In the first 2 years of my Ph.D, I happened to educate myself on how to write scientific text that can be horrifyingly obfuscating as well as technically impressive while looking scholarly enough to pass for publishable writing. Sometimes however there has been un-intended humour that comes only when you read it aloud. On the other hand, I try not to pass up the opportunity to crack a subtle joke in an institute seminar or lab meeting. So here are a couple.
For instance we had this hypothesis that exhaled breath would contain organic compounds that would help us detect the constitution of the microbiome of the gut. Basically the relative proportion of sulphur containing gases, methane and other gases would indicate what sort of bacteria were present in the gut. Being in an omics institute, we gave this collective parameter the name "gas-ome".
If that wasn't funny enough, in a proposal that I ended up writing, we had figured that different bacteria could emit the same gases so gas production alone couldn't be used to determine constitution. So we wrote, "Since gas production is degenerate among different species" to peals of laughter on recognizing the un-intended pun. By degeneracy we implied that different species could produce the same gases (like same codons being produced by different tri-nucleotides), however the social implication of that sentence wasn't clear until we wrote it and read it aloud.
My seminar jokes have been subtle. One which I never made was this one
Of course this wasn't going to go well with an audience that may not have watched the movie so I let it pass.
Another one, which I didn't crack but was there for everyone to see was a slide on using mathematical models to construct a minimal genome. See if you spot it, it is a calculus joke.
Hint: Top left corner, math expression is a joke.
Speaking of calculus jokes, here is one from my favorite (although slightly irregular) science comic at www.abstrusegoose.com
That's all for the random blog entry of the day folks!
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