Peter Bermel

"... [David Chan] is about as tall as the average woman."

Mark Blattner

"I hate going on vacation because I lose weight." (ahh the struggles of the shotput thrower)

David Chan

"I've got Belhaven Scottish Ale ... It's smoother than the tensor product of David Chan and Guinness."

David C: "I'm just trying to get to first base."
Peter B: "The pitching is phenomenal at MIT."
Michael L: "And your bat is a little short."

"I don't know, brotha... It sounds like the proper situation in which to invoke the Bermel Ultimatum." -- (The Bermel Ultimatum, a statute named after its proprietor, Peter Bermel, is the proposition to a girl sufficiently far from her original boyfriend to "dump her boyfriend and go out with a real man, like me.")

"That's hahd-cohr." (British accent)

Xudong Chen

"Let us... open this... to see... what is... inside. Look... it is a... fish."

Xuemin Chi

"The further along guys are [in their studies], the shorter they are... the higher you go with women, the uglier they get."

Kelly Cho

[after being handed a beer]: "This tastes like water." -(yeah, we all know you're so tough you need something stronger!)

Eunmi Choi

Eunmi: "I'm so tired..."
Me: "Well, take a nap now and I'll wake you up in time for class."
Eunmi: "No, that's ok. I want to save my nap for class."

"I will take pictures of my dogs-- my delicious dogs."

"If I wear those shorts, you will not get any work done."

"Can I have a sh*t?" (you mean 'sheet', Eunmi, 'shEEEt'!)

"My pants are sliced." (trying to say that her pants were inadequately thin for the cold weather)

Janet Chuang

"Sunshine makes me happy."

"Breadmakers make me happy."

"Macaroni and Cheese makes me happy."

Bryan Cord

"Dude, they have this 64-oz beer there. I had one... it was like a 40, but with 24 more ounces."

"Ahh, the adventures of Pete and Pete.... if Pete was named Phil."

"Ummm, well you can't spell 'Judas' without the 'Jew'." (trying to justify his statement that Jesus was betrayed by a Jew).

Dr. Tim Finegan

"He's been so busy preparing for the wedding... they call her Bridezilla."

Steve Geiger

"What?!?! You mean I've had Bert and Ernie mixed up all these years?!?!?"

"Why did the bike take a rest? Because it was two-tired."

"What did the tree and the car have in common? They were both sticks."

"What was Beethoven's favorite food? Ba-na-na-na."

Dr. Mark Hess

Amit: "If we think of the electron as a duck travelling through water...." {shows a cartoon slide of a duck making waves in the water}
Steve: "Ducks don't have green heads."
Mark: "It's a mallard."

On the Simmon's Hall dorm: "Sponge-dorm squarepants"

Mark: "The point charge is near the origin and this end over here is off at infinity..."
Jags: "Wait Mark, I don't understand. Are you trying to prove to me that 7cm equals infinity?"

Colin Joye

"If you think my [photography] looks professional, your obviously not a professional."

"Who invented this wretched system of Gaussian Units? Who measures capacitance in centimeters? It's ridiculous!"

"My research isn't even on the back burner now. It's in the freezer."

"I'm only doing research this semester - no classes - except I unexpectedly signed up for 9 credits of girlfriend."

On waiting 5 hours to be assigned for jury duty: "I don't care how patriotic they make jury duty sound... this just sucks!"

Me: "Aaaarrrrhhhh, it's soooo cold out, my feet hurt!"
'Aunt' Stella: "You should be courageous. Men shouldn't show weakness."
Me: (courageously) "I'm not afraid to show my weakness!"

"What do you mean? Boston's weather is easy to predict. It's always 20 degrees. No units. Just 20. One day it's 20 Farenheit, the next day it's 20 Celsius. The difficulty is in predicting the units."

"Don't take a math class here [at MIT] unless you like math."

"The political agenda of 'diversity' makes no sense. Perfect diversity means complete homogeneity. It's a contradiction!"

Gavin Joye

"We're planning to set off the (illegal) fireworks - we're all gonna park far from his house in different places and we have an escape route."

"Time is sanity: The less time I have, the less sane I'll be."

Hyun Young Kang

"I'm a tiny little woman."

Me: "Kwi opda" -{meaning to say "you're cute" but in instead saying "you have no ears"!}
HY: "What?? I have ears!! You mean Kwi yopda!"

