Fixed URL: http://boingboing.net/2015/11/17/who.html
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you messing with us? that’s a 404. or is the post scheduling thing messed up?
ETA: nevermind.
well, just last week he said his name was Basil. so, who do we believe?
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Basil Fawlty? Maybe John Cleese will be the next Doctor.
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He’ll be almost as good as Rowan Atkinson.
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can you imagine? television perfection = achieved.
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He did say it was Basil, like it was no big deal.
The series has gone on at great length about what his “name” is, which I always took to be his full name, including surname and any titles. The reasoning for it, which the series hasn’t gone that deep into, is if you knew his surname or family name, then you’d know his lineage. And if you knew his lineage, you’d know their place in the Time Wars and everything leading up to it and how it all related to decisions he made and his family members made culminating in his theft of the TARDIS and flight into the cosmos and away from the war zone.
So, knowing his first name is Basil is cool. Maybe he was just lying and being funny about it, like he likes to be.
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It loses something in translation from the original Gallifrean.
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Maybe Basil is how you pronounce d³∑x² in gallifrian? 
Likely. Especially with this Doctor.
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It almost looks like real mathematics. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…
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yeah, i’m an old enough fan to have just assumed that his tongue was firmly planted in his cheek when he said that.
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When I was chatting with Eddie izzard–another higher life form hell bent on saving earth–he mentioned d³∑x² is actually pronounced ‘Jeff’.
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Isn’t The Doctor the consummate bullshit artist, though? I mean, that’s his whole schtick with the see-what-you-want-to-see paper and whatnot, right? I mean, I would go with him if the tardis showed up outside my house, sure, but can you believe everything he says?
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If you squint and rotate the sigma, d³∑x² looks kind of like dr WHo.
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How do you say that?
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Are we sure that is a ∑ Sigma? It looks more like a side ways M
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Why would he have a letter of a foreign alphabet? Or it it just representative of a mathematics thing and that is a translation?
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Is it just they number everyone on Galifrey, but instead of having a traditional base 10 number, you can come up with a fancy equation or use hexadecimal or what ever to be fancy?
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i was gonna say it’s almost leetspeak for something that looks like “Deexs,” haha – but your solution is better.
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My theory is that on his first trip to Earth, he was having some business cards made (it was the 60s and every respectable time traveling alien had business cards) and the printer couldn’t read his bad handwriting when typesetting his name, so d³∑x² became Dr Who.
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Shoulda just base64 encoded it. ZMKz4oiReMKy prints nicely 
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Honestly, some parents. What on Earth were they thinking?
I know, they didn’t even specify what they were summing over.
Plus, if you expand that out, they named him zero.
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that’s as good a theory as i’ve ever heard. and of course, he just rolled with it.
