Rosen's signature

Joshua Judson Rosen rozzin at geekspace.com
Fri Oct 30 10:37:12 EDT 2009


Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:
>
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> > > > Don't be afraid to ask (Lf.((Lx.xx) (Lr.f(rr)))).
> > >
> > >   Okay, I'll ask: What does that stuff to the right mean?
> >
> > The other half of the whole habanero pepper. :)
> 
>   Clear as mud!  ;-)
> 
> > More lucidly: a combinator. ;)
> 
>   Ditto!  ;-)
> 
> > It's a pun. ... So maybe it's a deeper (or worse) joke than I
> > originally intended....
> 
>   I'll work on appreciating the finer aspects of the joke when I
> understand the basics.  ;-)
> 
> > > Some kind of LISP?
> >
> > Almost. Did you have any luck googling for it? :)
> 
>   Yah, I found your page, along with a while bunch of your signature
> in various archives.  ;-)
> 
>   And clicking the Google link on your page yields only a handful of
> results, some of which are unavailable, none of which seem to explain
> things, and one of which is your page again.  ;-)

Yes--I actually worked very hard to make things work out that way. :)

>   From "single-letter name ... phonetically" I eventually decided it
> must be "Don't be afraid to ask Y", i.e., "Don't be afraid to ask
> why".

Yep! But, like I said--it's a pun. Both of those are literally `the
correct sentiment' :)

> That leads me to finding the below in the Wikipedia article, which
> at least looks kinda like your sig:
> 
> 	Y = λf·(λx·f (x x)) (λx·f (x x))

Yep--that's it! :)

That's the non-ASCIIfied version of the "(Lf.((Lx.f(xx)) (Lx.f(xx))))"
form in my web-page :)

>   I'm left thinking of that old meta-joke: "Explaining a joke is like
> dissecting a frog: You understand it better, but the frog dies in the
> process."  ;-)

Yeah.

I'm hoping that, some day, someone will run across this one and
actually just get it--they'll chuckle, send me an e-mail saying `hey,
that's cute', and I'll have made a new friend. Much in the same way
that one might say, `oh, hey--*you* like really spicy food, too?' and
`I see you have a supply of habanero peppers--oh, *you* eat them
whole, too?'. In the mean time, I get a lot of responses more like
`oh, a vegetable--do you like gardening?' and `you *like* your food
*spicy*? Um, OK....'. That's OK, though--it *is* kinda weird :)

(and it's not nearly as frustrating as when I was including PGP
 signatures, and people either said `I can't open your attachment,
 what is it?' or just `Something's wrong with your e-mail')

I realise that I could probably expect success sooner (and more often)
if I just asked people to pick a number between 1 and 100 and tried to
guess it correctly <http://www.xkcd.com/628/>.

Actually, I *did* *once* get the sort response I was awaiting, on
alt.collecting.pens-pencils of all places:

    > It's a programmer's lambda-calculus pun :)

    And I thought the people who enjoyed those were a dying breed. :-)
    Glad to see there are a few more of us alive. ;-)

Is there anyone here who likes spicy food enough to eat habanero
peppers whole (`they just taste like happiness...')? :)

>   Maybe you should put the whole sig in quotes, so people like me
> don't think you're telling us not to be afraid to ask what the stuff
> on the right means.  ;-)

Well, I didn't use a colon.... ;)

Hmmm. If I use double-quotes, that seems like it might actually
detracts from the functional-programming reference, but semantic
(single) quotes would work fine. Er..., the *whole* thing?
Hmmm. Well, let's try it! :)

Actually, I wonder... maybe unicode has made enough progress for me to
just stop substituting the uppercaes "L" for "λ"?

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))"



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