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A Theory On Hell
The following is an actual question given on a University of
Washington chemistry mid-term:
"Is Hell exothermic [gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
Support your answer with a proof."
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law
(gas cools off when it expands and heats up 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 that souls are moving into Hell and the rate
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. Some of these religions state
that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.
Since there are more than one of these religions and since people do
not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people
and 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 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) Of course, 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 Ms. Therese
Banyan during my Freshman year "That it will be a cold night in Hell
before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I still
have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then (2)
cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic.
The student got the only A. |
Fish and
Cat Story
One spring day, a fish was swimming about a foot below the surface of
a lake and saw a fly hovering just out of striking distance.
The fish said to itself, "If that fly comes six inches closer, I'll
jump up and have myself a meal." Just then, a bear on the shore of the
lake looked up and said to itself, " If that fly gets any closer to
that fish, the fish will jump up, and I'll catch the fish and have
myself a meal."
As luck would have it, a hunter saw what was happening. He
thought to himself, "If that fly moves closer to the fish, the fish
will jump, the bear will lean over to grab the fish, and I'll shoot
the bear."
Just then, a rat was standing behind the hunter saying to itself," If
that fly moves closer to the fish, the fish will jump, the bear will
lean over to grab the fish, the hunter will lean over to shoot the
bear, and I'll grab the sandwich from the back pocket of the hunter.
However, unbeknownst to the rat, a cat was observing everything and
thinking, "If that fly moves closer to the fish, the fish will jump,
the bear will grab the fish, the hunter will shoot the bear, the rat
will grab the sandwich, and I'll snatch the rat."
At that very moment, the fly dropped a few inches, the fish grabbed
the fly, the bear grabbed the fish, the hunter shot the bear, the rat
grabbed the sandwich, the cat jumped, missed the rat and landed in the
lake.
The moral of this story is:
If the fly drops six inches the pussy will get wet. |
Blonde
Murder Victim
WANTED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER (the actual AP headline)
Linda Burnett, 23, a resident of San Diego, was visiting her inlaws,
and while there went to a nearby supermarket to pick up some
groceries. Several people noticed her sitting in her car with the
windows rolled up and with her eyes closed, with both hands behind the
back of her head. One customer who had been at the store for a while
became concerned and walked over to the car. He noticed that Linda's
eyes were now open, and she looked very strange. He asked her if she
was okay, and Linda replied that she'd been shot in the back of the
head, and had been holding her brains in for over an hour. The man
called the paramedics, who broke into the car because the doors were
locked and Linda refused to remove her hands from her head. When they
finally got in, they found that Linda had a wad of bread dough on the
back of her head. A Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded from the
heat, making a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot, and the wad of
dough hit her in the back of her head. When she reached back to find
out what it was, she felt the dough and thought it was her brains. She
initially passed out, but quickly recovered and tried to hold her
brains in for over an hour until someone noticed and came to her aid.
And, yes, Linda is a blonde. |
Irish Bank Robbery
Excerpted from an article about a bank robbery which appeared in the
Dublin Times (metropolitan edition, page 2A) on 2 March 1999:
Once inside the bank shortly after midnight, their efforts at
disabling the internal security system got underway immediately. The
robbers, who expected to find one or two large safes filled with cash
and valuables, were surprised to see hundreds of smaller safes
scattered throughout the bank.
The robbers cracked the first safe's combination, and inside they
found Only a bowl of vanilla pudding. As recorded on the bank's
audio-tape system, one said, "At least we'll get a bit to eat,"
The robbers opened up a second safe, and it also contained nothing but
vanilla pudding. The process continued until all the safes were
opened.
They found not one pound sterling, a diamond, or an ounce of gold.
Instead, all the safes contained covered bowls of pudding.
Disappointed, the robbers made a quiet exit, each leaving with nothing
more than a queasy, uncomfortably full stomach.
The newspaper headline read:
IRELAND'S LARGEST SPERM BANK ROBBED EARLY THIS MORNING. |
Stranger
Than Fiction
PHILLIPSBURG, NJ.
