profQUOTES

Better you learn [how to pronounce (i-hat - anyone know how to insert that?) here than on the street.

Mann, PHYS 121

Student: How come they don't teach us [vector components] in high school?
Prof: You can't say this to kids.

Mann, PHYS 121

Not all things in life are commutative. Putting on your socks than your shoes gives a different result than putting on your shoes then your socks. These operations are not commutative. Try it if you don't belive me.

Mann, PHYS 121

Again, I can't do math, so how many are there? *Counts* Five.

Cormack, CS 145

If you don't like this, there exists a bonus problem that encourages you to find a more efficient solution.

Cormack, CS 145

If you wear jeans, you'll be a juvenile delinquent.

Smith, ECON 101

I've watched [baseball] caps rotate since 1970.

Smith, ECON 101

[Student]: 200 miles an hour?
[Prof]: Did you just use the m-word?

Mann, PHYS 121

The war is over. Frustrated soldiers come home. Frustrated ladies come out of the factories. And they have at each other.

Smith, ECON 101

The people [in Russia] who aren't not being born are drinking themselves to death.

Smith, ECON 101

For many reasons, trees with less height are often considered more desirable. You don't have to extend your ceiling to fit them in.

Cormack, CS 145

As you get older, your need to spend decreases, because you have everything.

Smith, ECON 101

I'll call them l and r because I'll run out of chalk if I call them left and right.

Cormack, CS 145

Not babies in secondary school. Big babies.

Smith, ECON 101

I hope I'm not doing your assignment for you. Am I doing your assignment for you? I can't remember.

Cormack, CS 145

That colour is so 15 minutes ago.

Smith, ECON 101

The fashion industry exsists to persuade you that what you wore yesterday is not what you should wear today.

Smith, ECON 101

I'm sure the devil never talks to you, but he talks to me.

Smith, ECON 101

[Being in the USA] is for me always an adventure and often very stressful.

Smith, ECON 101

Usually it takes several years to be fired as an executive of General Motors.

Smith, ECON 101

Plan stupid! Come back with new plan!

Smith, ECON 101

Don't like at me like I don't know people don't cheat all the time.

Smith, ECON 101

The... Republican Party of the United States gives me acute indigestion.

Smith, ECON 101

[Talking about Republicans]
Do you know how enraging it is to be forced to a gree with a crazy person who by accident happens to be correct?

Smith, ECON 101

[Student]: Is the paper one-sided or two-sided?
[Prof]: Of course the paper has two sides..

Smith, ECON 101

That is what I meant. I was not on drugs last week.

Smith, ECON 101

They don't tell you they read the textbook for fun ... because they suspect you'll try to push them down the village stair.

Smith, ECON 101

I think some innovations are called for in actuarial science, don't you think?

Smith, ECON 101

I've been a treehugger longer than you've been alive.

Smith, ECON 101

Do you see why stupidity makes me twitch?

Smith, ECON 101

If the person you ask has half a page of notes, tell them they don't have enough notes and go ask someone who's going to pass the class.

Smith, ECON 101

I will not cheat you of your instructional time.

Smith, ECON 101

And this is probably actually what you did in elementary school.

Ingram, MATH 145

[Pointing at a tennis ball lying motionless] Do you know how much this demonstration cost the university? That's what your tuition is paying for.

Mann, PHYS 121

How's it going? Good? Still glad you're at university?

Mann, PHYS 121

I always feel so relieved when my examples work.

Cormack, CS 145

If you think a number is positive, negative, or 0, and it's something else, you're in for trouble.

Cormack, CS 145

I'm supposed to say Racket, but I fail at indoctrination.

Cormack, CS 145

[Student]: Never mind. I'm stupid.
[Prof]: Good.

Hare, MATH 147

If you're really tired after doing this assignment, the natural solution is to start the next assignment.

Ingram, MATH 145

We can find the multiplicative inverse of a if and only if it exists.

Ingram, MATH 145

We're not in a world of pure deductive logic, we're in the world of the planet.

