QUOTES from Physics 227 & 228 at BYU: "Drinking from the firehose of knowledge!
August 2000 - April 2001
227 LA LA LA!
"As a result of this course, you'll never be able to think straight again!" -Dr. Taylor, 1st day of class (Gee, thanks. And the prophecy was fulfilled...read on.)
"Chess nuts boasting on a broken tire." - One of Dr. T.'s 'Feghoots'
"A Benny shaved is a Benny urned." - Astronomer T
"NO WAY!" - Nicole "What?!" - Danelle "I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to my answer." - Nicole
"One is my favorite number." - Elizabeth! (Bang) "One -- is the lone - li - est num - bah." - Disco Danelle "Like the cosine of one is zero..." - E! "Cosine of your MOM." - Danelle (The previous is what happens when attempting to have a serious conversation with Disco when she's not in the mood.)
"Can't I be FUNNY!?" - Olive us! (after we've said something original and someone says 'What movie is that from?')
"Your mom!" - Olive us
"Drop dead!" - Nicole to Noelle when Noelle asked her if she was from Utah
"So who did let the dogs out?" - LeSue comic, most astronomers-in-training were fans! Viva LeSue! (pronounced 'Leh-sway')
"Who let your mom out?" - Danelle
"Io. It's a stinky place, man." - Danelle
"We got the raw end of the stick." - Jason (mixing up cliches), on why American smarties are like chalk and European smarties are chocolate
"I learn so much when I'm learning." - Nicole
"So, are you saying I'm fat?" - Katie "Are you trying to kill me?" - Katie, two of her famous catch-phrases
"This is going on the fridge." - Jason, commenting on his test score on Q4A
Discussion about BoM religion teachers. Emotions ran high. "Shut up, DIE!" - Nicole Kevin: "Love .... love."
"Teacher, can I be excused, my brain is full." - Katie quoting Gary Larson
"You gotta take every quiz like it's the last!" - Danelle to Elizabeth!
"Absorption lines are caused by fairy settlements." - What Danelle heard.
"Absorption lines are caused by various elements." - What Kevin said.
"I'm gonna push my husband out of the way (cracks fingers), let me do this." - Katie, on creating solar systems
"Aunt's cat's grandmother..." - Astronomer T.
"We will now forward the epidemic in the nursury." - Dr. T's take on the bishopric announcing the carrier monkey nature of small nursury children over the pulpit.
"The 'Tevia answer' again: Because it's TRADITION." - Dr. Taylor, about Russel scales
"The essence of a Feghoot: 'You are drunk without having consumed any alcohol. Then you come up with Feghoots.'" - Astronomer T
"Why aren't we vaporized? Why haven't we been munched by monopoles?" - Dr. T, on the probability of life on planets and proton decay
"The teacher would have a litter of lizards." - Dr. Taylor, on temperature increasing to the left on H-R (Hertzsprung-Russell) diagrams
"What?! Question mark question mark question mark." - T.
"Yule and only yule can prevent florist fliers." - Another one of T's Feghoots
"Gamma rays kick the crud out of atoms." - Matt Garvin, TA extraordinaire
"I like molasses." - Danelle "What?" - Elizabeth!
"I like molasses." - Danelle "That's what I thought you said." - E!
Katie throwing my hood onto my head: "Your mom did it."
"Well that doesn't make any sense. Does it have Quantum Mechanics in it? Absolutely!" (Hoyle on not believing the Big Bang but incorporating it into his theory.) - Dr. Taylor
Matt expounding electron cascading: "The electron falls down the stairs - D'Oh! D'Oh! D'Oh! D'Oh! And then the bully laughs, 'HA HA!'."
Katie (whispering): "He said 'stripping.'" Followed by uproar.
Katie's graffiti on Danelle's shoes: "Yo girl, your mim."
"It was a tip and run." - Amy, on Josh's little stunt involving Danelle and a chair.
"There is a Sagittarius dwarf being eaten by our galaxy." - Astronomer T, matter-of-factly
"The road to science is paved with idiot blunders." - T, Who else?