HY: "I want to go to Europe."
Me: "Where do you want to go in Europe?"
HY: "I want to go manywhere." -{that's actually a good new word. seriously!}

"Today, I have to go to elementary school...."

Susan Kang

Susan {Just after a group photo was taken}: "Wait, I blinked!"
Me: "That's okay, no one can tell the difference."

"Woot dee doot dee dooooooo! Why am I so hyper? Oh yeah, I ate pound cake and then cheese cake today. I'm on a sugar high!"

"I .... need .... suguh!"

Jongeun Lee

"You're flexible like an octopus."

Chad Marchewka

Advisor: "So did you go down to Kenmore square after the Red Sox {beat the Yankees}?"
Chad: "Yeah it was crazy down there."
Advisor: "Haha. {sarcastically:} And how was the tear gas?"
Chad: "Oh, it makes you cry."

"[Our advisor] wanted me to give a presentation to you all about what I did at Wisconsin for undergrad. I assumed he didn't mean all that underage drinking..."

Wes Peoples

Wes, on his getting married in July: "I think the ceremony's for the girl. I mean, I'd be happy just to go up to the gun shop and have the guy there pronounce us husband and wife and sign the certificate."

"... first thing is she wanted to get rid of all my furniture. I like my particleboard shelf. It's cheap, it's simple and it does the job. No one ever has to ask "can I put this cup here?" - they just do and it doesn't matter if it gets a little wet."

"They do sell sleep. It comes in a can. It's a black powder you mix with hot water. It's called coffee. {siiip} mmmmmm. There's 2 hours."

Greg Pollock

"Humility is realizing that, yes, you are special - and so is everyone else."

{Greg commenting on Proverbs 24:16}: "This verse reminds me of that Chumbawumba song 'I get knocked down, but I get up again....'. I promise I'll never quote from Chumbawumba again."

GP: "When I was in middle school, if you got in trouble it was 'go cut yourself a switch' {go cut the branch that will be used to spank you}... it was mental torture because you had to choose the size and length of the branch that would be used to hit you..."
Lodewyk: "Then just cut the whole tree, then they won't be able to swing it!"

"[My girlfriend] and I went to the Sam Adams Brewery for valentine's day." - good job Greg! ;-)

"I think of spring in Boston as a sort of jagged transition where the days alternate between winter and summer"

Scott Rhodes

"So what'chu sayin' is...."

Joe Tracy

"yeah... with my silver-plated, plastic spork."

"I pick flights so that I get bumped.... I just booked a ticket to go home for thanksgiving and I'm hoping it will generate more tickets.... you basically pay for one ticket and you never have to pay again."

Chris Rycroft

[From memory:]
"3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679 8214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038..1..9..6....
I can't seem to recall any more."

Jijon Sit

"I'm a strange case study."

Balint Veto

Balint (graduating in June) complains about attending a seminar
Vincent: "Balint, you're under no obligation to learn anything anymore."

On his qualifying exam: "If they give me an equation I don't know how to solve, I'm just gonna take the Fourier transform and keep taking derivatives until there's nothing left."

Prof. Coppi: "What does Alto Campus Torus mean in Latin?
Balint: "Medieval or Classical?"
Prof. Coppi: "I ... I don't know." (just like Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail!)

"Hey guys hey guys, I got this great joke... What happens to your mother-in-law when you put her in the freezer?... She becomes your frozen-in-law!" (referring to the "frozen-in" law of magnetohydrodynamics, where plasma is essentially stuck to the magnetic field lines).

Chris Wendt

"Yeah this semester was pretty bad. At one point, I had 154 books checked out from the library."

Hanna Yang

Me: "So how's your school work been going - with all this baseball?"
Hanna (with Ralph Wiggum-like naivety): "I watched all six games."

Dr. H. Cheng

"One meter is, like, 30-something inches..."

Dr. B. Coppi

"That was why I designed the Alcator [plasma tokamak] as small as I could-- small birds fly... big elephants don't fly."

[cell phone]: Beeep Beeeeeep... ".... That was the Italian Embassy. I should turn this off."

"So when I was advising President Reagan about the ITER project, I said that I would avoid having the US join it."

"The first time anyone had ever seen this phenomenon was when I was on the Voyager 1 crew."

"How do we solve this problem, in your opinion?"

"I wrote a paper on this topic with a colleague back in 1953, but we never published that paper."