Smith, ECON 101

Part of this lecture is on the exam tomorrow. That's ideal, that's fresh - that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Smith, ECON 101

Ladies, by contrast, are different. I don't know if you've noticed that, but they are.

Smith, ECON 101

I tried to drink as much as he did, but it was not possible.

Smith, ECON 101

It is not an invitation to puff on a cancer stick.

Smith, ECON 101

We're now going to have a diagram. Now the mathies are going to be so happy.

Smith, ECON 101

Must not have teenagers on railroad track. They will get squashed, and the railroad company will get pissed.

Smith, ECON 101

With that chart and this [one], you could have made your family several hundred [thousand]. Unless they gave it all to me.

Smith, ECON 101

I want to show you stupidity manifest.

Smith, ECON 101

For the rest of history, rich people set letters. How did they do that? They got their employees to do it. How did they do that? Well, they were rich.

Smith, ECON 101

Do you see the point, ladies and gentlemen? Because I will ask you about the point.

Smith, ECON 101

Nobody likes economists because we rain on your irrational parades. Undertakers get invited to more parties than I do.

Smith, ECON 101

Someone who is young and knows history. Remarkable!

Smith, ECON 101

Mr. Obama's predecessor, who's name should never be spoken.

Smith, ECON 101

We're Canadians. We do everything a little bit.

Smith, ECON 101

What is the Chinese government worried about? Growing income disparity between rich urban China and poor urban China, and between poor urban China and really really poor rural China.

Smith, ECON 101

I don't care if you have integrity, you will pretend you do while you are in this room.

Smith, ECON 101

In linear algebra you'll be talking about functions defined on vector spaces, whatever they are.

Hare, MATH 147

Contemplate the motion! [Said motion was brief and involved the heaving of a pumpkin from the roof of PHY]

Mann, PHYS 121

It's like taking the hair of the dog that bit you - if you're tired of doing last week's assignment, the natural conclusion is to begin this week's right away.

Ingram, MATH 145

N was called b back then.

Ingram, MATH 145

Did you know that you can actually play cards online now?

Balka, STAT 206

[It] looks, smells, feels, and tastes random, but it's perfectly deterministic.

Balka, STAT 206

Course description, blah blah blah, we'll talk about what we're going to talk about. Course objectives, more blah blah.

Balka, STAT 206

If I put a histogram of your midterm marks, you'll get an idea of where you are... or Oh, look at that guy over there.

Balka, STAT 206

I'm not going to talk about the project. We both know that you won't think about it until two weeks before the end of term.

Balka, STAT 206

It's a bigger pain in the... but... for me to make this work.

Balka, STAT 206

I think you'll have some ways of dealing with it if you fail... which some of you will... statistically speaking.

Balka, STAT 206

In a first-year calc course, 10% of the students would be sick for the exam. I can show you that that's extremely, extraordinarily unlikely.

Balka, STAT 206

Assignments... we don't have any, so I don't have to worry about copied assignments.

Balka, STAT 206

How do you define surgical errors? Did the patient die? Is someone standing over the surgeon and giving a rating? Are they asking how the patient feels on a scale of 1 to 10? Whether the surgeon goes 'Whoa'?

Balka, STAT 206

(on rolling a fair die) I'll need to define it as the number of dots that face the heavens when the die comes to rest.

Balka, STAT 206

Prof: What are the odds the Leafs win tonight?
Student: Zero.

Balka, STAT 206

I couldn't find the data set for this study anywhere... which always raises a red flag.

Balka, STAT 206

I think I've already established my drawing prowess, so I'll just label this door.

Balka, STAT 206

(about the Monty Hall problem) Three equally likely possibilities, assuming they don't hear the goat bleating behind a door.

Balka, STAT 206

Back when I was at Guelph, we had to do all those drug tests. I thought, besides alcohol, I should be OK.

Balka, STAT 206

I'm not anal about rounding, but you guys are, right, since you're engineers and care about significant digits and all that.

Balka, STAT 206

So the pediatrician, who took an intro stats course and probably got an 82 and thinks he was an expert, simply multiplies the probabilities together.

