Teachers quoted. Warmly.
Geek History:
“I thought I was doing really well when I started using overheads.”
“Everyone in Greece is named for a tiny, piddley little village that I shall never mention again. It’s that insignificant.”
“Socratese lived to, what was, in those days, the leathery old age of about seventy, when he said, “You may as well kill me, because I’m gunna’ die soon anyhow. Again, I paraphrase wildly.”
Prof: “Your guys’ minds just aren’t corrupt enough for athenian politics.”
Class: “That’s why we’re here.”
“Ostriches ain’t got nothin’ on the Spartans.”
Prof: “Because the Spartans invaded Messenia, taking all of it’s inhabitants as slaves of the state, all of Sparta’s slaves spoke the same dialect. This was not good. You don’t want your slaves to all speak the same language, otherwise they can plan things.”
Class: “Like parties?”
Bi-uh-oh-logy.
“I just saw a movie called Jellyfish. It was very good.”
Psyclone.
“I consider all the time I spend in my office drop-in time. If you come down, and the door’s open, come on in. If the door’s closed, but the light’s on, knock, and I’ll most often be doing nothing. If the light is off and the door is locked, knock anyways; in all likeliness, I’ll be doing something weird in the dark. You might not want to come in…”
‘I’d prefer that you call me Duke, and I’ll address you as such…not as Duke, but by your first name. Some young persons have trouble calling old people by their first name, so you can call me Mr.Allen, and I’ll address you like that…again, not as Mr.Allen, necessarily, but as mister or missus, et cetera. If you, even once, call me Sir, I will reply “Yes, my lovely child!?” and clasp my hands, and grin like a pedophile.’
“Psychologists in movies. I think the word farce is adequate to describe them. In Hollywood movies, 65% broke confidentiality agreements, 70% did something that went so far against the code of ethics that it would have gotten them arrested and imprisoned. 22% of Hollywood psychologists killed someone in the movie. Now, I’ve asked my colleagues and friends, and none of them have ever killed anybody. I, myself, haven’t killed someone in years.”
“I was practicing psychology before your parents were OLD enough to even think about having you.”
“There’s a noticeable line between encouragement and bribery. If you’re doing a survey and you set up a table with some doughnuts, you’re pretty much within the perameters. If you say to someone, ‘Hello, there. I need some volunteers for an experimental surgery, involving lasers and your eyes—actually, we only need one, to be on the safe side— and I was wondering if you’d like to join up? No? What if I gave you a hundred bucks? A thousand? Okay, five hundred thousand dollars? Five mill…yeah. Alrighty.’”
“It’s sometimes okay to lie to someone, if you’re trying to keep a confound out of your experiment, but only if it doesn’t put the person in any kind of danger. If I tell you that I’m doing a survey, but I’m actually counting the number of times you blink, that’s okay. If I tell you to go up to the lab to do a couple tests, and as you enter the room, my assistant heaves a bucket of snakes at you to measure your reactivity to danger…”
“After you’ve performed the test, you need to do a ‘repair.’ This means you can’t go, ‘Haw haw haw! You thought I was doing butterflies, but I was doing eye-blinks!’”
