Title: !False
General Information about Item:
- Joke
- English
- United States
Informant Data:
- Alisha is a Dartmouth ’19 who majors in Government. Her familiarity with computer science comes from a course she took in high school.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context
- This joke could be understood by anybody who understands boolean logic, which while typically associated with programmers is not necessarily limited to them. The major limitation on context is on the medium of the interaction. This joke when presented verbally loses much of its substance. This joke would specifically come up in text based interactions such as texting, email, letters, forums, whiteboard, etc.. Many of which are just as prevalent if not more so in the current world than traditional face-to-face interactions.
- Cultural Context
- In boolean logic, all statements equate to either 0 (FALSE) or 1 (TRUE). The ! is symbolic for the NOT operator which simply takes an input and returns whichever the input is not (i.e. the input is 0 or 1 and returns 1 or 0 respectively). Therefore the statement !FALSE equates to TRUE. Additionally, this depends on the common understanding that some jokes are more humorous because of their accuracy. These two concepts combine to create what is essentially a pun using the vernacular of boolean logic.
Item:
!FALSE.
[Pause] It’s funny because it’s true.
Transcript:
- Robert: Could you please give your name and background?
- Alisha: My name is Alicia. I am a ’19. I am a government major and I took a programming course back in high school.
- Robert: Could you please tell your joke?
- Alisha: !FALSE..(short pause)…It is funny because it is true.
- Robert: Could you please tell me where you heard this joke?
- Alisha: I heard it in class.
- Robert: Could you please give a brief explanation of the joke?
- Alisha: Basically the ! serves as a common symbol for the NOT logic operator which returns the opposite of its input, in this case FALSE(0) so the statement was TRUE(1). It relates to the use of the terms TRUE and FALSE when describing logic operators in programming.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Collector’s Name: Robert Sylvia
Tags/Keywords:
- Joke. Computer Science. Boolean logic. Pun. Programming.