The Academic Paywall Blues

Trust me, I've seen enough "revolutionary" proofs to last seven academic careers. The Millennium Prize Problems are math's equivalent of climbing Everest in flip-flops—seven unsolved mathematical mountains with a million-dollar bounty each. Every month some bright-eyed optimist waltzes into my office with "the solution" scribbled on napkins. Sure, and I'm secretly Fields Medal material who just enjoys grading calculus exams for fun. The mathematical community doesn't just press X to doubt—we smash that button until it breaks. Remember when that one guy claimed to solve P vs NP and then his proof collapsed faster than my will to live during faculty meetings? Good times.

Welcome to the wild world of inorganic chemistry, where electron orbitals are marketed as "flowers" and molecular geometry as "ice cream"! 🍦 This is basically every inorganic chemistry professor trying to lure unsuspecting students with pretty visuals while secretly planning to bombard them with incomprehensible energy diagrams that even THEY don't understand! Those d-orbital "flowers" are actually electron probability distributions that will haunt your dreams, and that "ice cream cone" is a molecular orbital with a bond angle that will be on your exam worth 40% of your grade. SURPRISE! And that final diagram? Nobody knows what it is! That's the beauty of inorganic chem—half the time we're just nodding along pretending we understand those Tanabe-Sugano diagrams while internally screaming!

The pandemic timeline according to conspiracy theorists! First, classes move online because of COVID. Then, mysteriously, "COVID engineers" graduate and enter the workforce. And suddenly—planes start falling out of the sky? Twice?! Because obviously, engineering education works better in person when you can physically touch the laws of aerodynamics. This perfectly captures how conspiracy minds connect completely unrelated events with imaginary causation. Remote learning → unqualified engineers → aviation disasters. Next they'll blame the microchips in vaccines for making pilots forget how to fly!

The ultimate scientific power move: deriving equations from first principles because you can't remember if it's sin²θ + cos²θ = 1 or sin²θ - cos²θ = 1. That desperate moment when you're staring at your screen, calculator in one hand, scribbled notes in the other, thinking "I could Google this... but what if it's one of those trick sites that deliberately gives wrong answers to catch cheaters?" So you channel your inner Thanos, snap your fingers at conventional wisdom, and rebuild calculus from scratch in the middle of your timed exam. Twenty minutes later, you've reinvented half of differential equations just to solve one problem worth 2 points.

The eternal rivalry between Electrical Engineers and Computer Engineers captured in SpongeBob format! Poor Squidward (the Computer Engineer) can't handle being near Patrick (the Electrical Engineer) because—gasp—he's terrified of actual circuits! And when SpongeBob drops "Kirchhoff's Laws" into the conversation? Total meltdown! It's like watching someone who only codes in Python suddenly confronted with having to build an actual physical device. The horror! 🔌⚡ Spoiler alert: most CompE degrees still require circuit analysis, but that doesn't stop the interdepartmental trash talk!

The evolution of math students is truly magnificent. On the left, we have the Roman numeral gladiator, calculating XXIII + XLVI with nothing but sheer brain power and possibly the blood of their enemies. Meanwhile, modern students are defeated by the terrifying concept of "letters in math" despite having a calculator that could launch the ancient Romans to Mars. The irony? Those intimidating Roman numerals ARE letters in math! Nothing says intellectual decline quite like complaining about algebra while simultaneously being unable to calculate a 15% tip without technological assistance. The calculator has become both our greatest tool and the crutch that's causing our mathematical muscles to atrophy faster than a mathematician's social skills at a party.