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I was clearing out some old files, and came across this. It's an old joke, but the combined insanity of the cult-tv crew made it something rather more special. H. Petard's classic paper A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting is also required reading.
MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant, and catching one of whatever is left.
EXPERIENCED MATHEMATICIANS will attempt to prove the existence of at least one unique elephant before proceeding to step 1 as a subordinate exercise.
PROFESSORS OF MATHEMATICS will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students.
COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A:
1. Go to Africa.
2. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
3. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent
alternately east and west.
4. During each traverse pass,
a. Catch each animal seen.
b. Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.
c. Stop when a match is detected.
EXPERIENCED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS modify Algorithm A by placing a known elephant in Cairo to ensure that the algorithm will terminate.
ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMERS prefer to execute Algorithm A on their hands and knees.
HARDWARE ENGINEERS hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching gray animals at random, and stopping when any one of them weighs within plus or minus 15 percent of any previously observed elephant.
EXPERIENCED (or possibly 'cocky') COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising algorithm B:
1. Go to Africa
2. If africa is too small to fit an elephant in, admit failure.
3. Go to a random point in the middle of africa
4. If there is an elephant where you are:
catch it.
5. If not:
see which direction smells more like an elephant.
6. Re-define africa to be that expance of land between here and
the edge of the current definition of africa, in the direction
of the smell.
7. Catch an elephant. (real scientists don't loop)
[Gareth]
ECONOMISTS don't hunt elephants, but they believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves.
STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see N times and call it an elephant.
LAWYERS don't hunt elephants, but they do follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings.
SOFTWARE LAWYERS will claim that they own an entire herd based on the look and feel of one dropping.
SENIOR MANAGERS set broad elephant-hunting policy based on the assumption that elephants are just like field mice, but with deeper voices.
QUALITY ASSURANCE INSPECTORS ignore the elephants and look for mistakes the other hunters made when they were packing the jeep.
SALES PEOPLE don't hunt elephants but spend their time selling elephants they haven't caught, for delivery two days before the season opens.
SOFTWARE SALES PEOPLE ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant.
HARDWARE SALES PEOPLE catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as desktop elephants.
PARTICLE PHYSICISTS will spend two years modelling random elephants on a computer simulation before building a machine the size of africa which collides giraffes together. When the machine only manages to produce zebra they claim that elephants still exist they just need a bigger machine to find them.
[Alex]
PLASMA PHYSICISTS get a large collection of elephants before heating them up to extremely high temperatures in order to get them to fuse to make one uber-elephant with an associated release of energy and there by solve the the world's energy crisis.
[Alex]
THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS (Unification Theory):
These physicists postulate that at the beginning of time all elephants came from one elephant and are currently trying to formalise a theory which prove that lions are actually elephants and that they originanted from the same elephant at the beginning of time.
[Alex]
THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS (String Theory):
Assume an elephant is but part of a chain of elephants that exist in higher dimensions and that the elephants in africa are merely the intersection of these elphant strings with the real world. (they are, of course, quite, quite mad...)
[Alex]
SPACE PHYSICISTS (working for NASA):
Spend there time working out how to catapult elephants into orbit (but fail to take into account the how the temperature may effect the elephant).
[Alex]
SPACE PHYSICISTS (working on SETI):
Spend their time looking for elephants on other planets
[Alex]
RF ENGINEERS
Attempt to detect elephants by emissions of low-frequency radio waves produced by their digestive systems. This involves the construction of huge directional
antennas on remote islands around the world in order to triangulate the position of the elephant.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERS
Fit a known elephant with a GPS receiver and a satellite videophone, so that it constantly transmits its position back to a tracking station. It will eventually meet other elephants, as they are social creatures. When they observe that it has returned to the herd, they go and find them.
AVIONICS ENGINEERS
Fly overhead on automatic pilot in a search pattern, detecting elephants with high-frequency radar and shooting them with air-to-ground missiles.
[Those last three are probably the work of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrpjantarctica, or possibly susannahf - Ed]
PHARMACISTS
Take 30mg lorazepam.
Lie back and wait for elephants to appear.
[dynix]
MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant, and catching one of whatever is left.
EXPERIENCED MATHEMATICIANS will attempt to prove the existence of at least one unique elephant before proceeding to step 1 as a subordinate exercise.
PROFESSORS OF MATHEMATICS will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students.
COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A:
1. Go to Africa.
2. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
3. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent
alternately east and west.
4. During each traverse pass,
a. Catch each animal seen.
b. Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.
c. Stop when a match is detected.
EXPERIENCED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS modify Algorithm A by placing a known elephant in Cairo to ensure that the algorithm will terminate.
ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMERS prefer to execute Algorithm A on their hands and knees.
HARDWARE ENGINEERS hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching gray animals at random, and stopping when any one of them weighs within plus or minus 15 percent of any previously observed elephant.
EXPERIENCED (or possibly 'cocky') COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising algorithm B:
1. Go to Africa
2. If africa is too small to fit an elephant in, admit failure.
3. Go to a random point in the middle of africa
4. If there is an elephant where you are:
catch it.
5. If not:
see which direction smells more like an elephant.
6. Re-define africa to be that expance of land between here and
the edge of the current definition of africa, in the direction
of the smell.
7. Catch an elephant. (real scientists don't loop)
[Gareth]
ECONOMISTS don't hunt elephants, but they believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves.
STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see N times and call it an elephant.
LAWYERS don't hunt elephants, but they do follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings.
SOFTWARE LAWYERS will claim that they own an entire herd based on the look and feel of one dropping.
SENIOR MANAGERS set broad elephant-hunting policy based on the assumption that elephants are just like field mice, but with deeper voices.
QUALITY ASSURANCE INSPECTORS ignore the elephants and look for mistakes the other hunters made when they were packing the jeep.
SALES PEOPLE don't hunt elephants but spend their time selling elephants they haven't caught, for delivery two days before the season opens.
SOFTWARE SALES PEOPLE ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant.
HARDWARE SALES PEOPLE catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as desktop elephants.
PARTICLE PHYSICISTS will spend two years modelling random elephants on a computer simulation before building a machine the size of africa which collides giraffes together. When the machine only manages to produce zebra they claim that elephants still exist they just need a bigger machine to find them.
[Alex]
PLASMA PHYSICISTS get a large collection of elephants before heating them up to extremely high temperatures in order to get them to fuse to make one uber-elephant with an associated release of energy and there by solve the the world's energy crisis.
[Alex]
THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS (Unification Theory):
These physicists postulate that at the beginning of time all elephants came from one elephant and are currently trying to formalise a theory which prove that lions are actually elephants and that they originanted from the same elephant at the beginning of time.
[Alex]
THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS (String Theory):
Assume an elephant is but part of a chain of elephants that exist in higher dimensions and that the elephants in africa are merely the intersection of these elphant strings with the real world. (they are, of course, quite, quite mad...)
[Alex]
SPACE PHYSICISTS (working for NASA):
Spend there time working out how to catapult elephants into orbit (but fail to take into account the how the temperature may effect the elephant).
[Alex]
SPACE PHYSICISTS (working on SETI):
Spend their time looking for elephants on other planets
[Alex]
RF ENGINEERS
Attempt to detect elephants by emissions of low-frequency radio waves produced by their digestive systems. This involves the construction of huge directional
antennas on remote islands around the world in order to triangulate the position of the elephant.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERS
Fit a known elephant with a GPS receiver and a satellite videophone, so that it constantly transmits its position back to a tracking station. It will eventually meet other elephants, as they are social creatures. When they observe that it has returned to the herd, they go and find them.
AVIONICS ENGINEERS
Fly overhead on automatic pilot in a search pattern, detecting elephants with high-frequency radar and shooting them with air-to-ground missiles.
[Those last three are probably the work of
mrpjantarctica, or possibly susannahf - Ed]PHARMACISTS
Take 30mg lorazepam.
Lie back and wait for elephants to appear.
[
dynix]
no subject
learn to use an LJ-cut
no subject
Yes, I should have lj-cut this. I realised this belatedly about an hour after posting it, by which time I was on a train to Edinburgh, and this is the first time I've been at a computer since then. Apologies for the temporary friends-page stretch.
Hmmm:
This is more like bootstrapping. Statisticians would probably hunt everything that moves in Africa and count the proportion of elephants n/N. Then estimate the variance of this, and extrapolate as to the number of elephants on antartica.
no subject
Meanwhile, I'd have to agree that this is a case for using lj-cut, and/or removing the unnecessary line breaks to reduce the vertical space that it takes up. I'm not sure that there are any general rules of etiquette, but personally I will use cut tags in the following cases:
a) For stuff that people may not want to read, e.g. spoilers on TV episodes/films that they haven't seen yet, or stuff that's blatantly not work-related.
b) Anything that will take a long time to download, and/or will screw up the layout of the friends page, e.g. a huge image.
c) Something that will take a long time to scroll past. When I look at my friends page and things have changed, I'll scroll down to find the first new entry, then work back up the page from there. I also tend to keep an eye on recent posts that I've read, in case there are any interesting comments, so it's nice to be able to whiz down the page and see whether the number of comments has changed, without re-reading a long post.
no subject
Medieval historians decide that an elephant and giraffe may be the same thing but it is impossible to know what either of the two look like, or even if they exist.
Early modern historians say of course elephants and giraffes existed but the giraffes at least are extinct now, whilst the elephants have evolved.
Whig historians say all the elephants have gradually and progressively been hunted down and shot. By Englishmen. This is a Good Thing.
Marxist historians say we shouldn't spend so much time hunting elephants but smaller animals like the gazelles.
Revisionist historians say we ought to spend some more time hunting gazelles even though the elephants are going to trample them all anyway.
Post-revisionist historians suggest we need to hunt down as many different species of animlas as we can. But everyone finds elephants and giraffes are the most fun to hunt, so whilst admitting the importance of gazelle, zebra, lion, wildebeast, hippopotamus and crocodile hunting, they rarely bother to do it.
no subject
I'm currently flicking through a mass-market history book called The Scottish Enlightenment: the author (who isn't Scottish, surprisingly) would no doubt claim that all elephants were hunted down and shot in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Scots, and that any Englishmen or other foreigners who happened to have shot an elephant only shot it by accident and, in any case, were descended from Scots on their mothers' sides and had a primary school teacher from Stirling. Since it was done by Scots, the elephant-hunting was a Good Thing.
Oh, and THE US MILITARY hunt elephants by finding somewhere with oil, declaring repeatedly that there are elephants there, then shooting wildly at everything until they hit a giraffe, which Fox News describe as an elephant.