New answers tagged specific-question
2
I feel the deletion is a significant loss to MathOverflow. As one of a few prominent older light-hearted threads, it helped make MO an entertaining and enjoyable place — like the departmental lounge, where you talk maths but also relax a bit. If such questions are lost, it comes to feel more like a research-level equivalent of a TA session or a lecturer’s ...
14
Apparently the entire question has now been deleted… and now I'm feeling a little alarmed, like I accidentally knocked over somebody's favorite sculpture or something.
The reason I posted this was so that some of you could look at a potential problem I saw, talk about it if you wanted to, and do something about it if you wanted to.
What happened was that I ...
11
Now that this meta question exists, I wonder if an alternative to deletion could be to edit the jokes in question to remark that they could be considered offensive, and to add a link to this meta question.
There is a slight but IMO important distinction between making a joke in anger, and quoting a joke in response to a request for math jokes. For example, ...
-4
There are established mathematical terms which may be construed as to carry sexial or drug/alcohol-related innuendo. Examples:
handlebody
pipe dream
drunkard's walk
perverse sheaf
Tits alternative
hairy ball theorem
Should MO start censoring these and similar established terms, too?
IMHO, word play in some of the cited in the question jokes is quite ...
39
I wanted to say specifically why the second joke on the list really should be deleted. There's a very common trope in math where people analogize math to an attractive woman often explicitly in a sexual way. I've seen this happen in talks. I once saw it happen in a talk where the person illustrated the point with a photo. This is all really deeply ...
-5
Just delete the entire question. It’s already closed as off-topic, it’s not what the site is for. There’s no good reason for it to still be there.
9
Edit 3: I'm not sure why I didn't think of mentioning this before I made a mess of things, but there is already a standard way to deal with answers and questions that are rude or abusive, namely by flagging them as such. This method does not require any moderator intervention to yield concrete results.
Edit 2: I have undeleted the answers for now, and I am ...
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