> So you see Alice has a whole bunch of problems to face. Oh yes, and there is one more thing I forgot so say - Alice doesn't trust Bob. We don't know why she doesn't trust him, but at some time in the past there has been an incident.<p>> Now most people in Alice's position would give up. Not Alice. She has courage which can only be described as awesome. Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and to organize a coup d'etat, while at the same time minimizing the cost of the phone call.<p>> A coding theorist is someone who doesn't think Alice is crazy.
I recently went to a conference presentation that attributed this CS in joke as indicative of how the field is deeply gendered. This paper isn't by the researchers I saw, but speaks to that. <a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3017794" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3017794</a>
> One time I got really mad at it. Like all computers, it knew precisely what I wanted it to do. It knew exactly what I MEANT. So why does it have to go and DO what I SAID?<p>> How do you get even with a dumb machine like that?<p>> First I tried slapping it around a little. I pushed its buttons a bit hard. I threatened it. "How would you like a busted display" I said.<p>> But it did no good. It just said "I am virtually unbreakable - and I'm not going to take any notice till you enter the data nicely, like you used to do."<p>This is beautiful. I loved how it explained processing delay with "real" world examples. Funny and interesting speech.
The phonetic alphabet is gold<p>> L for Leather<p>> U for Mism<p>> Y for Lover<p>The last one took me a while, I had to say it out loud a few times.
(possibly incomplete, can't get to original) mirror: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/alice-and-bob" rel="nofollow">http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/alice-and-bob</a>