An email has just been sent round our ecologists – one of those periodic attempts to organize communal storage in freezers. It included this little titbit (with my emphasis):
During this month all the stuff in the room 1303 should be labelled properly (*including possible carcasses*). Unlabelled stuff will be considered garbage and accordingly thrown away in the near future.
Well, as everyone is potentially a carcass, does this mean they’ll throw away anyone without a name tag?
If Mike stops posting in a couple of weeks time, we’ll know where to look or him – in the biodegradable bins, hopefully.
I’m more intrigued by the possibility of impossible carcasses.
If I do go missing (and I’m sure I’ll feel like it after writing all these damn grant proposals – them’s not proposals to Grant, even after you’re delightful come-on earlier), you’ve all read Bob’s tacit admission of guilt here.
Until then, back to trying to decipher electronic submission systems in different countries.
When a grad student at the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge I went down to the basement to see the technicians butchering a rhinoceros. Bits of it wre in the freezer for years afterwards.
Oh, and none of those carcasses are mine. The only possible things I deal with are imaginary numbers.
Didn’t taste good, then, eh?
Um, my reply was to Henry. I really don’t want to know what Mike’s imaginary numbers taste like.
Well, Bob, describing them is complex
Well, Bob, describing them is complex
The double posting creates added unintended
comedyvalue.k ± i
Apparently a US physics department used to have an automatic message if someone dialled the wrong number: “The number you have dialled is imaginary. Please multiply by i and dial again”.
The numbers on my phone only go from 0 to 9. Multiplying an imaginary number by i (the square root of -1) gives you a negative number (assuming it’s not a complex number). Those physicists aren’t so smart now! Imagine a biologists explaining maffs to ’em!
Ooooh, I’m off to phone all the physics departments in the US until I find that answerphone, so I can leave that message.
checks phone
If you want to hear that message, I think you’ll have to use a number that starts with 4.
Heee heee hee!
I recall when the walk-in freezer beside the cyanobacteria lab went out. The cetacean group was storing much of a whale in there. After someone opened the door and discovered the consequences, the cleanup work commenced over several days. I chose to spend those days at the campus coffee shop, catching up on the cyanobacterial literature.
Good luck with the freezers, Bob.