Sunday Osbcure Science Photo Caption Contest – or – The New Yorker Does It, Why Shouldn’t Terry*? – or – “Sos-pic-cuh”
The New Yorker has a weekly cartoon caption contest where readers send in their own cartoon captions to a provided cartoon. The editors then choose three to be voted on by their readership. Given the often intriguing, historically significant, or just plain hilarious/bizarre nature of many old photographs with scientific content, I thought to myself, “Why the hell not do the same on Terry*?”
So, here I present to all of you the first “Obscure Science Photo Caption Contest”. There aren’t any prizes available for the contest participants – that is, beyond receiving acknowledgment of your formidable wit from your peers.
But where/how do you start? Let’s take the following as an example:
[source – NASA]
This above is an image of a technician preparing a scale airplane model for the AMES wind tunnel in 1942 – but, what might he be thinking? Perhaps something like…
“Now…how do I shrink the bloody wind tunnel?”
or maybe…
“Hey baby…it’s me…shh-shh-shh, don’t worry, we’ll take good care of you.”
or more likely…
“I hope the modification we made to the horizontal stabilizer improves the Reynold’s number”
Of course, it’s up to you to have a go at it – what better way to break up a dreary Sunday of studying? So, keeping in tune with an aerospace theme, here is an image of Yuri Gargarin – the first human to fly in space:
Geek on!
