Campus Life

Overheard at MIT

Overheard at MIT

—Random, flustered student speed-walking out of LaVerde’s

“When the flux due to a magnetic field is decreasing, the inductor tries to compensate and produce more flux. If instead the flux is increasing, the inductor works to decrease the flux. Inductors want the flux to remain constant; they hate change.”

—Professor Hudson in an 8.02 lecture

“Then an inductor would never vote for Obama?”

—Student

“So you would expect that the author would prove the main theorem directly, through a head-on attack. But he doesn’t! What he does is he first establishes a series of lemmas, and then he actually proves the theorem as a corollary to his lemmas! It’s just like Kansas coming back on Memphis — it’s wonderful.”

—Unknown

Person 1: “Psh, why would you put the chainsaw behind glass? Everyone knows zombies can break glass.”

Person 2: “Yeah. They should put it behind a moat or something …”

—Conversation after seeing the chainsaw zombie hack