IronRuby

So yesterday after reading John Lam's blog (http://www.iunknown.com/2007/07/a-first-look-at.html) post about IronRuby I thought I would give it a try. I downloaded the source and built the project using visual studio 2005. Next I opened up Scott Guthrie's blog (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/23/first-look-at-ironruby.aspx) and was looking at his example of using IronRuby with WPF. I soon had 'hello world' put out on the console and in a dialog box.

After getting 'hello world' out there I wanted to start playing. First I wanted to display the current time out to the screen so I tried out the ruby command Time.now, no dice. I got a message saying "uninitialized constant Time", I thought Time.now was automatically initialized by system.

The next thing I tried that didn't work was using instance variables. I tried to use the statement: @msg = 'Hello World' and soon my console was filled with error messages. I was however able to use this statement: msg = 'Hello World'. I don't know if they plan on letting you use instance variables in IronRuby or not.

So over all I was not greatly impressed with IronRuby but am still excited for new versions to come. I guess 'Rome wasn't built in a day' and the progress the IronRuby team has made is in the right direction. Again I only played with this for 10 minuets thus am not an expert. So go out try it and let me know what you think.

-CH