"Hoyle didn't believe in Big Bang nucleosynthesis, so he showed it happened in stars." - Dr. T
"Irish confetti." - T
"We live in the galactic suburbs." - T
"I can't stand canned nature." - Kevin (Don't ever buy him a CD with the ocean or thunderstorms on it.)
"That was my bottom dollar." - Matt Garvin
"Well, if you bet it, 'the sun'll come out - tomorrow!'" - Katie
"Quintessence: The solution to everything!" - Dr. T
"Ah, to be married. But ah, to be single." - Danelle, waxing philosophical
"I got dragged to Preference by the gorilla of my dreams." - T's Feghoot-age
"Foingetty foingetty foingetty." - Astronomy T (the class nearly died!)
"Dan-eh -- BUH!" - 'Clogging' Elizabeth, to mess with my head. (The star 'Deneb' sounds an awful lot like my name at the beginning.)
Standard model of Seyferts according to Dr. Taylor: "The nature of the central gremlin swirling it around with a swizzle stick is like the central black hole."
"That's enough to make hair grow without Rogaine." - T
"Obscene Clone Fall." - Dr. T's Feghoot of the day
"People sailing to the edge of the Earth and going 'WAHOO' off..." - T
Quotes from 228
"I don't mean to be humorous; I mean to be sarcastic." - Nicole
Beginning of Unit 1: "Thomas Wright repented of the right answer." - Dr. T
"Hubble detested Shapley cordially." - Prof T "He [Hubble] was probably still insufferable." - Danelle's muttering
Feghoot: "Bowling Squid and Jules Verne ... 20,000 leagues under the sea." - Astronomer T
"Asphyxiation -- It's a big one." - Danelle, tormenting a cute freshman in her Manned Space Flight class, later realizing he was hitting on her
"Dehydration -- It's a big one." - Danelle to Ted later that day after she told everyone the Asphyxiation story; then he chased her until she hid under the table and he tied her shoelaces together under the table legs and she couldn't get the knot undone because she (and everyone) was laughing so hard.
"This is an old calculator!" - Ted "Ha ha, HEY, beggars can't be chosers!" - Margaret
"I like Boson. It sounds like an insult. Ya BOZON!" - Margaret
"Hey, you're making fun of my hero." - Danelle
"Michael Flatulently?" - Kevin
'Your Mom' jokes grow increasingly complex: "Did you go to homeschool? 'Cuz only your mom could have come up with that." - Josh Strong
Kevin gets a new do: "I have checkers on the back of my head. Try to stop me." - Kevin, defiantly
"You're so weird, checkerboard." - Katie to Kevin
"Hey Kevin, the punchline is 'juggernaught.' What's the joke?" - Danelle
"The checkers will seduce you." - Kevin
"Thirty kpc (kiloparsecs) is like ... pocketchange." - Danelle, on last problem on Q4A
"Chump change." - Elizabeth, quoting That Thing You Do
"Chemistry?" - Danelle "YEAH, Chemistry!" -E! (quoting Guys and Dolls, one of our fav movies)
Dr. Taylor on photon flow variety of radiative transport: "It diffuses like a bad perfume."
"200 proof pulverized dingo's kidneys." - Prof T
"I don't get these notes. I wish I had a Urim & Thummim." - Disco Danelle
"A black hole has no hair." - Dr. Taylor quoting Wheeler's famous line; known for lighting off fireworks in the hall outside his office to announce he found something
"The chicks can't resist the checkers." - Kevin
Dr. Taylor's two stages of neutron star formation: 1) whump! 2) SPROING!
"E.E. Smith. If we had ham, we could have some ham and eggs, and if we had eggs, we could have some eggs and ham." - Dr. T
"R.U. Sirius? R.U.Lupi? U. Oph! O.U. Gem!" - Actual variable stars
Notes: (C) Mass Loss From Giants And Supergiants. "Betelgeuse swimming in its own mass loss." - Danelle's annotation
"White dwarfs are galactic clinkers." - Dr. Taylor
Ted to Danelle: "You should ask me to Preference."
Amy: "She's got an image to protect."
Dr. T's comment on supernovae: "Type I are useless, while Type II's are everyone's darling!"
