@whitequark The Banach-Tarsky Paradox goes roughly that if you'd divide a sphere in three dimensional space into (infinite!) pieces and then reassemble them, you've got enough for two.
So, if you disassemble "Banach-Tarsky" and rearrange it again (basically what an anagram does), you get twice the words.
The time traveler crawled out from under his malfunctioning machine. He looked relieved as he said to himself, “This should be easy. It’s 1750 B.C. and I’m in Ur, but all I need is some quality copper.”
@whitequark The Edmonton Oilers decide to change their name to keep pace in a post fossil fuel economy. They decide to go with something their fans will be able to remember: the Edmonton Eulers.
They hold a press conference to announce the change. A journalist asks, "Isn't the new name a little derviative?"
The manager answers, "yes, but only of ourselves."
There are lots of interlingual soy milk jokes (comic examples attached).
Though, all this reminds me of DJ Statik (of Das Bunker notoriety, though in more recent years deejayin at Midnight Mess in Tokyo, Japan) going out to Indian food with me and DJ Abattoir (RIP).
He held up a piece of naan bread and asked me: "これはナンですか。”
「kore wa nan desu ka」Translation:
"Is this naan?"
Which is a homonym of これは何ですか。「kore wa nan desu ka」
Translation:
"What is this?"
Definitely one of those kinds of jokes that required interlingual knowledge and literacy to grok.
@teajaygrey should he not have written これはナアンですか。 instead?
(My Japanese is really basic, sorry… just wrapping around my head when to use Hiragana versus Katakana — while being acquainted maybe with 30% of each —, and no Kanji yet.)
@whitequark in Germany there are two cities called Frankfurt. The main one and the other one. (Requires knowledge of German geography and a bit of German vocabulary)
@whitequark The city most English speakers call Frankfurt is called Frankfurt-am-Main (Frankfurt on the [river] Main). There is another Frankfurt near the Polish border called Frankfurt-an-der-Oder (also named for a river, the Oder). Oder means “other” in German. So the main Frankfurt is on the Main, and the other Frankfurt is on the Oder.
☛ In Kyrgyz, the suffix -kana means “the place where”, e.g.
kitepkana (kitep = books) = library
bilimkana (bilim = knowledge) = school
namaskana (namas = prayer) = mosque
KAMAZ was/is a Soviet/Russian truck factory, and in KG there are still a lot of Soviet trucks.
thus Kamazkana = building site
@whitequark
In German, bike is “Fahrrad” (drive-wheel) and hair is “Haar(e)”.
There are at least two mobile hairdressers called “Haarrad”.
Maybe not a good pun, but it translates into Russian as “волосыпед”.
hair = волосы
bike = велосипед (velociped)
(The Russian word for hairdresser is парикмахер, a pun on its own, since it means “wig maker” in German/Yiddish.)
@whitequark Un homme est allé dans une cafe.
“Quest-ce vous desirée?” dit le garçon.
“Un Café espagnol, s’il vous plait.”
“Un café espagnol? C’est quoi?” dit le garçon.
“Ah, c’est facile. C’est un café… au lait!”
(Obscure only because I have to remember my schoolgirl French to tell it!)
@whitequark an infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer, the second orders half a beer. The bartender sighs, says "you're all idiots", and pours two beers.
@whitequark I once had a repo for Python interop with a project named Liquid, and named it big-boss. That way you could run git clone big-boss to get liquid-snake.
@whitequark it is not obscure but definitely my favorite, but in college I told my then-girlfriend-now-wife the "What's purple and commutes?" joke, and though she has repeatedly told me she does not understand why the joke is funny (only for lack of trying, she's brilliant), she still enthusiastically responds with "Abelian Grapes" every time.
I had a draft of a standup routine at one point where I would open the set with a bunch of really terrible unfunny jokes, then self-deprecate with "hm, I guess I should tell a real joke. Um, every randomized benchmarking paper since 2012."
@whitequark i always give my projects doubly indirect names
my current one is a screen temperature daemon named cosmos, after a boss from granblue fantasy that has a mechanic that involves balancing red and blue levels
@xgranade I simultaneously do not understand this, yet at the same time feels completely in-line with what I do understand about quantum mechanics (i.e.: take everything that makes intuitive sense and throw it out the window).
@me It's really much more mundane than that, and comes down to that quantum metrologists decided to rename the Cramér–Rao bound for a specific experiment the "standard quantum limit." Other experiments "violate" it in the sense that they are different experiments with different Fisher informations.
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