What You Need To Know
I have been insanely busy and travelling all week. This will continue tomorrow, hopefully reaching a peak so that things will mellow out a bit into the weekend.
The remainder of this post is for the gentleman who, when challenged by me today asked me with a straight face “You don’t need proof that 1+1=2, do you?”
For those of you who don’t speak formal logic, you may translate this reply as “Actually, I do. And you want to believe that if I won’t take 1+1=2 on faith, then I’m certainly not going to give any credence to whatever crap you happen to think is ’self-evident’ without at least a whiff of rational evidence.”
Tags: Like A Damn Diary,Russell,thinking
Neil MacFarlane
Kira
May 9th, 2008 at 11:41 am
That’s stupid. Everyone knows that 1=2.
A=B
A^2=AB
A^2 - B^2 = AB-B^2
(A+B)(A-B)=B(A-B)
(A+B)=B
A+A=A
2A=A
2=1
Flawless logic.
May 9th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
If you really think (A+B)(A-B) is the same thing as A2-B2 in this case, then I should be making more money at poker since your calculation of pot and implicit odds should be… um… unique.
May 9th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Silly you. The problem with the proof is that it only works if A=B.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Either I’m really silly, or he started with that. Although we may both ultimately be saying the same thing, in our own idiom.
He goes from A2-B2 to (A+B)(A-B). This is legitimate for all cases except A=B. Unfortunately we know we’re in that case as an initial premise. What that amounts to is factoring by dividing by zero. You kind of can’t divide by zero.
Since we know A and B are the same, they could be any number. Let’s say A=B=2.
So A2-B2=AB-B2 is the same thing as 4-4=4-4, or 0=0. Tautological, but OK.
How ever in order to get to (A+B)(A-B) you have to say that 0= 0/0, which you can’t say. Or, as Wikipedia puts it:
Hence my previous comment. (A+B)(A-B) does equal A2-B2, except when A=B, which is our starting premise. In that case you can’t do the reverse distribution. Or rather, if you think you can, you end up proving that 1=2, and consequently that 1+1=4.
All this insight, and yet Neil still bluffs me off of pots all the damn time.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Ah. I see I didn’t think it through and you were five steps ahead of me.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention that I was I presumed we were using a commutative ring of numbers to form a wheel. I should have known you’d all stick to your non-abstract algebraic thought. Commoners.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:50 am
You never cease to surprise me.
Although I am sorely tempted to call fourberie on your supposed familiarity with the works of Jesper Carlström. I’ve seen his picture, and he doesn’t look like he could make it through the usual MacFarlane “it takes at least half a bottle of absinthe to earn my respect” tests.