Tech Tee Shirts Explained

Have you ever seen a tech tee shirt with technical saying or equation but didn’t know what it meant? It is almost as if someone is having an inside joke. Well now, here are some explanations of some of those tee shirts.


Caffeine Molecule Tee-shirt: You know how much people likes caffeine when you see them wearing a picture of the caffeine molecule on their tee-shirt.



PI Tee shirt – PI is a mathematical constant which has the numeric value that is infinitely long and starts out with 3.1415… This tee-shirts has the numeric value of PI written out to some length. The shading shows that of the Greek letter PI which is used to denote this numeric value.


Get Real, Be Rational The “i” is an imaginary number which is told by “pi” to “be real”. “pi” is an irrational number, which is told by “i” to “be rational”.


Binary People – The tech tee-shirt says “There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understands binary and those who don’t.” The “10” is the number two in the binary number system. So the sentence is really saying that there are two types of people. But that is only apparent to those who understands binary enough to realize that “10” is the binary number for “2”.


SQL Query tech tee shirt – It shows a SQL query: “SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0”. A SQL query is a database query to retrieve records from the database. Loosely translated, the query is trying to find users that have a clue. Then the tee-shirts shows the answers of that query to be “0 rows returned”. Translated it means “There are no users that have a clue.” Or to put it in another way, all users are clueless.


Geek Love Poem T-Shirt: This shirt shows … ROSES ARE #FF0000 VIOLETS ARE #0000FF ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO YOU. #FF0000 is the hex color code for red. And #0000FF is the hex color code for blue.



No place like 127.0.0.1 tee shirt: This tee-shirt says “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1”. It is a play on the phrase, “there is no place like home”. The IP address 127.0.0.1 refers to home because that is the IP address of “localhost” or your own home server.


Tee shirt of a Capsaicin Molecule – This T-shirt basically says “Hot”. The capsaicin molecule shown is the active ingredient of hot chili peppers.



“What Would Joel Do” T-shirt: The shirt says “WWJD? What would Joel do?” Joel Spolsky is know in the tech circles as the programmer who write the blog JoelOnSoftware.com and the book “Joel On Software” which has a really long sub-title of “And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity”


Sudo Tech Tee Shirt: This shirt shows a cartoon where one person asks another to make a sandwich. But the other refuses. Until the first precedes the command with “sudo”. And that worked. The other must comply. Afterall, he did use the “sudo” command, which in UNIX is command that allows users to run programs with the security privileges of another user such as a super user. Many times programmer will run a command which fails and then immediately run the same command using sudo and it works.


Don’t Drink and Root: Don’t drink and type Unix commands. Otherwise, you might accidentally type the command on the T-Shirt. Please do not type the command to see what it does. It is a dangerous command. I tell you what it does. It deletes everything from your server recursively using super-user privilege (and without asking for confirmation). That’s why people who knows this command and sees it on the T-shirt thinks it is really funny.


I ate some pie: This T-Shirt basically says “I ate some pie, and it was delicious”. The square root of -1 is “i” the imaginary number. The number 2 to the 3rd power is “8”. The greek sigma symbol is often used to denote “sum”. And then you have the irrational number “pi”.


I wear this shirt periodically Because it shows a “periodic table”.


There are three kinds of people: T-shirt says the three kinds of people are “those who can count, and those who can not”. Obviously, the person wearing the T-shirt belongs to the latter.


Things just got real: Okay, this T-Shirt requires some real knowledge of math. When you take the square root of negative things, you get an imaginary number. But then when you square it, you get a real number back.


Glass is completely full Technically speaking, it is 50% air and 50% water.


You’re pointless: The triangle (which has three points) says to the circle “You’re Pointless”. Because the circle has no points.


Alcohol is a solution
In Chemistry, a solution is “a liquid mixture in which the minor component (the solute) is uniformly distributed within the major component (the solvent).”