Tinsology

I suddenly recall something interesting a professor of mine pointed out a couple years ago while on a tangent during lecture. It has to do with the nature of infinity and how accepting something perfectly reasonable as true leads to less intuitive, but equally true conclusions.

The following expression is true and most people would not argue otherwise:

1/3 = .3333333333 . . .


Assume, of course, that there is an infinite number of 3s trailing the decimal point. The following expression is also true, and even fewer people would argue otherwise:


1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1


This may seem obvious, but what may be less obvious is what follows logically from the two expressions above:

  .333333 . . .
  .333333 . . .
+ .333333 . . .
_______________________
  .999999 . . .  =  1

You may be reluctant to accept that the third expression is true, but if you accept the first two expressions, there is no avoiding it. Most people with a background in computer science or mathematics probably won’t be blown away by this, but it is fun, nerdy thing to point out to your friends in the humanities department (or anyone with a B.A.)

BWI, blogging while intoxicated.

Quoting my professor:

When a parent forks a child it waits for it to exit.

If you don’t find this funny it is because

1. You arn’t familiar with UNIX
2. Your sense of humor isn’t that of child

Symptoms include…

• Refusing to eat pork
• Constantly watching the news
• Demanding border closures
• Wearing face masks in public
• Being unaware that antibiotics have never stopped a virus
• Inability to measure the scale of a situation (141 / 350,000,000 = OMG I’m going to die!)

I take no issue with cage free eggs or vegetables grown without exposure to pesticides, but I do take issue with the word organic when used to describe food.

“I can’t eat that cheeseburger because it is not organic.”

“Really!? Its not relating to or derived from or having properties characteristic of living organisms? To think that I went my whole life thinking beef was from cows.”

You know you’ve spent too much time programming when you start ending your sentences with a semicolon;

If coffee were cocaine… I’d be Rick James.

Every now and then I sit down for a test that I am completely unprepared for. In that moment of desperation I think to myself “Maybe I can infer the required knowledge before time runs out”.

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1.

TODO:
Invent Calculus

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Should I ever become terminally ill, I plan to make excessive use of the WordPress post scheduling feature so I appear to be blogging from beyond the grave.

By the way…
I wrote this on the 8th, but it wasn’t published until the 13th. I might be dead already.

Every time I have an exam, I show up to class and place my scan tron and number 2 pencil on my desk, in plain sight. This is perfectly normal for exams that require a scan tron, but in those that don’t it may cause people to run to the bookstore and then arrive once again ten minutes late, clearly exhausted.

Variations on this method:

• Show up with a blue book
• Show up with a clearly different scan tron
• Show up with an abacus

That last one may not cause anyone to run to the store, but it may cause them to have second thoughts about how they invested their studying time.