An unidentified 29-year-old male choked to death on a sequined pastie
he had orally removed from an exotic dancer at a local establishment.
"I didn't think he was going to eat it," said the dancer identified
only as "Ginger," adding, "He was really drunk." |
Cop
Stories
Good: A policeman had a perfect spot to watch for speeders, but wasn't
getting many. Then he discovered the problem-a 10-year old boy was
standing up the road with a hand painted sign which read "RADAR TRAP
AHEAD." The officer then found a young accomplice down the road with a
sign reading "TIPS" and a bucket full of change.
Better: A motorist was mailed a picture of his car speeding through an
automated radar. A $40 speeding ticket was included. Being cute, he
sent the police department a picture of $40. The police responded with
another mailed photo of handcuffs.
Best: A young woman was pulled over for speeding. As the motorcycle
officer walked to her car window and flipped open his ticket book, she
said, "I bet you are going to sell me a ticket to the Highway
Patrolmen's Ball." He replied, "Highway patrolmen don't have balls."
There was a moment of silence while she smiled, and he realized what
he'd just said. He then closed his book, got back on his motorcycle
and left. She was laughing too hard to start her car for several
minutes. |
Extra Effort
I was due for an appointment with the gynecologist when early in the
morning I received a call from his office:I had been rescheduled for
early that morning at 9:30AM. I had just packed everyone off to work
and school and it was around 8:45. The trip to his office usually took
about 35 minutes so I didn't have any time to spare. As most women do,
I'm sure, I like to take a little extra effort over hygiene when
making such visits, but this time I wasn't going to be able to make
the full effort. So I rushed upstairs, threw off my dressing gown, wet
the washcloth and gave myself a wash in "that area" in front of the
sink, taking extra care to make sure that I was presentable. I threw
the washcloth in the clothes basket, donned some clothes, hopped in
the car and raced to my appointment. I was in the waiting room only a
few minutes when he called me in. Knowing the routine, as I am sure
you all do, I hopped up on the table, looked over at the other side of
the room and pretended I was in Hawaii or some other place a million
miles away from here. I was a little surprised when he said: "My...we
have taken a little extra effort this morning, haven't we?", but I
didn't respond. The appointment over, I heaved a sigh of relief and
went home. The rest of the day went normal, some shopping, cleaning
and the evening etc. At 8:30 that evening my 14 year-old daughter was
fixing to go to a school dance, when she called down from the
bathroom, "Mom, where's my washcloth?" I called back for her to get
another from the cabinet. She called back, "No I need the one that was
here by the sink. It had all my glitter and sparkles in it." |
A
Returned Favor From Warsaw
This has got to be the all-time classic comeback. Note: This is an
exact replication of National Public Radio(NPR)interview between a
female broadcaster, and US Army General Reinwald who was about to
sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military installation.
INTERVIEWER: " So, General Reinwald, what things are you going to
teach these young boys when they visit your base?"
GENERAL REINWALD: 'We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing,
archery, and shooting."
INTERVIEWER: "Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it?"
GENERAL REINWALD: "I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on
the rifle range."
INTERVIEWER: "Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous
activity to be teaching children?"
GENERAL REINWALD: "I don't see how, ....we will be teaching them
proper rifle range discipline before they even touch a firearm."
INTERVIEWER: " But you're equipping them to become violent killers."
GENERAL REINWALD: "Well, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but
you're not one, are you?"
The radio went silent and the interview ended! |
An Error
Publishing An Article
Canada's Ottawa Citizen newspaper recently printed a recipe for
Chanterelle Lemon Pasta in its food section, calling for one cup of
Chanterelle mushrooms. They even provided a helpful photograph so
amateur mushroom hounds could find their own growing in the wild.
Unfortunately, the photograph instead showed Destroying Angels, which
are deadly when eaten. |
Real
Life Dilbert-Type Managers Memos
"My boss spent the entire weekend retyping a 25-page proposal that
only needed corrections. She claims the disk I gave her was damaged
and she couldn't edit it. The disk I gave her was write-protected."
