decipher TB's email signature challenge

Submitted by tbuitenh on Wed, 2007-08-22 09:27.

Posts: 1059
Joined: 2005-12-21

Let's have a little community building summer fun!

This kind of started here, where it is off-topic.

The code is as follows:

$\forall a \in \{affirmations\}: a \sim T, a \sim F, a \sim \Mu,
a \sim T \land F, a \sim T \land \Mu, a \sim F \land \Mu,
a \sim T \land F \land \Mu$

What does it mean? Where did I find this (in unencoded form)? Tell me the title of the publication and the page number. You will win the right to ask the next riddle.

Free-zombie seems to have figured out it is LaTeX code.

First hint: \Mu (M, lowercase is μ) is actually the wrong character, a Mu (or Wu) from a different language should be in its place.

CAN I HAS FIXD CAPSLOK KEE PLZ?

Wed, 2007-08-22 10:39 So... I believe to know all

free-zombie

Posts: 799
Joined: 2006-03-08

Taco, I'd get rid of the braces. They make it look like a set with one element.

It is an encoded form of the name SRI SYADASTI SYADAVAKTAVYA SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADASTI CAVAKTAVYASCA SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADAVATAVYASCA SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADAVAKTAVYASCA, which is Sanskrit and means All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

T and F stand for true and false, respectively. \Mu must therefore stand for "meaningless", and probably refers to the Mu in Zen philosophy.

Taco probably got it from pages 39f of the Principia Discordia.

How I found out: after Taco confirmed that it's LaTeX, there was no doubt about the general structure of the statement. Now knowing that this is a very encoded quote, I just googled for "all affirmations" and that as good as did the rest.

We'll see about a riddle...

Edit: also,

Thomas Jollans
GnuPG key: 1024D/A6B5 9461 B60F 2C80 2399 6B1E 2698 A70E F421 434B

Wed, 2007-08-22 19:59 we have a winner

tbuitenh

Posts: 1059
Joined: 2005-12-21

Upon solving the riddle, free-zombie was enlightened. Or not.

free-zombie wrote:

Taco, I'd get rid of the braces. They make it look like a set with one element.

That depends on what dialect of math you speak. I'm used to sets either having a one uppercase character name, or a descriptive lowercase name between braces, eg $\{white swans\} \cap \{black swans\} = \emptyset$. A set containing the string "affirmations" as it's only element would be $\{``affirmations''\}$.

By the way, where did you get that sick TeX font? Eye-wink