Dr. Taylor's lecture about SS 433: "Sensation when discovered!" (like any of us had ever heard of it.)
Dr. Moody's Day in 228:
"So do you think that quasars are Kolob?" - Ted
"Yes, moving on..." - Dr. Moody
"Imagine being on the event horizon of a black hole. All time is laid out before you, like a scroll. Now place a throne there. Think about it." - Dr. Moody
"I'm going to have to pray about that." - Ryan (Simpsons guru), quietly.
"When I think of superclusters, I think of Zwicky. He didn't believe." - Dr. Taylor
"What's a 'marcsecond'?" - Olive us
"I used to have a whoopie cushion." - Disco Danelle. "You are a whoopie cushion." - Sgt. Ben, ex-assassin. "She's going to write, 'I'm a whoopie cushion.'" - Kevin, about me in the process of writing down these quotes. "Let it be known: I am a hotdog ... and a whoopie cushion." - Danelle (Ah yes, the fabulous hotdog impression.)
"W.I.M.P.S.es? I don't believe they exist." - Ted
"It's Stephen Hawking talking!" - Jarilynne (my sister), about A Brief History of Time on cassette tape.
"Aw, Maple was off by a factor of ONE!" said Danelle, then immediately felt sheepish
"Icy dead people." - Elizabeth! slowly whispers, while observing at night in the dome (the focal points make it sound like she's whispering in your head!)
"I like icy dead people." - Danelle (to be whispered in the observing dome)
Kevin (whispered in Thermodynamics): "I see stupid people. They don't know that they're stupid."
"What would MacGyver do in this situation?" - Danelle, when Diff E crap (Differential Equations) yields crazy, whimsical constants
To Elizabeth!: "Does it look like I'm picking my nose?" - Danelle
"Cosmology and Reddiwhip?" - Astronomer T
"I think we have a new theory." - Jay whispered
"And then I kissed her. And it was good." - Ted
"Of course, they wouldn't announce that at a conference because then everyone would 'hee ha' their heads off." - Dr. Taylor, speaking about the ultimate rest frame
During class: "Shhh! He was talking about Deuterium and I missed it!" - Danelle
You can get the darndest stuff out of lecture: Tardyons - us (slower than c); Tachyons - them (faster than c)
"You don't walk up to a Nobel Laureate and tell him that his little red choo-choo has chugged around the bend." - Prof Taylor
"And then it's Quantum Mechanics, you think sensibly and the answer is nonsense, so it works." - Astronomer T
"I used to love the name Natalie. When I used to play Barbies, that was always the head Barbie's name." - Danelle, losing it before finals in the astronomy library
"Suck squeeze pop fooey." - Dr. Taylor's impression of a piston process
Adventures of the Astrokids: Trying to watch a launch from C460 ESC on campus.
"I don't think BYU pays for the NASA channel." - Danelle
"It's educational." - Elizabeth!
"Maybe the ElEd's get the NASA channel." - Danelle, with a devilish smirk.
(Previously we had been telling Amy to still hang out with us in the astronomy library even though she'd be in the SFLC a lot next year doing El Ed stuff.)
After the launch, during which the online reception went to pot: "WE DIDN'T EVEN GET TO SEE THE WATER!!!" - Danelle, unable to mask her disappointment (The water is not used for cooling processes, it's used to keep the shockwave of the blasting rockets down. When the diminished shockwave bounces off the pad, it doesn't shake the shuttle's tiles off, which are needed for re-entry. Basically, the water is cool.)
"Does she [Katie] ever come back when she leaves with Mike?"
"Not without her scarf." (Poking fun at Amy when she was wearing a scarf to cover up a hicky from her husband.)
"A software store in Logan was going out of sale." - Kevin, relating the story of how he got Maple 6
" Oops, I killed you again." Amy (Apparently not a fan of Britney Spears, or Kevin's watch that played that line from her song)
"Just because I'm crazy doesn't mean I'm stupid!" - Danelle
"'E-mail my heart?' I think I'm going to throw up." - Amy, about Nicole's Britney Spears fetish
"'Want to make out?'" - Amy's hilarious first kiss story (Beware the newly-returned RM!)
