Have I tattooed a syntax error on my arm?

I'm afraid that's the conclusion I've come to with every idea for a tattoo I've had over the last 20 or so years. I can't come up with anything with which I care to be stuck for the rest of my life. "Yeah, that's not going to seem so clever in ten years, is it?" So my skin remains untouched by the inky goodness of my local tattoo artist.

A tattoo is an oxymoron: a permanent fashion item.

My kids can't believe what we used to wear when I was their age. (It makes me laugh, too.) I look around at every garage sale and see $5 items that used to be considered quite elegant. I think of the hairstyles, room styles, humor styles, political causes, hobbies, relationships, and so much more that have flowed past like a river and disappeared around the bend.

Thank goodness, I'm not stuck today having to continue making any fashion statements I might have chosen years ago.

I tell my kids that I don't care if they get tattoos as long as they are the temporary kind. Maybe adults should switch to temporary tattoos, too. Treat them like any other form of fashion statement: make the statement you want when and where you want, then change when you want something else (and later you probably will want something else.)

Not unrelated, but I have "Cheese is good" tattooed across my lower back... it's pretty ambiguous in meaning, but has served me well throughout my life... I only note this because of most of the things that I did as an undergraduate philosophy student, it's about the only thing I still find charming. You can't really test against an uncertain future.

What does 'ex nihilo ad absurdum' mean? I only know what little goofy Latin I've picked up online, and my guess is "absurdity out of nothing".

Philosophy is just what we call the most fundamental systems of ideas that govern everything else. Naturally, it is the source for the gravest possible darkness. But it is also the source of the greatest possible light.

The question doesn't appear to be closed, just protected.

Why is a Question asking about syntax of whitespace in bash not suitable for stack overflow?

There's a worse problem on English stack exchange where people will say that your question has been answered even though none of the words you used are in any of their suggestions. This not only hurts searchability of questions and answers, but fails to recognise that many people using the site have English as a second language.

Leaving it open is no big deal either. Or would that be the downfall of SO?

I've heard of some tattoo artists that grab a copy of the barcode for Tampax or Corn Flakes when they're asked to do a barcode tattoo.

I have a theory that foreign language tattoos (or code tattoos, for that matter) arise mainly from a desire to have something (seemingly) unique tattooed. That, and some signalling implying some hidden skill/knowledge that the tattooed person must have.

The uniqueness bit is somewhat ironic, considering it's the thing that a large part of your peer group is rushing to do, as well.

I remember when my brother proudly showed me his Chinese tattoo. He said "guess what it says". I looked at it for about 15 seconds and said "Tiger?" and he was like "how'd you know that?!".

It said "tig" in a sort of Chinesey looking font.

Could be worse. I know someone who picked a tattoo out of the artist's book because it looked cool, and later discovered it was the logo of a Mexican prison gang.

You’ll see just as much english gibberish on chinese teens t-shirts. I haven’t seen any on tattoos, but they also seem to be significantly less common than in the US.

I think it probably has more to do with just how prevalent tattoos seem to have become in America in general.

Tattoos have simply become more acceptable in some circles where they previously were not.

I have my username tattooed in binary on my arm:

http://imageshar.es/52deec31f629007c14000e24

I'm an American hacker with a tattoo. For me, I wanted something that symbolized my life up until that point (and since, but I don't like to make assumptions about what I'll be doing in the future). So, I ended up with a very simple lambda on my left shoulder -- it was the best symbol to summarize what my life had been up until that point. Very few others ever see it, so it's really just for me; a nice reminder of my commitment to hackerdom.

There's no cultural significance, it's just (hetero) male bonding.

I wanted to get <?=phpinfo();?> on my arm once. The thought of what it would output if run on a human still amuses me and if I had got it done, I don't think I'd be sick of it now, even though I've not coded in PHP for 2 or 3 years.

I just have my son's name in binary ascii spiraled around my upper arm. It's nothing but ones and zeroes but it gets a lot of compliments.

i liked the cat /dev/random | sort Boringly it does not work as /dev/random never closes

Here is my own one:

grep life /dev/urandom | strings

The search for life continues.

The Augmented Reality tattoo is pretty cool and functional. I could see that catching on. I can imagine a screen floating with text massages instead of a animated character.

Well, at least it's not a total loss, since the SO mods take great joy in killing joy.

One wonders how they deal with the situation of their own joyfulness, because it too should obviously be killed, but in order to do that they'd have to unhold joyful and interesting questions, creating joy which itself necessitates killing, and so on. Fork bomb.

The notice is playing the odds; it doesn't track referrers, and right now most of the traffic is actually coming from Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1vs4uu/have... to be precise). You might be surprised how many people with several thousand rep points forget the rules when they've been on Reddit recently.

Why is a non-terminating loop better than a fork bomb?

At least the tattoo inker should have run some CLI tests first... duh. Can't trust those people.

It recursively calls both itself and another copy of itself. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/991142/how-does-this-bash...

You could go the skin graft route, but that would be annoying.

IANAD, but if you tried to (gently) stretch the skin where you need the space (like with some tape and sticks) then over a period of months you'd grow some new skin in between. You don't want to stretch the skin too much too quickly, or you'll get stretch marks (like some pregnant mothers do).

I think some bleach would work miracles for adding white space.

Or he could squeeze in a square of white ink.

Because there's a definitive answer and it's reasonably free from opinion.

This is the opposite, it works in zsh but not bash.