Johan Lorbeer (3 photos)

A Funny Joke and The Man without Humor

Sent By Bedrich Omacka, www.actionjokes.com

April fool’s day is a favorite day for some, because there are many funny jokes that can be played. But when you are working for ‘The Man’ humor can be unacceptable. The workplace has become a controversial place for funny jokes, because what is funny to one person can be considered an attack by another. Finding humor at another person’s expense can cause many stressful days at work or even many lawsuits.

Many companies hold informational meeting on not practicing office humor, because they don’t want any of there workers to be offended. However, at time companies can cross the line on what is acceptable and not acceptable. Part of the problem with telling a person that funny jokes or humor is not acceptable is that if a person can not enjoy themselves at work the workplace will become uninviting and the workers unhappy.

‘Night Court’ was a sitcom that came out quite a few years ago. The judge on the show was always having fun, but playing practical jokes occasionally got him in trouble. However, most of the time the judge’s antics allowed him to see a larger scope of the people he met and he was able to help them to better their lives. A saying that many companies need to learn is the ‘a little levity never hurt’. Allowing personnel the opportunity to send jokes through email and find humor in some of the bad things that may happen in the office can help to handle stress and bring a better camaraderie between the workers.

Where the line needs to be drawn on funny jokes and humor is if the joke shows a racial or gender bias or if the joke is intended to harm another or cause a person to be made to look bad (especially in the eyes of their superiors). Harmful jokes or humor should never be acceptable in the workplace. Every individual should be responsible for their actions and take steps to know what is acceptable and will be found as a funny joke. If a joke is questionable the individual should recognize that that type of humor should be refrained from.

A company does have the responsibility to uphold its reputation and should educate its employees on acceptable humor and what would be considered a not so funny joke. However, companies should also take steps to allow their employees a fun work place. Part of this may include allowing a worker to use email to send jokes to people they know. One suggestion for the workplace may be to have a ‘no joke’ list and if people do not want to receive jokes through email they can place themselves on the list.

Humor and jokes should be allowed in the work place to allow a happier and more jovial work environment. A funny joke can cheer up a person’s day and a little humor can relieve stress. If an individual is responsible to not offend a person and the company encourages their work force to be happy working for ‘The Man’ wouldn’t be so bad.

Airport Luggage (Humor)

From shopndrop.com
by Josh Greenberger

Why does so much luggage get lost at airports? And how can you prevent it?

Since the beginning of time, man has been dreaming of flying. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright turned that dream into a reality when he flew a plane 120 feet in 12 seconds. Today, with jets cruising at speeds of Mach 0.8 (Mach 1 is the speed of sound), man sits in airport terminal buildings -- "canceled" and "delayed" -- still dreaming of flying. Why is that?

This being the vacation season, it is important to be aware of some of the shortcomings of air travel. Good flying means never having to say "I've been bumped" or "Where's my luggage?" (Not that these two mishaps are the worst things -- Amelia Earhart never got bumped and her luggage was never lost.)

Probably half the people reading this article have had luggage lost by an airline at one point or another. Yet, most people don't seem to take any precautions to avert such problems. The trick is to outsmart the airlines.

One method of reducing the odds of losing luggage is a tactic developed by nuclear war strategists. For every suitcase you take on a trip, bring along four empty decoys. The chances of losing the "right" one is thereby reduced to 20 percent. If, with these kinds of odds in your favor, you lose the "right" one anyway, whatever you do, don't spend your vacation in Las Vegas.

If the airline loses all five suitcases, it's not an accident -- they're out to get you! I would strongly suggest traveling by boat. If a submarine is available, all the better. (On a submarine, instead of movies and snacks, they allow the passengers to look through the periscope and watch dolphins fly through burning bagels.)

The worst part about losing a suitcase is when they find it three months later and you no longer fit into the clothes you bought for your vacation.

There's one method which can totally eliminate the possibility of losing luggage. Instead of telling an airline you want to go to, let's say, Florida or Bermuda, tell them you want to go wherever your luggage goes. How can they possibly mess up?

What bothers me more than the lost-luggage problem, though, is the cover-up. Ever notice that no matter how many suitcases are lost on a flight the luggage carousel is always full? Who's are all those suitcases? Obviously, the airlines buy suitcases just to fill up the carrousels -- by dazzling you with an array of colorful (empty) suitcases, they figure it'll never dawn on you that your suitcase is in a holding pattern somewhere over Singapore.

Another serious problem plaguing the airline industry is the long delays. Sitting in an airport terminal building for what seems like an eternity, waiting to board a flight, sort of makes you wonder whether supersonic jets were invented just to make up for time lost at airports. Surely something more can be done to alleviate this frustrating situation. Perhaps they should have a flight attendant on the ground instead of on planes -- would you rather be comfortable on a two-hour flight to Florida, or a two-day wait at the airport? And it wouldn't hurt to have a post office at every airport -- just in case your passport expires.

The key to survival in the airline jungle is good planning. If your vacation begins, let's say, the morning of January 15th, be at the airport no later than July 23rd. This should give you enough time to get cancelled, bumped, delayed, held over, rerouted, and inconvenienced, and still get to your destination on time. Of course, this should also give you enough time to get from New York to Florida on a rubber raft. But setting up a projector and screen on a rubber raft could interfere with air currents and you could wind up in Singapore along with other people's luggage. So this is not recommended.