Comment from Matt Bird on Kevin's very technical paragraph on the asteroid belt: "At least it was funny." Kevin: "It wasn't supposed to be funny. It's not funny!"
"You pull Quintessence out of your bag to explain the crazy factor [cap lambda]." - T
"And then Hoyle says, 'Why didn't I think of that?'" - Prof Taylor, on the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background)
Dr. Taylor's explanation of particle horizon issues: "The gremlins need to decide how much radiation to put out."
"We live under broken symmetries." - Dr. T "Noooooooo--!" - Danelle
"Frederick Reines was a real masochist." - Dr. Taylor
"If you'd talked about fractional charges in the 1960s, you'd get strait-jacketed and drop-kicked into a van headed for the funny farm." - T
"If you could pull a quark out of a baryon, you'd invest so much energy that you'll create a meson and another quark in the baryon, and you're back where you started, minus a lot of energy." - Astronomer T
"CDM (Cold Dark Matter) has been such a predictable can of worms." - Big Kahuna Taylor
"We don't know what the future history of the universe will be." - Dr. Taylor
"Our sturgeon general warned us that smoking ziggarauts can be bad for your health." - Taylor's Feghoot Action
"Encourage killjoys." - Astronomer T
"Your mom's measurements are 36:24:36 ... in kpc (kiloparsecs)!" - Danelle
"It would be so funny if we sat in on 227 and he said the same stuff." - Elizabeth the clogger
"Heh heh, ya, like there was a teleprompter in the back of the room." - Danelle
"Look at her go." - Elizabeth! "She's Speedy Gonzales." -Danelle, on Nicole's power nap break while studying for last day quizzes.
"I'm reading through notes, and writing down quotes. (Snap snap snap)" - Danelle to Katie
"We're made of star entrails?" - Kevin
"Ha ha, we're not made of stardust, we're made of star poop!" - Danelle
Astronomer's pick-up line: "It's a good thing you're not antimatter."
Our BINGO board of Dr. Taylor catch-phrases.
(One day we actually played BINGO and when someone got it, they yelled out BINGO and Prof. Taylor just stopped and looked at them. He didn't realize what we were doing.)
"Galactic Cannibalism"
"Well, look..."
"...drives me nuts!"
"Zwicky"
"But, at any rate..."
"Ah HA!"
"...eyes pop out..."
"Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos"
"Aunt's cat's grandmother"
"Hey, wait a minute..."
"Finagle's constant"
"Fudge factor"
"Hee hee hee..."
"flip your flapjack"
"ego-tripping"
"what you do is to say..."
"Makes your brains itch"
"dingo's kidneys"
"APOD"
"makes your crew cut curl"
"the cold kiss of a mother-in-law"
"Lo & Behold..."
"your social life"
"badastronomy.com"
"[journal] referree"
"That would be WONDERFUL"
"What?! Question mark question mark question mark"
"You stop and ask yourself"
"hmmmmm..."
"Tradition"
"A certain institution to the North..."
"Garden Variety"
"TOTALLY"
"that's awful"
"sacrament meeting zombie"
"99.999%"
"prolitariate"
"Magneto Hydrodynamics 666"
"mind wandering"
"prostrate in reverential awe"
"Harumph!"
"awful spring"
"awesome!"
"common as dirt"
"YETCH!"
"Quantum Mechanics"
"Arthur C. Clark"
"Larry Niven"
"Sound of trumpets"
"Sadistic"
"Outstanding!"
"gone to sleep"
"presto predigiouso ca-THLOOM!"
"whizity whizity whiz"
"Stanford"
"However..."
"Murphy's Law"
"ksput ksput ksput"
"If we could have some ham..."
"snickering up their sleeves"
"Not supposed to make sense"
"Star Trek:TNG"
"(slaps his forehead)"
"hilarious"
"family ranch house"
"terrible"
"phew~!"
"cosmology"
"Pasadena"
"that's...so"
"(humming pipes in classroom, Banshee wail)"
"alright...so"
"(hand behind his ear)"
"Presumably"
"In a sneering tone..."
"drives me nuts!"
"Sandage"
"ARGH!!!"
