Titbits

Advertisements: one 'd.' Therefore 'ads,' not 'adds.' 'Adds' is the present tense third-person singular of 'to add.'

Dear Morrison's supermarket,

What the hell is the point of selling mince pies in a nice Christmassy box, when the use-by date is some time in late November?

Trickle-down economics: the theory that the vast and ever-expanding reservoirs belonging to the extremely rich might one day overflow a little bit.

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If 97 Out Of 100 Mechanics Told You Your Brakes Were About To Fail, Would You Still Drive Your Car?

John Oliver hosts a truly balanced debate on climate change.
—Daz

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Of Gaps, Gods And Polygons

Charles Ismay-Darling, who wasted a good portion of the early part of his life chasing around the world and bringing home dead finches, before finally turning to serious mathematological studies. Suffered from cirripedaphobia—the irrational hatred of barnacles.

One hundred and fifty years ago, pioneer mathenaturalist, Charlie Ismay Darling, advanced the theory that was to change the world of mathematology forever: the theory of evolvomatutics by mutable seduction. Briefly stated, he postulamatated—and has since been proved correct by so many independent methods that only a nutter or a creationist would argue against it—that numbers and shapes evolvomalate over time to become different numbers and shapes.

There are so many pieces of supporting evidamence for this that it would be daft to try to list them all, but here are some of the better known examples. The number 2, it has been discovered, if looked at in a warped mirror with your eyes nearly shut, looks a bit like the number 5—a clear example of evolvomatution. If you think of a number, add the year of your birth and divide by the square root of Russell's Teapot, you end up with an unexpectedly irrational answer. Not only did this add further evidamence in support of Darling's theory, but it also opened up a whole new branch of study; that of irrational, nay stark raving bonkers, number theory. Not since an unknown and possibly stoned 9^th Century Indian mathematologist invented the number 58, has the field been so invigorated. Perhaps the greatest triumph in the field of evolvomatutics though, came in the 1920s (so numerologists, who know about arcane stuff like dates, not to mention prunes, raisins and other fruit of questionable taste, tell us), David Hilbert, supreme infinitologist, discovered that the number 8, when turned on its side, produces an infinity of bad mathematological puns. It was a sad loss to the mathematological world when he retired to open what has become the word's most successful chain of hotels. Or possibly just a hotel with infinite entrances; no one's quite sure.

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Geometry For Dummies And (Apparently) Climate-Change Deniers

Do you ever see comments that are so astoundingly dumb that your jaw bruises as it bounces off your chest? I have a name for them; I call them ‘why are there still monkeys’ comments. That’s how amazingly, stupefyingly silly I mean.

Yesterday I posted this graph, showing sea-ice shrinkage in the Arctic, on a post about climate change.

It wasn’t much of a post, just a whimsical analogy I thought of that seemed worth throwing out there, and I wasn’t really expecting any feedback off it at all. And I was nearly right in my expectation. Nearly. I did, however, get this comment:

“There are nice satellite photos to misspell[sic] the myth that Arctic ice is shrinking. That is, it’s shrinking in some places (hence you can draw a nice graph) and growing in other places.”

My jaw-thud registered on the Richter scale! After a mildly sarcastic reply, however, I left it alone.

But.

It kept niggling at me; an itch in the back of my mind.

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A Test Of Conviction For Climate-Change Deniers

If you can look at this graph, and not see doom in store for the company it portrays…

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