College Athletes
College Athletes
[Cueball, Ponytail and White Hat are having a conversation. Ponytail is checking her phone.] Ponytail: Oh, huh. California passed a law giving college athletes full rights to their names and images. White Hat: Good, I think?
[Cueball holds his hand up in a fist, while Ponytail, holding her phone down, and White Hat looks at him.] Cueball: That's nothing. Our state gave college players rights to use the names and images of any California athletes. Ponytail: It did not.
[In a frame-less panel Cueball holds his hands out, Ponytail's phone is gone and White Hat puts a hand to his chin.] Cueball: Sure it did! Cueball: That's how our school fielded a basketball team made up entirely of Steph Currys. White Hat: Or is the plural "Stephs Curry"?
[Cueball holds both hands up in front of him. Ponytail has her arms down but she is balling her hands into fists.] Cueball: They didn't all copy the original Steph, though. One player got the rights to his name, then the next player got it from them, and so on. Cueball: This process is known as "currying". Ponytail: ...I hate you so much.

Ponytail is reading from her phone about the California Fair Pay to Play act , which was signed into law on September 30, 2019, two days before this comic was released. It gives college athletes the rights to their name and image (face, body, etc.) for financial gain, in contrast to NCAA rules which require that athletes be unpaid. This bill threatens the NCAA's notion of amateurism , which has become a topic of public debate.
White Hat thinks this law is a good thing, but then Cueball claims that his state has passed an even better law giving college players rights to the names and images of any California athletes. Note that Cueball's state is thus not California, so it is very odd they can use names from another state, in addition to the oddity of gaining rights to another person's name and image.
Ponytail doesn't believe Cueball, but he carries on claiming that all members of his school's basketball team thus have changed their name to Steph Curry after the NBA player who plays for the Golden State Warriors , a team in California. Cueball explains in particular that only one player copied the name from the NBA player, then another member of the team copied the name from that player, and so on.
As it turns out, in his final remark, all this has only been the setup for his grand joke: Cueball tells Ponytail and White Hat that this process of recursive name usage is known as "currying". In addition to a pun with basketball rules against carrying , avoidance of which often involves passing from one player to another, this is also a play on both the basketball player's name "Curry" used here, as well as the mathematical procedure called currying , named after mathematician Haskell Curry . This sort of humor is very typical of Cueball, leading Ponytail to state that she "hates him".
Currying is when a multi-variable function is broken down into a sequence of single-variable functions, each of which outputs a new function until the final variable is consumed. For example, the function f(x,y,z) can be curried into f(x)(y)(z), where f is a function that consumes x and produces a function f(x), which in turn consumes y, yielding the function f(x)(y), and that in turn is a function f(x)(y) which consumes the parameter z to finally produce f(x)(y)(z), which is equal to the original f(x,y,z). This is not commonly used in most areas of math except for foundational logic but it is widely used in functional programming.
When Cueball says a team made up entirely of Steph Currys , White Hat questions what the plural form should be, and should it instead have been " Stephs Curry "? This is referring to the pluralization of phrases where a noun is followed by a modifier of some sort, such as attorneys general , parts unknown , heirs apparent , mothers-in-law , and so on. In these cases, plurals are formed by pluralizing the noun parts of the phrases; however, some of these are rare or foreign enough that speakers of English don't always identify them correctly and pluralize the last word instead, e.g. attorney generals .
The title text is a computer science joke, saying that the Steph Currys basketball team's signature play is the "three-point combinator", a joke on the three-point play in basketball, and a type of fixed-point combinator called the Y Combinator , introduced by Haskell Curry. The description of "three-point combinator" is dense with word play that relates to the Y Combinator, which is used to implement recursive methods in functional programming languages, has notable properties relating to halting (see: the halting problem ), and has a common form in which a second argument is used as a counter that is increased by one with each recursive call until termination. "Signature play" may also be a play on words, as currying transforms a method signature .
In this case, when this move is performed, it will just keep accumulating points, as it is guaranteed it cannot halt and will not stop until the time runs out and the buzzer that ends the game is activated. Such a move can of course not be a part of a real basketball game, and more of a nod to the Golden State Warriors' reputation as a high-scoring, nearly-unstoppable offense widely known for three-point shooting.
[Cueball, Ponytail and White Hat are having a conversation. Ponytail is checking her phone.] Ponytail: Oh, huh. California passed a law giving college athletes full rights to their names and images. White Hat: Good, I think?
[Cueball holds his hand up in a fist, while Ponytail, holding her phone down, and White Hat looks at him.] Cueball: That's nothing. Our state gave college players rights to use the names and images of any California athletes. Ponytail: It did not.
[In a frame-less panel Cueball holds his hands out, Ponytail's phone is gone and White Hat puts a hand to his chin.] Cueball: Sure it did! Cueball: That's how our school fielded a basketball team made up entirely of Steph Currys. White Hat: Or is the plural "Stephs Curry"?
[Cueball holds both hands up in front of him. Ponytail has her arms down but she is balling her hands into fists.] Cueball: They didn't all copy the original Steph, though. One player got the rights to his name, then the next player got it from them, and so on. Cueball: This process is known as "currying". Ponytail: ...I hate you so much.
