Comments on: Edexcel examiners are possibly crack addicts

By: Reef

Reef — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:08:48 +0000

I can’t help but thinking what would have happened if Kevin Spacey had sketched that diagram up in front of all the Nasa scientists in K-Pax?
Straight back to the loony bin me-thinks; it would have added a certain comic irony to the smug, ‘that should solve all the mathematical problems you were having’ type line that followed though!

By: Kingreaper

Kingreaper — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:10:50 +0000

Thanks for linking me to that thing, it got a lot of agression out of my system writing a rant about EVERYTHING that’s wrong with it (well, not everything, but there’s only so much one can do)

Check it out if you want, it involves liberal use of the word “fucktard” though, so if that offends you…. Why are you on the internet?

Science Education is going down the crapper

By: coracle

coracle — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:53:15 +0000

Frank wins, thread over.

By: Marty

Marty — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:41:27 +0000

You haven’t even got on to question 5 yet…

Our moon seems to disappear during an eclipse. Some people say that this is because an old lady covers the moon with her cloak. She does this so that thieves cannot steal the coins on the surface.

Man, they’re on some next-level shit.

By: Ithika

Ithika — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:28:50 +0000

Yes, that’s it! Frank wins the thread.

By: Frank the SciencePunk

Frank the SciencePunk — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:37:19 +0000

you mean like this?

By: Ithika

Ithika — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:18:30 +0000

@Owen:

I think the examiners got really trashed and spent the night hacking on one of those programs that generates sensible-looking but meaningless academic papers, so that now it produces physics papers with strange diagrams like this.

The only possible answer to this question is along the lines of the “Find x.” question: draw a big circle and an arrow, with the words, “here it is”.

By: Owen

Owen — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:42:03 +0000

This is crazy stuff. I’d take a wild stab at C. Assuming that A represents the orbit of a planet, and therefore C represents the orbit of the moon around that planet. Nonsense of course, because the orbital path of the moon would look like a spiral because it will also be following the path of the planet. Aaaagh!
Who writes these papers!?

By: TauHecht

TauHecht — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:01:42 +0000

Oh God my brain is melting! What deprave madman would unleash this on the world?

It says the orbit of a moon, not our moon. This may not even be our solar system. Judging by the diagram, this may not even be our universe. Any one of these is a plausible answer! Oh jesus! Its eating through my miiiiind!

I’m assuming A is correct, but C or D is correct if they are not reffering to the moon’s actual orbit but rather the orbit around some unspecified object out there, somewhere. Maybe there is a black hole at the other end of B’s orbit, creating this messy slingshot effect it has going. I don’t know. It kinda looks like somebody just said “fuck it” and started drawing circles.

But then again, it’s not to scale. So anything is possible. This seems more like a question on Quantum Mechanics than orbits. Then smoking pot would be an advantage rather than a detriment. “The answer is E, they’re all the orbit, dude.”

By: coracle

coracle — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:50:46 +0000

Yeah, what James said, with C being an orbit perpendicular to A rather that horizontal. That would silly.

What is going on with D?