At least that car has protection versus thunder – get it? Get it?

Man, it really has been a while, huh? Ah, school. I missed you. No, really, I did. This week brings me a take-home final exam that… well, that’s about all I can tell you. I have an exam. Ah, ethical rules. I didn’t miss you as much, and those were the itty-bitty college ethical rules, not the big honking law school rules.

 

But that’s not why I’m here tonight. Nor am I here to tell you that I’ve been cast as the Prologue and the Apothecary in the GG&SS winter production of Romeo and Juliet (on the one hand, so very very few lines. On the other… easy to learn, and I am going to ROCK them.).

 

No, I came to tell you that it just started raining, a rain heralded by a gi-freaking-normous bout of very near thunder that at first startled me… and then annoyed me, because someone’s car alarm started going off after that thunderclap. It goes for two minutes, then another thunderclap sets it off again. What the fuck. Really? Excuse me, I have to put on my raincoat and grab my alarm silencer. I mean crowbar.

My intuition isn’t flawed, math is.

Here is a gem of an article, not by virtue of the content, though it is well-written, but by virtue of the waves of dispute that followed it.

The guy (proof of gender) posted a few well-pruned arguments that show 0.999… = 1. Despite the five or so different proofs, there were so many disbelieving comments that he had to write three more blog posts just to cover refutations of the ‘counter-arguments’, some of which were as eloquent and convincing as:

Is is NOT and WILL not EVER be exactly 1, because, by DEFINITION, it is LESS than 1. If you fail to understand this, then you simply fail to understand the definition of .9 repeating. I was sick in school, and never went on to uni and higher math, but even I know you’re waay wrong.

And yes, the title of this post is also a direct quote from one of the comments. Apparently there was quite a commotion over this ‘scandal’:

This blog has gotten over 70,000 hits since the original post was on the front page of digg.  The discussion there and at numerous other small forums makes it clear that the refutations aren’t being read.  There have even been meta-discussions on how this fact can get a warning from digg about containing inaccurate information, even though every knowledgeable source of information agrees with me.  The only reasonable criticism I found on the digg site is that this doesn’t belong in the news because the proof has been around for so long that it ought not count as news.

The digg post still has the inaccurate information warning. Seriously. Click on it. Then bang your head into the wall and click it again. Still there. Repeat as necessary. Incidentally, it seems that 7 is a good approximation for infinity (see the URL for the digg post)– good to know.

Well my fellow citizens of thought, we certainly have our work cut out for us if we hope to one day refute creationism– we can’t even convince people of things that are true BY DEFINITION.

doo doo dooot doo doo do doo dooot doo doo doot doo doo do doo doot

I just looked at my gchat bar and thought it told me I was invincible… I don’t remember eating a star, so it must be time for bed. Also, I wish I were using a no-regret algorithm to write about no-regret algorithms for my NSF proposal. And yes, if you are stalking me pretty hard, you will know that I just combined my two statuses (stati?) to create this post. But in addressing this point (and mentioning the self-referential nature of the post, and of this aside in particular, in an aside), I have now added more.