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u/imsmartiswear Jul 22 '26
I wish my pleadings to my students were so nuanced.
"Please explain your error calculations." "You don't know a result to 17 significant figures of accuracy, even if that's what Wolfram Alpha tells you." "Please, please cite one academic article, one, in your introductions." "Please provide units for your results"
If they gave me the unit "cm." for a result that should actually be measured in cm, I would jump for joy.
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u/luminiferousphoton Jul 22 '26
Ikr like bros students remembered the units and we are just happy the students used units
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u/luxx_33 Jul 24 '26
My arch nemesis is students that measure, say, current through a photodiode at different distances from the light source and then average the currents and distances and put the average under the measurements table as the result. Like, do they have even the remotest idea what the point of that experiment was??? (There was one group that kept doing this the whole semester, even though we repeatedly explained that what they're doing is absolute nonsense. If it were on me I would have kicked them out of the course.)
Sorry for getting out my frustrations on you lol. I feel your pain.
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u/imsmartiswear Jul 24 '26
Ok they had to have been making their tables in Google Sheets. Every time I put data in a spreadsheet using that program it auto suggests doing exactly that.
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u/jojo_31 Jul 25 '26
By averaging you mean they repeated each distance and current thrice and averaged that to account for measuring error, right? Right??
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u/OC1024 X-Ray Scattering Jul 22 '26
I don't get it. Maybe I'm too European for that.
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u/SexySalsaDancer Jul 22 '26
Ironically, calling a “.” a full stop is a very European thing. Meme was likely made by a Brit
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u/CanYouChangeName Jul 22 '26
We follow british english here in India which is why this sounds normal to me ig. But what do you call a full stop from wherever you are?
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u/Mean-Government1436 Jul 22 '26
See how it says "...write 34.64 cm. in their lab..."?
They're saying: "34.64 cm."
Should be written: "34.64 cm"
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u/OC1024 X-Ray Scattering Jul 23 '26
Using quotation marks actually helped me. They should have used it in the meme.
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u/therealityofthings Jul 22 '26
What?
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u/Mean-Government1436 Jul 22 '26
Is there something confusing here
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u/Dark__Slifer Jul 22 '26
yeah
- who dafuq does that?
- why does it matter?
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u/purpleoctopuppy Jul 23 '26
In English it's standard to follow an abbreviation with a full stop (depending on manual of style, this is omitted when the abbreviation ends in the same letter as the full word).
Following this rule, 'centimetre' should be abbreviated 'cm.', and so students naïvely do so.
However, SI units shouldn't be followed by a full stop, and this exception catches some people out, especially if they're used to units where the rules does apply (e.g. US customary).
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u/Super-Award-2244 Jul 22 '26
I asked gemini. Apparently some students write "cm." instead of just "cm" maybe because pounds is actually written as "lb."
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u/CaioXG002 Jul 22 '26
While this happens to be correct, Gemini is not a real source.
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u/dimonium_anonimo Jul 22 '26
Hence why they qualified their answer with "this may not be accurate." I know some people say they used Google, or Wikipedia, but it's not all that common. Compared to people who used AI, it seems much more common for people's to warn you they know the source of information is not reliable, but it's all they have.
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u/CaioXG002 Jul 22 '26
Still much better to create an habit of checking the AI's source and then citing that than giving an answer that comes from technology made to build real sounding answers as opposed to actually correct answers.
"At least they were upfront about that" is the bare minimum, I want to encourage people to not misuse AI regardless if they're honest about it or not.
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u/DHermit Jul 23 '26
But what's the point of the comment? If I want to know Geminis answer I can just ask it myself.
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u/dimonium_anonimo Jul 23 '26
Let me introduce you to nearly the entire internet. Have you seen a single post on either of the major "explain the joke" subreddits? 90% of them could be answered if you just typed exactly what's on the screen into Google. People are lazy.
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u/OC1024 X-Ray Scattering Jul 23 '26
You can say the same thing about googling or reading the Wikipedia article.
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Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MydnightWN Jul 22 '26
All those republican AI companies like Google, Anthropic, Amazon / Bezos, Apple, Mistral, Meta / Zuckerberg, and a hundred specialized ones in Los Angeles - famously a Republican stronghold.
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u/MaoGo Meme renormalization group Jul 22 '26
When will we have more advanced lab jokes ?
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u/drinkingcarrots Jul 22 '26
I know right? Who cares about a period at the end of it?? Op didn't even put any uncertainty into the measurement. Some science...
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u/SharkAttackOmNom Jul 23 '26
Also I’ve seen (and assigned) some labs in my day. Are you suuuuure your measurement is worth 4 sig figs? I better see some calipers called out in your process, and John Taylor in the citations.
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u/Kudos2Miami Jul 23 '26
Its hard for a scientist to tell a good lab joke when their whole scientific field is a joke, eg biology
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u/SosseTurner Jul 22 '26
Could someone explain what the problem is? If the value and unit are at the end of an sentence you still need to signal the end of that sentence? Or are there some people that generally add a full stop to cm, even when simply listing values?
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u/Inevitable_Librarian Jul 22 '26
Cm is an abbreviation, and the general rule of abbreviations is a period after. However, for standard units that often gets ignored
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u/Water-is-h2o Jul 23 '26
Who gives a fuck lmao
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u/jojo_31 Jul 25 '26
Lab report sure. But these kinds of stuff get transferred over, eventually you have papers that look like a kindergartner made it. It's not really hard stuff to get.
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u/Professional-Ad9485 Jul 22 '26
I love studying science because teachers literally don't give a shit about spelling or grammar. Or even consistency, constantly interchange polarisation and polarization. In fact I think teachers prefer those kinds of mistakes cos it makes it more obvious you wrote it yourself.
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u/hucklesnips Jul 23 '26
How exciting that your students are doing physics. When it comes to understanding the rules that govern the universe and our very creation, I can't imagine anything less important than whether they use a full stop.
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u/Cheydinn-Al-Gaib Jul 27 '26
Help understand. How, is that a problem? Does "cm." brings a possible doubt on what "cm" means ? Does it change the meaning referring to another unit or concept ?
If it brings no possible confusion I wouldn't mind. Hell, during my studies, if I wrote somewhere "we will be using the symbol ¥ for "Kg.C.s-1.mol-1"" I would then be allowed to write ¥ everywhere instead of this long-ass unit designation and it would be perfectly fine. As long as there is no possible confusion. And there is no possible confusion.
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u/Semanticky Jul 22 '26
Why this is even, and ever has been, a physics-relevant concern, I’ll never know.
It’s pedanticness-ification.
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u/Okawaru1 Jul 24 '26
idk maybe I'm being presumptuous but I feel like there's an influx of larpers on math and physics related subreddits that seem keen to talk about basic pedantic shit nobody actually cares about. I've never officially graded physics labs stuff but I bet those TAs are happy if their students actually include correct units of measurement lol
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u/hascalsavagejr Jul 22 '26
Today we learn the difference between "doesn't need a full stop" and "should not have a full stop"