Reverend Kevin Ford

"Jesus entering Jerusalem on the back of a donkey is like..... the president arriving in a 19 ... 84 ..... Chevy Nova."

"If you put a spoonful of sewage into a barrel of wine, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of wine into a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. Dirt spreads, clean doesn't."

Dr. J. Friedberg   (Think of Rodney Dangerfield)

"The tenseh ':' operateh just means yuh take the tenseh and dot [product] the hell out of it until it buhcomes a scaleh."

Dr. Q. Hu

"With high temperature superconductors they can use liquid nitrogen, which is cheaper than milk or beer."

Dr. J.A. Kong

"This is extincted"

"I'm gonna beat the horse to death."

"When I look at you, I see the Fourier Transform."

"This is going to be very very boring."

"She committed suicide... twice."

"I don't like viewgraphs, it is like cheating. The other professors, they show you a viewgraph on this projector and, whoooot!, it is gone!"

"Did I do all this math? I'm impressed by myself."

"Occasionally, I go to kindergarten."

"ehh, what happened to your hair? hehehe. that's cute." (to 'Tennissee Scott' with corn-rows)

"This is the conducting thing."

"I dunno why Ben Franklin ever proposed that we change our time every 6 months. It is a crime of the highest kind! It is 4:20pm right now. Why should it be 5:20pm at this time in 6 months?"

"So he was waiting for his mother to die, but she refused to die."

"... And then he died too."

Dr. J. Lang

"M&M's are great!"

Dr. D. Margetis

"Suppose that I'm small - I am - but smaller... "

"Mathmatica is completely useless."

"The something has to be something."

"This surface doesn't have to be a disk... It can be an ellipse or a... or a... or a... a projection of a nose onto the plane."

"The [integral] kernel bears the same diseases as the eigenfunctions. Think of it as a father ... if the kernel is crazy, the children will also be crazy."

"He spent two years in isolation trying to solve this... I mean, he was in Russia, so that's not so hard to do."

Dr. F. Mercede (villanova university)

(explaining the Thevenin equivalent resistance by drawing an eyeball connected to the circuit:) "Suppose I look down into the circuit with my eyeball. Then I inject a tiny current out of my eye, which would be a very grusome thing, and I measure the resistance...."

Dr. K. Molvig

"We only have 3 minutes left, so we'll fill those 3 minutes with bananas."

"Now I'm getting a lot of chalk on me."

"This [path that the particle takes] is like the drunk stumbling home, swinging on lamposts. If he has no memory of his last step, eventually, he'll diffuse his way home."
Barret: "What's that factor of 1/2 for?"
Balint: (quietly, matter-of-factly) "That's because he only has one leg."
Molvig: "Well... we don't care about a factor of 1/2."

"So what is this? Mike?... You look like you're burning with enthusiasm..."
Mike: (hesitating) "I AM burning with enthusiasm, just not answers!"

"... And so this means that Vlasov was WRONG! There are only two ways to get famous in Physics: Either do something great, or screw up so bad they name a formula after you."

"...It all depends on the in-phasenesses and out-of-phasenesses."

"We can take a short-cut if we use the Plemezlhjlhgzhhgzsh equation. Don't ask me how to pronounce his name correctly."

Dr. M. Shapiro

In Russia, I had to repair my glasses many times. You just solder the frames.

Ken: "My glasses frame snapped this morning -- I'll have to go out and buy another pair..."
MS: "Oh, I have an extra pair you can borrow."
Ken: "That might do more harm than good; the prescriptions are different."
MS: "They are close."
Ken: "How do you know that? Because they're round?"

MS: "There's something wrong with this Soju (Korean rice vodka) - I don't feel it."
Me: "That's because your used to Russian Vodka."
MS: "Ohh, I know why, it's because I've been practicing all week." (at the end of a conference with lots of free wine and good beer nearby)

"It's a pity. I'll have to close my DOS window."

Dr. R. Temkin

"And since Haimson likes to paint everything blue, everything blue in this picture belongs to Haimson."
MS: "Except for Ivan's pants."

"That sounds like another paper for the Journal of Irreproduceable Results."

"I don't like either candidate. I choose not to vote. Whether you pull the lever for Kerry or Bush - it doesn't matter anyway, your vote's going toward Kerry in Massachusetts. Now if JFK were still alive, then we'de have someone to admire, dammit!"

"Everything I needed to learn about management, I learned in kindergarten."

