88 miles per hour!
I had my first "old" moment in my physics lab last week. One consequence of switching my academic focus towards dentistry at the end of my undergraduate career is that I now find myself taking classes with people who were in middle school when I graduated. Another consequence of this is that our pop culture vocabularies can sometimes be wildly divergent despite that small five year divide.
We were working on an inclined plane lab, one of the staples of a basic physics course. Our materials were a ramp, a small wooden "car," two pulleys set up above the incline, some string to run in between the twe pulleys, and finally a long hook with weight at the bottom.
Our physics lab often starts with a good ten minute's confusion. The lab instructor is an asian grad student who may or may not be good at physics, but who most assuredly has a grasp of the English language that could be charitably described as tenuous. On top of that, we have a lab manual written by older Asian professors with an equally tenuous (but tenured) understanding of English. The practical upshot of all this is that Engrish has long been the official academic language in the Ball State Physics department, and it takes a bit of doing to decipher exactly what the hell we're supposed to be doing.
Back to last week's lab.
The four of us were standing at our lab table staring blankly at all these toys the TA had handed to us a moment before. The rab manuar was full of cheerful instructions about what was to be done once everything was constructed, but was curiously silent on how to put the damned contraption together in the first place. Then I had a stroke of genius and the lab came together in my mind.
"Okay, here's what we do," I said, threading string in between the pulleys, setting the aforementioned string elevated over and across the incline, and placing the hook on top of the wooden block with wheels that served as our ''car."
"We take the car and accelerate it towards the line at 88 miles per hour. It'll hit the line just as the lightning hits the clock tower, producing the 1.21 gigawatts Irequired and sending it back to 1985." All the while I was pushing the car along the incline to illustrate the process.
I locked up with a geeky grin on my face. I was in a science course, after all, so I had a reasonable expectation that my peers would have the minimum level of nerdiness required to get the joke. I was met with blank stares.
"I wasn't even born in 1985," the guy who sat next to me declared with a confused look on his face. The other two across the table just stared at me as though I was some curious museum exhibit.
"Back to the Future?" I asked hopefully.
"Oh, I've never seen that," was what I heard in unison from my lab companions.
What happened? This was are of the classics when I was growing up. Did the cable networks stop broadcasting this after I got to high school and stopped watching television regularly? Is the film now so obscure that references only survive in nerd discourse? If so, when did this happen and why wasn't I notified? It boggles the mind.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna make like a tree and get outta here.
We were working on an inclined plane lab, one of the staples of a basic physics course. Our materials were a ramp, a small wooden "car," two pulleys set up above the incline, some string to run in between the twe pulleys, and finally a long hook with weight at the bottom.
Our physics lab often starts with a good ten minute's confusion. The lab instructor is an asian grad student who may or may not be good at physics, but who most assuredly has a grasp of the English language that could be charitably described as tenuous. On top of that, we have a lab manual written by older Asian professors with an equally tenuous (but tenured) understanding of English. The practical upshot of all this is that Engrish has long been the official academic language in the Ball State Physics department, and it takes a bit of doing to decipher exactly what the hell we're supposed to be doing.
Back to last week's lab.
The four of us were standing at our lab table staring blankly at all these toys the TA had handed to us a moment before. The rab manuar was full of cheerful instructions about what was to be done once everything was constructed, but was curiously silent on how to put the damned contraption together in the first place. Then I had a stroke of genius and the lab came together in my mind.
"Okay, here's what we do," I said, threading string in between the pulleys, setting the aforementioned string elevated over and across the incline, and placing the hook on top of the wooden block with wheels that served as our ''car."
"We take the car and accelerate it towards the line at 88 miles per hour. It'll hit the line just as the lightning hits the clock tower, producing the 1.21 gigawatts Irequired and sending it back to 1985." All the while I was pushing the car along the incline to illustrate the process.
I locked up with a geeky grin on my face. I was in a science course, after all, so I had a reasonable expectation that my peers would have the minimum level of nerdiness required to get the joke. I was met with blank stares.
"I wasn't even born in 1985," the guy who sat next to me declared with a confused look on his face. The other two across the table just stared at me as though I was some curious museum exhibit.
"Back to the Future?" I asked hopefully.
"Oh, I've never seen that," was what I heard in unison from my lab companions.
What happened? This was are of the classics when I was growing up. Did the cable networks stop broadcasting this after I got to high school and stopped watching television regularly? Is the film now so obscure that references only survive in nerd discourse? If so, when did this happen and why wasn't I notified? It boggles the mind.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna make like a tree and get outta here.