An Engineering Student, a Physics Student, and a Mathematics
student were each given $150 dollars and were told to use that
money to find out exactly how tall a particular hotel was.

      All three ran off, extremely keen on how to do this.  The
Physics student went out, purchased some stopwatches, a number
of ball bearings, a calculator, and got some friends.  He had
them all time the drop of ball bearings from the roof, and he
then figured out the height from the time it took for the
bearings to accelerate from rest until they impacted with the
sidewalk.

      The Math student waited until the sun was going down, then
she took out her protractor, plumb line, measuring tape,and
scratch pad, measured the length of the shadow, found the angle
the buildings roof made from the ground, and used trignometry to
figure out the height of the building.

      These two students bumped into the Engineering student the
next day, who was nursing a really bad hangover.  When asked
what he did to find the height of the building he replied:

      "Well, I walked up to the bell hop, gave him 10 bucks,
asked him how tall the hotel was, and hit the bar inside for
happy hour!"

James D. Gray
grayd@is.dal.ca



Here is another one someone send me:

A mathematician and a physicist are trying to measure the height of a
flag pole using a long tape measure.
The mathematician takes the tape measure, walks up to the flag pole, and
begins to shinny up the pole. A short way up, he slips and falls down.
The physicist notices a ladder lying nearby in the bushes. He leans the
ladder against the pole, but it reaches only half way up. He climbs the
ladder and tries to shinny up from there, but he also slips and falls.
While they sit near the pole scratching their heads, an engineer walks
by, so the mathematician and the physicist tell him their problem.
The engineer notices a crank at the base of the flag pole. He turns the
crank, and the flag pole tilts over until it lies on the ground. The
engineer stretches out the tape measure, cranks the pole back up, and
tells the mathematician and the physicist, 'It is 15 feet.'

As the engineer walks off into the distance, the mathematician looks at
the physicist and says, "Isn't that just like an engineer? You ask him
for the height, and he gives you the length."