(CIO of Dell Computers)
Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say."
(Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)
My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I
told my Boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss
work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change
her burial to Friday. He said, "That would be better for me."
(Shipping executive, FTD Florists)
"We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going
to discuss it with the employees." (Switching supervisor, AT&T Long
Lines Division)
We recently received a memo from senior management saying: "This is to
inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the memo
mentioned above." (Microsoft, Legal Affairs Division)
One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a
project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon
enough. He said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until
tomorrow to ask for it!" (New business manager, Hallmark Greeting
Cards.)
As director of communications, I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing
our company's training programs and materials. In the body of the memo
in one of the sentences I mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by
one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the
executive committee, I was called into the HR director's office, and
told that the executive vice president wanted me out of the building
by lunch. When I asked why, I was told that she wouldn't stand for
perverts (pedophiles?) working in her company. Finally, he showed me
her copy of the memo, with her demand that I be fired and the word
"pedagogical" circled in red. The HR manager was fairly reasonable,
and once he looked the word up in his dictionary and made a copy of
the definition to send back to her, he told me not to worry. He would
take care of it. Two days later, a memo to the entire staff came out
directing us that no words which could not be found in the local
Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I
resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation
memo by pasting words together from the Sunday paper. (Taco Bell
Corporation) |
Classic Hack
Here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks.
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola
discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the
Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy,
it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a
portion of the program in `master mode' (supervisor state), in which
memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large
value into its `privilege level' byte (normally write-protected) and
could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the
file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous
other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open.
Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official
`level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of `needs to be
fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a
database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola
followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as
`Security SIDR', and attached all of the necessary documentation,
ways-to-reproduce, etc.
The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't
realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary
operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official
patch.
Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support
rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to
demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be
cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be
subverted.
They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a
thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then
incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar
Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as `ghost jobs'
(daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the existing loophole
to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then
keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system
operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.
One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software
development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual
phenomena. These included the following:
* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a
job. * Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they
would attempt to walk across the floor. * The card-punch output device
would occasionally start up of itself and punch a lace card. These
would usually jam in the punch. * The console would print snide and
insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa. * The
Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to
stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was
unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One
of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the
card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the
opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in
half when they were read, leaving the operator to re collate them
manually.
Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers.
They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were
once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following sequence
of events took place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's
men!
id1: Thank you, my good fellow!
Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed,
and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few
milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them
simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did the latter --- only to find that
the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted! It turned
out that these two programs had patched the boot-time OS image (the
kernel file, in UNIX terms) and had added themselves to the list of
programs that were to be started at boot time.
The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when the
system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and
reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a patch
for this problem.
It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's management
about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees in question. It
is not recorded that any serious disciplinary action was taken against
either of them. |
Netscape
Technical Support Folly
Tech: Internet Technical Support this is so-and-so speaking. May I
have your username please?
Female Customer: Yes I want to speak to the person in charge
immediately!
Tech: Speaking. What can I do for you?
Female Customer: I want to complain about the pornographic bookmarks
your company put in my web browser!
Tech: We didn't put any pornographic bookmarks in your web browser.
Female Customer: Oh yes you did! I'm looking at them right now!
(Tech remembers the Netscape history list and grins to himself)
Tech: Where exactly are these "bookmarks" located?
Female Customer: In Netscape!
Tech: And where exactly in Netscape would that be?
Female: In that little list that comes down when you click the little
down arrow!
Tech: The one right above the Net Search button?
Female Customer: Yes that one!
Tech: Miss, that's the Netscape history list. Netscape keeps the past
ten links you typed in that box. The only way to put an address in
that box is for someone to physically sit at your computer and type in
a web address.
Female Customer: Well I certainly didn't type in those X rated web
addresses!
Tech: Well somebody did. Who else has access to your computer, and
uses the Internet?
Female Customer: Just me and my husband!
(Several seconds of silence pass ... Hey! I wasn't going to say it!)
Female Customer: ........ oh ............. OOOH! ... Thank you.
(She quickly hung up) |
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