Balka, STAT 206

An odd-numbered postal code doesn't really make sense.

Balka, STAT 206

Student: Yes, I got the same answer you did.
Prof: Then I guess we're both wrong.

Balka, STAT 206

The random variable could be the number of spades in my hand, the number of swear words that come out of my mouth before the end of the night, my blood pressure...

Balka, STAT 206

You'll have to take a small leap of faith and trust that I won't be a jerk for the midterm.

Balka, STAT 206

Scheme is tough for... doing useful things.

Petrick, CS 241

Student: ...the speed is 120 miles per hour
Prof: Did you just use the 'm' word?

Mann, PHY 121

An example of something non-commutative: putting on socks before shoes will have a significantly different result than putting on shoes before socks. Try it!

Mann, PHY 121

Its dot product is 0, so we can kill it off! DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! ... I love killing stuff in math.

Mann, PHY 121

After your study group, go watch an episode of House.

Goldberg, CS 135

Cats wander off much more easily than your x-coordinate.

Goldberg, CS 135

Ooh, they put a website up for me. It's probably hideously outdated.

Petrick, CS 241

Everyone loves Marmoset, so we're making you use it again!

Petrick, CS 241

Marmoset had some issues last term, which I'm sure doesn't surprise you.

Petrick, CS 241

Hopefully it'll be fun, hopefully it'll be interesting, and hopefully you'll all be around at the end.

Petrick, CS 241

Day two and we've already lost 25-30% of the class...

Petrick, CS 241

Now that we've discussed all 18 instructions in our subset of MIPS, you're all experts in assembly now, right?

Petrick, CS 241

You could use an array, but we frown upon it. Bad style, bad style. (shakes marker)

Petrick, CS 241

(points to shirt) KGB... still watching you. And a reminder about assignments: do them alone. We're still watching you.

Petrick, CS 241

That's why we kind of just wave our hands at Scheme.

Petrick, CS 241

ASCII is pretty old. It's probably older than I am.

Petrick, CS 241

Try transferring a program from 7-bit to 8-bit.

Petrick, CS 241

On a Mac, 0xF0 [is the Apple symbol]. IBM probably wouldn't use that character set.

Petrick, CS 241

Once Intel had a standard, Apple said Well, I'll make a different standard so it doesn't work with yours.

Petrick, CS 241

Fridays are Novelty T-Shirt Days, because I don't have enough nice clothes to where every day.

Petrick, CS 241

We typically draw a clock to demonstrate modular arithmetic. There's only 4 bits here, since 32 bits would be massive.

Petrick, CS 241

We've had you writing in machine code, always fun. Now you'll appreciate how nice assembly is.

Petrick, CS 241

Think back to your real programming days, before writing in machine code.

Petrick, CS 241

Prof: How do we get the return address into a register?
Student: Black magic.
Prof: (writes black magic on the board)

Petrick, CS 241

What happens to the old value? It's overwritten. This is the black part of the magic.

Petrick, CS 241

I see we have a full class, but attendance will slowly go down, though I expect a peak just before the midterm.

Hasan, ECE 222

I will be using $ for notation. It doesn't mean money.

Hasan, ECE 222

If you all do very bad, the average will still be 70.

Mansour, ECE 126

Remember last year, when we had the swine flu? Students kept saying Oh, I have the swine flu, I can't write the exam.

Mansour, ECE 126

Student: (reading outline) The midterm is from 6:30 to 8:80?
Prof: In case you need more time.

Mansour, ECE 126

Let's say I give you a midterm. For argument's sake. Let's say you all do bad on it. For argument's sake. (chuckle)

Mansour, ECE 126

This is a very nice course, very easy course.

Mansour, ECE 126

The formula sheet is very long. It's 12 pages.

Mansour, ECE 126

(draws crooked line) It's a vector.

Mansour, ECE 126

Prof: Can anyone tell me what dq means?
Student: Dairy Queen.

Mansour, ECE 126

We are not math teachers. You do not need to memorize the formulae; only understand them.

Mansour, ECE 126

In English, you can verb anything.

