Category Archives: Humor

Funny things that have happened to me, stories I’ve heard….anything

My Wife’s Logic (or Women’s Logic Explained?)

For all of you who learned boolean algebra in your CS courses in college, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news: your education was incomplete. The list of boolean tautologies and truth tables that you may have memorized or learned over time was wrong, with some startling and glaring errors.

To rectify this, I present some new truth.

First, an example in real life, which really happened. For context, Leticia is my wife, has beautiful, olive skin, with dark brown eyes, and hair with various colors of brown, and the little girl in discussion was as white as can be.

Leticia: Look at that little girl–she’s so beautiful! Do you think we’ll ever have a girl who looks like her?

Me: No.

L: So you think our daughter will be ugly!

M: Uhhh……no. I don’t think she’ll be white.

Transforming this little conversation into boolean logic:

A: This little girl is beautiful

B: Our future daughter will look like this girl

C: Our future daughter will be beautiful

So my wife says that AB–>C, and that if I say !B, then !B–>!C. I always knew that, but what I didn’t know is that the other options I thought existed aren’t actually valid! (i.e., that !B–>C is also true, or in other words, that C can be true regardless of the value of B) Who knew! So I present below corrected truth tables. Wikipedia, take note.

Standard Truth Table for Implication

Improved Truth Table for Implication

X Y X–>Y
F F T
F T T
T F F
T T T
X Y X?Y
F F T
F T F
T F F
T T T

So you see that the correct form of implication when dealing with this logic is the same as equality.

Now you know, beware.

It isn’t Infectious…

My father-in-law was visiting this week and the first thing he said to me, extending his hand to shake mine was:

“Don’t worry, it isn’t infectious.”

 

(He has a temporary skin condition)

Free Code Here!

I just received this hilarious message: 

Thanks, you *****, for not responding to my Prim’s e-mail, and may you be cursed with the worst of success in Computer Science.

Sincerely,

Michael

Every once in a while I get requests from people asking me for completed code. The purpose of my articles (and this blog) is to aid understanding, not provide wholesale code. My job keeps me plenty busy, I receive a LOT of e-mails every day, and I probably don’t have the fully-functional, runnable code that people are looking for anyway, when they can probably find it on the Internet.

That said, I have received numerous comments, specific questions, disagreements, kudos, and suggestions that I have warmly responded to.

What’s the word for…

NPR ran a fun story the other day about coming up with words to express feelings or situations that we don’t have a word for.

My question is: what’s the word for the fear of writing “Love, ” (Like you would maybe automatically do to your spouse) at the end of an e-mail to your boss?

I’m not the only one who’s worried about this–a few weeks ago a coworker expressed the same fear.

Dear Blockbuster,

Our relationship has been a long one, but at long last the time has come to go our separate ways. I can’t say our relationship has been a happy one. I remember the long nights of walking up and down your aisles, looking in vain for a decent movie, only to return home empty-handed to watch something I already have.

But I’ve found someone new–someone who will give me the movies I want to see, the movies I can’t find in any of your stores–good movies. New movies, old movies, classics, thrillers, TV shows–anything I’ve ever wanted to see, but couldn’t fit in a store.

I’ve moved to NetFlix and I won’t look back. With nearly 80 movies in the queue and counting I’m looking forward to a good year or more of movies I haven’t seen.