Engineering Humour

Second term (Lent Term) of first year (Part IA) of my Engineering course (Tripos) is drawing to a close. The Cambridge week ends on a Wednesday, starting on a Thursday. Lectures and courses finished yesterday, having started on a Thursday eight weeks beforehand. heading home to Newcastle is restricted by college residence requirements until Friday, but I shall be loading up and hitting the road on Saturday. So essentially I'm in dossing mode, having finished supervisions for the term.

Final supervision was focusing on the wonderful world of Digital Circuits, Combinational Logic & Boolean Algebra.

As is the case of supervisions where you show up with little to no difficulty with the material, discussions often get sidetracked into wider real-world applications and systems. Talk of CMOS brought up its competitor, Bipolar Transistors. They are hereby dubbed "Stephen Fry Transistors"* © {Dobblesworth Inc. 2009}.

A previous quote of mine was...
"I can't wait for the day when they decide to release Thévenin Internet Security."** [Also © Dobblesworth Inc. 2009, to stop software companies getting their grubby paws on it.]

If/when I have further flashes of wit and inspiration, I'll be sure to share them with you.

* - Stephen Fry, Alumnus of Queens' College Cambridge, has bipolarity disorder.
{Afterthought, not so much an Edit} - Wi'pedia tells me he only has the milder form 'Cyclothymia'. Ah well, learn something new every day.

** - Norton Internet Security, produced by Symantec.
'Norton' is also used in electronics and electrical engineering to denote a certain theorem of consideration of linear circuit networks. Its counterpart is 'Thévenin', which gives you a perfectly equivalent representation of the same chunk of electronics stuff in your network.