FM Waves

Quantum physics has just brought me to the conclusion this blog is not so empty at the end of the day; it’s just it’s full of posts and anti-posts that come and go out of existence so fast RSS can’t get hold of them.

Now, I’m just hoping the Casimir Effect is not going to make ‘FM Waves’ an extinguished blog…

From now on I’ll try not to blog on the first think that comes to my mind. And, as the guys from wikiHow say, I won’t unless it is…

Effective (and as a economist I would add Efficient)

Necessary (and could we be adding Needed?)

Accurate (I can’t help it, so probably if it was me, it’d be Arrogant)

Timely (if it’s JIT, better)

Appropriate (refer to the first A if you’re me)

Of course, I’ll start first thing tomorrow morning. At the moment I just broke a couple of ENATA rules.

 I remember my first years at the University, trying to get a global idea of how was going to be my life as a professional after college, so I decided to take a look to some jokes. I’ve got a degree in economics, I can’t hide it, so it was easy to find loads of jokes (I specially liked Jokec at the time). Afterwards, when the virus of operations research got into my veins I tried to do the same (how am I going to spread the word if I can’t do it with a smile?); this wasn’t going to be an easy task though.

NO ONE HAS SPECIFIC JOKES ABOUT OR-ers!!!

You can find jokes about mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, statisticians, and even economists , but there’s no "Unified Theory" for us when related to humor. Such it is the variety of sciences that are grouped into OR that we’ve lost our definition, so consider this as a proposal to create a repository of OR-ers jokes.

I’m not such a YouTube scubadiver, however sometimes I browse a little inside it. When I was trying to find something about game theory (remember my last post on Mr Smith vs Mr Nash) it came to my attention (not just to me but to an excess of 200k people) this funny…, what I’m saying?, hilarious video about the 10 basic economics principles from Mankiw.

YouTube

However, I have to say that what most godsmacked me was the resume of the guy: he’s actually an economist! (and as he says: baker & troublemaker). What the hell!, a real FUNNY ECONOMIST!!!. Congratulations mate!.

A physicist, and engineer and a economist are all trapped on an island with a box of canned food that they cannot get open. The physicist says, “If I build a fire and then we heat up the cans eventually the cans will blow up from expanding gasses and then we will be able to eat the food.” The engineer then suggests, ” If I can make a three to one pulley system perhaps we can rig up a machine to open up the cans.” The economist then chimes in saying, ” You guys are making this far too hard let’s just assume we have a can opener.”

Besides the downgrade economists receive in this joke (always living in an imaginary world?: not really!), we can perceive the differences between all three on the methodologies involved in their state of mind. Mathematicians, as well as physicists, make further use of the theory; engineers are more practical, they make use of the theory to accomplish the practice; economists mix this and that due to complications of Social Sciences.
So, who’s the best?. None and all: everyone of us OR colleagues should be a little bit of everyone deppending on the job…

Further questions I’ll answer. The debate is open!