190: “Hey Jude” Flowchart

My dad sent me an email forward.

Which you’ve seen—I’m sure. I know I have. But that’s what forwards are for, right?

However, there are a whole bunch of errors in that picture, and it reminded me of how frustrated I got the first time I saw it.

So, I started to edit it.

One thing that is particularly glaring to me, is there’s no path to repeat the phrase, “Na na … na na, Hey Jude,” which is pretty much most of the song. You can repeat “Na”, but then to get to “Hey Jude,” you have to go back to the start of the song, and start again. That’s not how the song works.

The timing of this email forward was good for me, as well. I’ve been recently learning  about circuitry and logic gates, so I’ve got flowcharts on the mind.

So in the spirit of ruining the joke, I wasted a few hours on this:

I thought about only having one box for “Hey Jude” and one box for “Na,” and just using some interesting logic gates to get in and out of those sections, but I ultimately decided against it for readability. You could, in theory use each word only once, and loop back to them when you need them, but that would get messy. As a compromise I unnecessarily reused “your shoulder.”

I know you’ll be sure to point out any errors. That’s what comment sections are for.

(I didn’t initially make this to post here. I was just completely unable to stop myself, but then I remembered I had this blog. So, here you go, folks.)