"statistics"
"Rotary calculator"
"bizarre"
"Berkeley"
"ok, so"
"and so!!!"
"WRONG!"
"getting off"
Mnemonics for OBAFGKM(RNS):
Danelle: Observations by armadillos find grateful kleptomaniacs most relaxing, not spastic
Kevin: Only bald astronomers fail great kids, making really nervous students
Astronomer T: Only boys accepting feminism get kissed meaningfully
Classic: Oh be a fine girl (guy), kiss me! (Right now sweety!)
Danelle's Quiz Quotes from 227 & 228
Question: Sketch a cross-sectional diagram of the Earth which displays its basic layers.
Danelle: (Like an everlasting gobstopper. Beauty, eh?)
Matt: cool!
Question: What effect do Shepherd satellites have on the F ring of Saturn?
Danelle: They keep it in line. HEE YA! (cracking whip in bkgd)
Question: Name the five components a comet has when it's near the Sun.
Danelle: ion tail, dust tail, halo, hydrogen envelope, ... your mom, beats me.
(Awarded full credit)
Question: What is the speed of an electron with just sufficient energy to ionize by collision a sodium atom in the ground state?
I solved it and then wrote (because we had to find it in the hw problem) "Don't you want to know the temperature of the gas?? Huh?? HUH??"
Question: What is the most obvious characteristic of the HIII ion? (Watch out for this question! It won a prize at a meeting of the Sadistic Professors League.)
Danelle: Nothing. HIII doesn't exist, you cheeky monkey.
Matt: hee hee
Question: What is the theoretical limit (if any) on the magnification of a 1-inch telescope? Explain algebraically.
Danelle: (wrote down some equations, then) "I don't get it, and I'm too tired to try to make anything up. (Tiny mirror, dude. I got me a 10-inch at home.)"
Question: What distance from the Sun in AU does Bode's law yield for Jupiter?
Danelle: 3.2 AU? Beats me. (Bode's Law was a lucky guess.)
Question: How much does a sidereal clock gain on a mean solar clock in 5 mean solar hours?
Danelle: (after a brief mathematical attempt) "Where's my nice conversion factor?"
Question: In one or two sentences, describe the spectra of carbon stars.
Danelle: They are very messy, hard to resolve. The various carbon compounds emit lots of funky lines.
Danelle: "This star supernovaed around 1400 A.D. and was found in the Chinese annals."
Matt (circled annals): "Very important to have two 'n's."
Question: Name the three stellar end products which are of special interest in stellar necrology.
Danelle: WD, NS, & BH. (Insult my intelligence, why don't you?!)
Matt: No, he will bruise it.
Question: How far down are Wolf-Rayet stars likely to have been "peeled" by mass loss?
Danelle: To the CNO products, WOO WOO. (The core-ish.)
Danelle, at the end of Q2A: Just for the record, I think this was one of the stupidest quizzes I've taken in my career. And useless. My studying and the actual questions seemed to have nothing to do with each other, and that infuriates me. Just so you know.
Matt's response: Join the club
Question: On what kind of physics does the character of a singularity depend?
Danelle: Quantum Mechanics (who'da thunk?)
Matt: Say it ain't so!
End of quiz ranting: Socratic Method: The knowing that I know nothing. (I'm so sick of struggling through these quizzes.)
Matt: Try grading them.
Question: Where do Hoyle and Wickramasingehe think that most of the Earth's initial supply of amino acids came from?
Danelle: From the ISM in the form of dust, gas, and gunk. (Your mom is the gunk between my toes, but not as fresh.)
Phil, the linux god: hey!!!
I folded the quiz into a hat & wrote: "Hope you don't mind my thinking cap. (Kevin made me do it.)"
Q3B: Danelle: I think my will to do good is slowly waning.
Matt: Fight! Fight!
On HW4A: Danelle: Your mom's so fat, the last time she saw 90210 was on a SCALE!
Phil: Ouch, unless of course (90210) grams.
Hist. 'o Manned Space Flight test (Danelle): Since the meridian of time, warring people have thrown all sorts of interesting junk at each other.
Matt: heh - got a kick out of that sentence.