prog | Entries tagged with mathematics

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Heh heh, pages upon pages of people going No... NO! Aaaaaagh you're all wrong shut up about the .999... thing. This is worse/more amusing than the time that the Monty Hall problem was AOTD.

I find it interesting that the text of the article actually predicts the belief-path the doubters take... when faced with simple and easily graspable proofs, they change their minds and state that obviously this means that the number system is broken.

When I was a child I once read "The Killion" by Ian Frazier [link to a contemporary Usenet transcription] in an in-flight magazine during one of the many three-hour plane rides I took with my parents. Too young to see that it was a humor piece, I took it at face value, and my horror and fascination with it would linger for a long time after. I just suddenly thought of it again this morning, perhaps for the first time in 20 years.

A) This article is hilarious.

B) Goodness me, I'm now realizing that for years afterward I thought that some of the jokey "facts" it states with a straight face were true, probably long after I remembered where I learned them. These included "a zillion" being an integer like any other, and that all computers ever made had "a governor" installed to prevent them from working with dangerously high numbers.