Best. Logician joke. EVAR. (with exclamation points, ones, and at signs)

[Vort]

I already told this one a year ago. It's so good, it deserves another airing.

 

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Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender asks, "A beer for each of you?"

The first logician says, "I don't know."

The second logician says, "I don't know."

The third logician says, "Yes."

[PolarVortex]

Boo!  Sounds like a first-round Google interview question.

 

And don't forget the ancient Roman who walked into a bar, held up two fingers, and said, "Five beers, please."   (I actually told the Roman joke at a Toastmasters meeting and held up my two fingers in a clear V shape, and even then most of the audience was utterly baffled.  And this was in the high-tech part of San Francisco.)

 

My favorite geek joke is about the college professor whose final exam contains only one problem: "Make up a good question and answer it."  A clever student in the class solves it by simply copying that sentence two more times on his answer sheet and turning it in.
 

[Vort]

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Make up a good question and answer it.

 

Make up a good question and answer it.

 

Make up a good question and answer it.

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I don't get it.

[prisonchaplain]

The question--asking for a question--and an answer--gets answer with a question and an answer that forces and endless loop.  So it's technically correct, and mildly--in a British cuisine kind of way--funny.

*****************************

Make up a good question and answer it.

 

Make up a good question and answer it.

 

Make up a good question and answer it.

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I don't get it.

[PolarVortex]

*****************************

Make up a good question and answer it.

 

Make up a good question and answer it.

 

Make up a good question and answer it.

*****************************

 

I don't get it.

 

"Make up a good question and answer it" on Line 1 is a good question, because the professor is asking it.  (One assumes.)

 

If it's a good question, then it itself satisfies the "Make up a good question" part of Line 1.  Line 2 is an answer to Line 1, but it's also a good question that happens to be identical to Line 1. 

 

Now the student has to answer the question from Line 2.  The answer has to be a good question, and we can just use Line 1 again, which was already established as a good question.

 

Yeah, yeah, I know, they aren't really questions because there is no question mark, but you get the idea.  It's supposed to teach recursion, but factorials are a much better example.  haha

[Vort]

The question--asking for a question--and an answer--gets answer with a question and an answer that forces and endless loop.  So it's technically correct, and mildly--in a British cuisine kind of way--funny.

 

Yes, I thought it might be self-referential, but it isn't a question. It's an instruction. Guess I need to cast a wider net in word definitions, especially with jokes.

[prisonchaplain]

I was willing to infer the professor begining with, "Would you . . . "  :-)

[PolarVortex]

I guess we're even, Vort, because I didn't get your logician joke at first.  I assumed a "don't know" answer meant "ask someone else, I'm still thinking," which of course ruins the whole joke. 

 

I spend a lot of time around geeks and they drive me bonkers, frankly.  Once I went to dinner at a friend's house and the meal started in chaos because everyone was reaching for dishes and passing them in random directions.  Finally I screamed, "Let's just pass everything clockwise, okay?" and someone sighed and snapped, "Well, you mean clockwise if viewed from above, right?"

[Crypto]

  Finally I screamed, "Let's just pass everything clockwise, okay?" 

Did you know that that queuing in a line will likely make bursty traffic (i.e. food servings) slower to get to each recipients plate.  

[PolarVortex]

Did you know that that queuing in a line will likely make bursty traffic (i.e. food servings) slower to get to each recipients plate.  

 

No, but that may not be a bad thing.  I've eaten in enough Air Force chow halls to welcome any delay in serving that slop.

[slamjet]

Either I'm tired or totally nerded out because I laughed at Vort's joke.

 

So for those who don't get it, here's the explanation.

[Just_A_Guy]

Oh, geez.  I figured that it was just a play on "not no" and "yes" being functionally equivalent.

[Guest]

Well, being a programmer, I laughed at Vort's joke... but being Filipino, I completely did not get PV's joke.  Not even after PC explained it... yes, because an instruction is neither a question nor an answer and Americanlish just throws me off a lot.

 

So here's the classic programmer's joke:

Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?

Because Oct 31 == Dec 25;

 

Ha ha.

[estradling75]

Another one would be

 

There are 10 types of people in the world...

 

Those that understand binary and those that don't

[mordorbund]

Even revising PV's joke, the answer suffers from an off-by-one error. Let's sidestep the not-a-question issue by changing it slightly:

 

[O]Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

([O] is a simple notation to keep track of the original problem) Now we don't need a question and the original problem can satisfy it's own constraint (assuming it is a 'good' test problem (I'm not fully sold on that, I suspect it's poor because the prof couldn't come up with a good one)).

 

The proposed solution is:

 

[P]Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

Where [P] is the problem and is the solution. If the [O] requires two statements to follow as an answer, then [P] also requires two statements for an answer. The prof should dock points for an insufficient solution for the student problem [P]. This of course assumes that the "answer it" portion of [O] requires correctness. The solution then should look something like:

 

[O]Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

[P]Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

[s:P1]Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

[s1]Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

Where is the solution to [P] and [s1] is the solution to [P1] ([s:P1] being the statement that is both the solution to [P] and a new problem). We don't need [P1] to have a correct solution because we aren't receiving marks for solving problems that are themselves solutions (in other words, [O] requires a [P] and a correct , which for our given [P], requires both a [P1] and an [s1], but neither [P1] nor [s1] needs to satisfy [O]'s requirement of being "a good test problem" or of being a correct answer respectively ( still needs to be a correct answer to satisfy [O] and "a good test problem" to satisfy [P])).

 

A simpler solution is where correctness is not required in the solution. In that case, I think the null solution would be the simplest and the student should be docked for inelegance. This is the scenario where a proper [P] and could be:

 

[P] Solve 2 + 2

 

Purple, because ice cream has no bones

 

With that understanding, the simplest solution to any given [P] would be the empty answer. So that yields the following solution:

 

[O]Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

[P]Write a good test problem and answer it.

 

 

Either way, writing 2 lines is unsatisfactory.

[Vort]

Mordorbund, I 'Liked' your post because there was no 'Laugh' option, but I was literally chuckling while reading it. Well done.

[Vort]

Another one would be

 

There are 10 types of people in the world...

 

Those that understand binary and those that don't

 

Or "Those that divide people into 10 types and those that don't."

 

Hey, that combines two separate jokes into one. I like it.

[prisonchaplain]

I used to think I was relatively smart.  Now my head just hurts...real bad.   

[PolarVortex]

Even revising PV's joke, the answer suffers from an off-by-one error. Let's sidestep the not-a-question issue by changing it slightly:

 

[O]Write a good test problem and answer it... [snip]

 

Very nice, but one correction: It's not my joke.  IIRC, it came from one of Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" columns in Scientific American.  I actually remember where I was when I read it because I was in a campus library and burst out into nonstop laughter.  A nearby librarian gave me the evil eye, which made me laugh all the harder. 

 

I'm sure I laughed so hard because of one of my high school teachers.  She taught a course called "The American Indian" and was the laziest and most ineffective teacher I've ever known.  (Proof of this claim is easily shown, because after I finished the final exam I tried to think of just one new thing I had learned in the class and could not.)  Anyway, she was notorious for exams that contained only one problem: "Make up a good question about X and answer it," where X was some vast topic, often unrelated to native Americans, that students could drill into from zillions of angles.  My friends and I would compare our test grades later, and we concluded that any answer in the English language got an A.

 

I'd be happy to forward your objections to Mr. Gardner, but (if I understand another thread correctly) he's in spirit prison.

Edited December 4, 2014 by PolarVortex