I think the whole mess could be straightened out with a few simple changes. They should put airline traffic controllers in charge of luggage -- this may cause some suitcases to collide every once in a while, but at least we'll know where they are at all times. To eliminate delays, every cockpit should have a pilot, a copilot, and a New York City cabbie -- a few sharp turns, a couple of loops, a nose dive here and there, and every plane would be on schedule. Finally, the baggage handlers should be put in charge of nuclear waste -- the United States government has been trying for a long time now to find a way to get rid of nuclear waste so that it never resurfaces. Are there any people better suited for this job than baggage handlers?

A chair of 7.5 metre height was constructed in Moscow(Russia)

A chair of 7.5 metre height was constructed in Moscow(Russia). I don't know why, but it will be useful for furniture factory advertisement.

Sent by Vladimir Miroshnikov

Science's 10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments

Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time. Based on the paper of George Johnson in The New York Times we list below 10 winners of this polling and accompany the short explanations of the physical experiments with computer animations.

1. Double-slit electron diffraction
The French physicist Louis de Broglie proposed in 1924 that electrons and other discrete bits of matter, which until then had been conceived only as material particles, also have wave properties such as wavelength and frequency. Later (1927) the wave nature of electrons was experimentally established by C.J. Davisson and L.H. Germer in New York and by G.P. Thomson in Aberdeen, Scot.

2. Galileo's experiment on falling objects
In the late 1500's, everyone knew that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, Aristotle had said so. That an ancient Greek scholar still held such sway was a sign of how far science had declined during the dark ages.

3. Millikan's oil-drop experiment
Oil-drop experiment was the first direct and compelling measurement of the electric charge of a single electron. It was performed originally in 1909 by the American physicist Robert A. Millikan. Using a perfume atomizer, he sprayed tiny drops of oil into a transparent chamber. At the top and bottom were metal plates hooked to a battery, making one positive (red in animation) and the other negative (blue in animation). Since each droplet picked up a slight charge of static electricity as it traveled through the air, the speed of its motion could be controlled by altering the voltage on the plates. When the space between the metal plates is ionized by radiation (e.g., X rays), electrons from the air attach themselves to oil droplets, causing them to acquire a negative charge. Millikan observed one drop after another, varying the voltage and noting the effect. After many repetitions he concluded that charge could only assume certain fixed values. The smallest of these portions was none other than the charge of a single electron.

4. Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism
Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1665, then holed up at home for a couple of years waiting out the plague. He had no trouble keeping himself occupied.

5. Young's light-interference experiment
Newton wasn't always right. Through various arguments, he had moved the scientific mainstream toward the conviction that light consists exclusively of particles rather than waves. In 1803, Thomas Young, an English physician and physicist, put the idea to a test. He cut a hole in a window shutter, covered it with a thick piece of paper punctured with a tiny pinhole and used a mirror to divert the thin beam that came shining through. Then he took "a slip of a card, about one-thirtieth of an inch in breadth" and held it edgewise in the path of the beam, dividing it in two. The result was a shadow of alternating light and dark bands — a phenomenon that could be explained if the two beams were interacting like waves. Bright bands appeared where two crests overlapped, reinforcing each other; dark bands marked where a crest lined up with a trough, neutralizing each other.

6. Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment
The experiment was performed in 1797–98 by the English scientist Henry Cavendish. He followed a method prescribed and used apparatus built by his countryman, the geologist John Michell, who had died in 1793. The apparatus employed was a torsion balance, essentially a stretched wire supporting spherical weights. Attraction between pairs of weights caused the wire to twist slightly, which thus allowed the first calculation of the value of the gravitational constant G. The experiment was popularly known as weighing the Earth because determination of G permitted calculation of the Earth's mass.

7. Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference
At Syene (now Aswan), some 800 km (500 miles) southeast of Alexandria in Egypt, the Sun's rays fall vertically at noon at the summer solstice. Eratosthenes, who was born in c. 276 BC, noted that at Alexandria, at the same date and time, sunlight fell at an angle of about 7° from the vertical. He correctly assumed the Sun's distance to be very great; its rays therefore are practically parallel when they reach the Earth. Given estimates of the distance between the two cities, he was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth. The exact length of the units (stadia) he used is doubtful, and the accuracy of his result is therefore uncertain; it may have varied by 0.5 to 17 percent from the value accepted by modern astronomers.

8. Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes
Galileo continued to refine his ideas about objects in motion. He took a board 12 cubits long and half a cubit wide (about 20 feet by 10 inches) and cut a groove, as straight and smooth as possible, down the center. He inclined the plane and rolled brass balls down it, timing their descent with a water clock — a large vessel that emptied through a thin tube into a glass. After each run he would weigh the water that had flowed out — his measurement of elapsed time — and compare it with the distance the ball had traveled.

9. Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus
When Ernest Rutherford was experimenting with radioactivity at the University of Manchester in 1911, atoms were generally believed to consist of large mushy blobs of positive electrical charge with electrons embedded inside — the "plum pudding" model. But when he and his assistants fired tiny positively charged projectiles, called alpha particles, at a thin foil of gold, they were surprised that a tiny percentage of them came bouncing back. It was as though bullets had ricocheted off Jell-O. Rutherford calculated that actually atoms were not so mushy after all. Most of the mass must be concentrated in a tiny core, now called the nucleus, with the electrons hovering around it. With amendments from quantum theory, this image of the atom persists today.

10. Foucault's pendulum
Last year when scientists mounted a pendulum above the South Pole and watched it swing, they were replicating a celebrated demonstration performed in Paris in 1851. Using a steel wire 220 feet long, the French scientist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault suspended a 62-pound iron ball from the dome of the Panthéon and set it in motion, rocking back and forth. To mark its progress he attached a stylus to the ball and placed a ring of damp sand on the floor below.