swestrup | Namenclature.

Its difficult talking about folks when everyone has the same first name. I once worked in a company with three guys named Mike in the same small department. They ended up being called Mike A, Mike B, and Mike C, since their last initials were A, B and C. I don't even remember who Mike A was, but I'm still friends with Mike B and run into Mike C on rare occasions.

In a similar vein, I currently know 4 folks with the first name of 'Peter' or some varient. Luckily (?) two are french, one is english and one is spanish, so a first cut can reduce them to 2 Pierres, one Peter and one Pedro. But what about the Pierres? (Okay, its true that

cpirate is also a Peter, but I don't know any funny stories about him.)

Lately I've often had to stop and point out that when I am telling a funny story about Pierre, it either IS, or ISN'T

pphaneuf. Obviously, a naming convention is needed. At first, it was proposed that I refer to them as 'Pants-On Pierre" and "Pants-Off Pierre", which would seem to be a distinguishing characteristic. I have seen both without pants, but only one of them has graced the main page of a website dedicated to pantslessness.

The trouble, of course, is that these are cumbersome phrases and in both cases the initals are P.O.P. An alternative then would be to use the P+P for Pants-On Pierre and P-P for Pants-Off Pierre. Of course, then one is tempted to do the math and end up with 2P and 0 as the identifiers, which don't seem to work as well.

Then again, a bit more math gives us P^log_p2 and P^-∞ which may or may not be better...