Great Mysteries of the Garden

[patandchickens]

That's great, Rosalind! The spherical cow, for gardeners I am disappointed there's no greek letters but I suppose you're limited by what the BB interface can produce

LMAO,


Pat, suspecting that 1 kg/100 cm^3 is closer to the density of lead than of soil, but too lazy to look it up and certainly after you've planted a buncha b/b or potted trees it certainly SEEMS soil weighs that much

 

[Rosalind]

You wanna hear something pathetic? I do actually have the correct values for the density of different kinds of dirt in one of my reference books, but I was too lazy to look it up. I got an exam question once about underground liquid storage tanks, how deep to bury the things according to the freezing point of the liquid, volume, and the type of tank construction.

As you can see, I was also not ambitious enough to do subscripts/superscripts or Greek letters--I would have had to write it in a MS or OpenOffice program, then PrintScrn and 'Shopped it, then posted on Photobucket...Wasn't feeling up to it though.

 

[patandchickens]

Rosalind - my mother, who was an agricultural biochemist before being quite surprised to discover she was pregnant with me , says that during her dissertation defense, one of her committee members asked her "If you put all of the roots and root hairs of an average plant of Russian Wheat end-to-end, how far would they stretch?"

As you might imagine she had no idea, and after a certain amount of handwaving and theorizing she admitted as much. The defense continued on other topics.

Afterwards, she asked the guy what the actual answer was. He said "Oh, I haven't the faintest idea, I just wanted to see what you'd say."




Pat, who moved three 2-3' high pine trees from the road allowance to the back field this morning, and is willing to believe 1 kg/100 cm^3

 

[Rosalind]

BWAHAHA! The best dissertation question/answer I've seen yet, was at a university that was trying to foray into the perilous field of Interdisciplinary Research, combining their engineering school with life sciences.

A student had done her project in drug discovery, and had designed a particular protein to block some brain receptor that induced cell proliferation. Her whole project was making a protein that binds this receptor irreversibly. (Something which, incidentally, is now done by a very expensive machine in about, oh, a month or two--so much for her five years of work, but I digress.)

Committee member: "Since this drug induces proliferation, how do you know it wouldn't cause cancer?"
Student, getting exasperated: "I don't know that! That's BIOLOGY!"

 

[S0rcy]

BAHAHAHAHA!!! LOL. The answer and the story were great!!

BWAHAHA! The best dissertation question/answer I've seen yet, was at a university that was trying to foray into the perilous field of Interdisciplinary Research, combining their engineering school with life sciences.

A student had done her project in drug discovery, and had designed a particular protein to block some brain receptor that induced cell proliferation. Her whole project was making a protein that binds this receptor irreversibly. (Something which, incidentally, is now done by a very expensive machine in about, oh, a month or two--so much for her five years of work, but I digress.)

Committee member: "Since this drug induces proliferation, how do you know it wouldn't cause cancer?"
Student, getting exasperated: "I don't know that! That's BIOLOGY!"