"I won't get any work done today unless I've had my coffee..."

"You need to us a liberal scoop. If you can see through the coffee, it's bad coffee." {explaining to a coworker who made bad coffee this morning how to make coffee the right way}

"It's so depressing to see how those [circus] people live on the train [parked outside near our building]. We could put up a sign that says 'Now Hiring: Clowns and Midgets' ..."

Dr. M. Zahn

"This is a constant, but it's a constant that changes."

"This is a moving reference frame."

The Zahnese Language: "derrritah" (derivative of), "drohrring" (drawing), "enijee" (energy), "lahr" (law), "ayree-ir" (area), "formulerr" (formula), "simillly" (similarly), "zayter" (zeta), "lamder" (lamda), "omegger" (omega), "delter" (delta)

"This i-th component is just the one-th or the two-th or the three-th component."

NEW LAW COMING FROM CONGRESS -- AMERICANS WITH NO ABILITIES ACT (AWNAA) WASHINGTON, DC - Congress is considering sweeping legislation which provides new benefits for many Americans. The Americans With No Abilities Act (AWNAA) is being hailed as major legislation by advocates for the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition. "Roughly 50 percent of Americans do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society," said Barbara Boxer. "We can no longer stand by and allow People of Inability to be ridiculed and passed over. With this legislation, employers will no longer be able to grant special favors to a small group of workers, simply because they do a better job, or have some idea of what they are doing." The President pointed to the success of the US Postal Service, which has a long-standing policy of providing opportunity without regard to performance. Approximately 74 percent of postal employees lack job skills, making this agency the single largest US employer of Persons of Inability. Private sector industries with good records of non-discrimination against the Inept include retail sales (72%), the airline industry (68%), and home improvement "warehouse" stores (65%). The DMV also has a great record of hiring Persons of Inability (63%). Under the Americans With No Abilities Act, more than 25 million "middle manager" positions will be created, with important sounding titles but little real responsibility, thus providing an illusory sense of purpose and performance. Mandatory non-performance-based raises and promotions will be given to guarantee upward mobility for even the most unremarkable employees. The legislation also provides for substantial tax breaks to corporations which maintain a significant level of Persons of Inability in middle positions, and gives a tax credit to small and medium businesses that agree to hire one clueless worker for every two talented hires. Finally, the AWNA ACT contains tough new measures to make it more difficult to discriminate against the Non-Abled, such as discriminatory interview questions such as "Do you have any goals for the future?" or "Do you have any skill, talent or experience which relates to this job?" "As a Non-Abled person, I can't be expected to keep up with people who have something going for them," said Mary Lou Gertz, who lost her position as a lug-nut twister at the GM plant in Flint, MI due to her lack of notable job skills. "This new law should really help people like me." With the passage of this bill, Gertz and millions of other untalented citizens can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. -- {Some spoof a friend sent me}

"The nice thing about rain is you don't have to shovel it" - Kenny the janitor.

"And highering illegal workers is against the law." [No kiddin'!!!] - John Kerry during the presidential debate, 2004.

"Most of the workers at Chernobyl who received over 1000 rem of radiation exposure eventually died." [No kiddin' again! I'd bet all the people who received no exposure eventually died too!] - Bill the radiation safety instructor

"If we're gonna derive stuff, we need cookies." - Ronak

"If you put a spoonful of sewage into a barrel of wine, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of wine into a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. Dirt spreads, clean doesn't." - Kevin Ford

"You know you're an engineer when you approximate a horse as a sphere to make the calculations easier"

"Don't think of yourself as an organic pain collector racing toward oblivion." - Dogbert

"Remember: copying off of one person is plagiarism; copying off of three or more people is research." - Steve

"Ha-ha, he's so small." -- Clayton talking about how easy it was to lift David Chan off the ground.

"TIMMMEHHHH..... I have no idea what's going on." -- Mike

"According to my wife, the plant soil should be somewhere between dry and wet." -- Amit

"They give us so much work [here at MIT], because if you put a bunch of smart people in a room with nothing to do, stuff starts blowing up." -- Joe

"As long as you're breathing and taking in fluids, I figure you're okay. If you wake up and you're not breathing, then you've got a problem." -- Randy

A very bitter Ashdown resident during a 5am false alarm fire evacuation in the middle of finals week: "Ashdown better burn to the ground or I'm going to be sorely disappointed!"