Are you gay?

ziggy on 2004-10-17T02:29:50

Last night, I was asked the strangest question:

Are you gay?

To be fair, there are a few times when that question is not entirely out of line. If, for example, you happened to be an exceptionally well-groomed metrosexual, and someone mistakes you for a gay man. Or if you know what's so funny about Homer Simpson citing the glory hole as one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. Or if you get one too many of the inside references in Queer as Folk. All hypothetically speaking, of course.

And then there's the old standby -- just because a man is married, and fathered two children doesn't mean that he isn't gay.

That aside, the rest of the conversation went something like this:

What would make you say that?

Well, I saw you went browsing to this site -- Lambda the Ultimate.

Yeah? And?

Well, isn't Lambda a symbol of the gay community?

Lambda the Ultimate is about a different Lambda.

Thanks!

Ovid on 2004-10-17T02:47:01

Well?

brev on 2004-10-18T15:36:15

Lambda this, λ that

n1vux on 2004-10-18T15:50:00

This, I should note, was asked by the woman I'll be marrying in less than two months.
  To be fair, there are a few times when that question is not entirely out of line. ... And then there's the old standby -- just because a man is married, and fathered two children doesn't mean that he isn't gay.

Better she ask two months before than two months after. I don't recommend anyone marry anyone they don't trust completely -- which includes trusting the beloved enough to tell the beloved everything. Being "Straight but not Narrow", I would not consider bisexuality a detriment to marriage ... but I expect partners to know sooner as opposed to later -- and realize some might have other issues.

Anyway, congratulations on the impending nuptials. May this be your greatest misunderstanding for some time to come.

At least you've come out as a Functional Programmer publicly. :-)

Lambda the Ultimate is about a different Lambda.

Well, it's the same Greek letter (symbol, glyph) λ, just abbreviating and connoting a different concept. IIRC, λ originally stood for LET in the lambda-calculus, although we have re-introducted LET as a subtlely different operator in Lispish dialects today. I can understand a non-geek non-greek being thrown by the website title ... some non-geek non-straight friends of mine would probably be very disappointed if they clicked through that link. ;-)

Wishing you the best for your matrimonials

Re:Lambda this, λ that

Dominus on 2004-11-09T18:20:03

IIRC, λ originally stood for LET in the lambda-calculus

I don't think that is correct. According to Peter Norvig, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming:

The name lambda comes from the mathematician Alonzo Church's notation for functions (Church 1941). ... Lambda derives from the notation in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, which used a caret over bound variables... Church wanted a one-dimensional string, so he moved the caret in front... . The caret looked funny with nothing below it, so Church switched to the closest thing, an uppercase lambda [Λ].... The lambda was easily confused with [the logical and symbol], so eventually the lowercase lambda was substituted... . John McCarthy was a student of Church's at Princeton, so when McCarthy invented Lisp in 1958, he adopted the lambda notation.