[PPARC '99 Home Page]

PPARC '99 - Lecturer Quotes

Just some of the more amusing quotations which the lecturers on the PPARC course came out with; almost all of these thanks to Colin Frayn.

• "Every bloody airport looks the same, and every country looks the same if you're jet-lagged. But Chilean wine is very good actually". (Jasper Wall)
• [Americans] "our dear friends and colleagues who have become dearer since the construction of these telescopes [Keck I & II]". (Jasper Wall)
• "Unfortunately, we live in a bowl of jelly". (Jasper Wall)
• "There is no escape - you too have got to understand statistics". (Jasper Wall)
• (Quoting Rutherford) "If your experiment requires statistics - you should have done a better experiment!". (Jasper Wall)
• Here's a set of bins that probably apply to grad students" [Overhead showing `schizophrenic', `paranoid', `manic-depressive', `neurotic' and `psycopathic']. (Jasper Wall)
• "We can rank things in wuffliness". (Jasper Wall)
• "Frequentists and Bayesians are two different types of statisticians, and they trade insults on a regular basis". (Jasper Wall)
• [On smoking and lung cancer] "... once we'd learned to make mice smoke properly ...". (Jasper Wall)
• [Puts up overhead] "Don't read this. Don't even look at it". (Jasper Wall)
• "There can be no task which is using up more CPU power globally than booting Windows". (Patrick Wallace)
• "I like Linux - it's terse and unfriendly - just like me". (Anon)
  "A Cambridge astronomer - that would be right". (Patrick Wallace)
• "Everything's fractal. I mean - yesterday's washing up looks fractal if you look at it in the right way". (Mike Edmunds)
• "This is an optical image of SN1181. As you can see, it's invisible in the optical". (Dave Green)
• "After 1976, interest in the moon waned". (Sarah Dunkin)
• "The first thing about space astronomy is that it's bloody expensive". (Dave Stickland)
• "Symmetricallity". [Is that really a word?] (Kenneth Phillips)
• "Continental countries like Europe and Germany". (Paul Murdin)
• "Not just professors, but super-professors". (Paul Murdin)
• "Academia sucks". (Paul Murdin)
• "To be frank, some people die". (Paul Murdin)
• "That's the kind of thing that screams at you [gestures]. This is a cluuuuue!". (Andy Lawrence)
• "They're all kind of [gesture] fascist salute spectra". (Andy Lawrence)
• [Puts up overhead showing randomly distributed points on a graph] "Phyicists will draw a straight line through the data and say that it fits the model, while astronomers will draw two vertical lines and classify the points into Type I, Type II and Type III". (Andy Lawrence)
• [Type II Seyfert toroidal component] "... a kind of fat doughnut of muck". (Andy Lawrence)
• "At present, the Universe is actually pretty complicated". (Andrew Liddle).
• "I'm quite inclined not to believe particle physicists on the whole" (Andrew Liddle [a particle physicist])

Any more quotes which you want to see here, just mail me...