Trefler, SE 212

There's a... um... line, and it means negation.

Trefler, SE 212

Prof: Is that a question?
Student: I sneezed.

Trefler, SE 212

For reasons of my own, I would like to translate that sentence into propositional logic.

Trefler, SE 212

It would take you a long time to list all the elements of this set. You might never finish. Hint: use induction.

Trefler, SE 212

How did I get these values? One answer is, I simply looked in a book.

Trefler, SE 212

Student: So false implies true?
Prof: Yes, absolutely.

Trefler, SE 212

You may disagree with these definitions. I sympathize.

Trefler, SE 212

Because it has commas and dots, it's got to be a theorem.

Trefler, SE 212

I have some prizes here. They're very nice, no calories. They're old exams. Which are also on ACE.

Hasan, ECE 222

Student 1: How many instructions are in the 68K set?
Student 2: Over 9000!
Prof: No, not thousands.

Hasan, ECE 222

If I'm wrong, I have to blame you because you were helping me.

Hasan, ECE 222

At some point, your stack will eat your program.

Hasan, ECE 222

I smell something burning. I hope it's not a fire.

Hasan, ECE 222

How many of you are good at procrastinating at this point?
[pause]
How many of you haven't gotten around to it yet?

Ward, SE 390

Prof: What do you think of these quotes?
Student: The top one was by an engineer.
Prof: Worse, a committee of engineers.

Rayside, SE 390

We are very traditional here! We like our four-way marriages and we like them official!

Ward, SE 390

The amount of energy involved in blowing up a planet is a hell of a lot.

Ward, SE 390

You have two choices in life: You can look ignorant, or be ignorant.

Ward, SE 390

At a superficial level that looks like a real problem.

Ward, SE 390

Please, please try to get married... four guys together is a perfectly reasonable marriage.

Ward, SE 390

And when there's no reasons it doesn't work, it works.

Ward, SE 390

Please don't do projects involving assassinating people in other countries.

Ward, SE 390

That's by the famous Michael Jackson, not the infamous Michael Jackson.

Berry, SE 463

God tried to get Adam and Eve not to eat from a particular tree... they were basically teenagers.

Berry, SE 463

There are superusers, who can do things you can't do, like leap over tallbuildings.

Berry, SE 463

Usually when you see someone putting on a glove you have some cause for concern, now you don't have cause for concern...this may reduce the number of students coming to see me at office hours.

Godfrey, SE 463

[Requirements engineering]'s like taking the system your code monkeys built... I mean that in the nicest way possible.

Godfrey, SE 463

So, I lifted this from Wikipedia, which is allowed, because I sourced it.

Godfrey, SE 463

UML in that sense is like a cockroach-killer.

Godfrey, SE 463

It is not because you have a good understanding of formal logic, it's because you have a good knowledge of drinking!

Thagard, PSYCH 256

Ghoti? That's a good guess. It's actually pronounced 'fish'.

Thagard, PSYCH 256

You don't have to be a philosophy major to go, you just need to be interested in philosophy... or pizza.

Thagard, PSYCH 256

The best place to find psychopaths is prison, or the Vancouver Stock Exchange.

Thagard, PSYCH 256

I'll match it to my concept of McDonalds, and then I'll run away.

Thagard, PSYCH 256

Most of you have a concept for 'indigestion'. If you're really adventurous, you may have a concept for 'food poisoning'.

Thagard, PSYCH 256

[On partial concurrency] For all the ladies out there, it's like being half-pregnant.

Buhr, CS 343

So I said Why isn't that on the testcompile? and they said mumble mumble mumble and that was it.

Buhr, CS 343

Before this class, you lived in this stick. Over here you're an N-dimensional hyperspace. Here, you're a stick.

Buhr, CS 343

I'm over at Cons's place! That's where I passed out!

Buhr, CS 343

If you start writing code like this you have to start shaving the palms of your hands. This is real control flow.

Buhr, CS 343

Looks more like a rat... I'm going to call this a car, and you'll believe me.

Ivan, CS 370