Student Rickrolls Teacher By Sneaking Rick Astley Lyrics into Quantum Physics Paper

Here’s a fun­ny lit­tle vari­a­tion on “rick­rolling,” a term some of our read­ers might not be famil­iar with. So let’s quick­ly refer you to Wikipedia:

Rick­rolling is an Inter­net meme involv­ing the music video for the 1987 Rick Ast­ley song “Nev­er Gonna Give You Up”. The meme is a bait and switch; a per­son pro­vides a hyper­link which is seem­ing­ly rel­e­vant to the top­ic at hand, but actu­al­ly leads to Ast­ley’s video. The link can be masked or obfus­cat­ed in some man­ner so that the user can­not deter­mine the true des­ti­na­tion of the link with­out click­ing. Peo­ple led to the music video are said to have been rick­rolled. Rick­rolling has extend­ed beyond web links to play­ing the video or song dis­rup­tive­ly in oth­er sit­u­a­tions, includ­ing pub­lic places, such as a live appear­ance of Ast­ley him­self in the 2008 Macy’s Thanks­giv­ing Day Parade in New York. The meme helped to revive Ast­ley’s career.

Now, in anoth­er sign that rick­rolling has gone beyond the web, we have above a snap­shot of a quan­tum physics writ­ten by Sairam Gud­i­s­e­va, a stu­dent at (we believe) White Sta­tion High School in Ten­nessee. As the snap­shot shows, Gud­i­s­e­va man­aged to run the lyrics of “Nev­er Gonna Give You Up” down the left mar­gin of the page … while still keep­ing his ideas flow­ing. Well done, young man. You can see a full page of his essay here.

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