Another from This Week’s WEedies!
Jun 6th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 7 Comments |
WEeding Winner 34
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[ A | B ]
“New Crops for Afghanistan,” by Lisa Schiffren, National Review Online’s “The Corner” blog
Reasons for Winning:
A:
“We, in the form of the DEA, have been sending specialists out to Afghanistan since the 1980s to persuade them, by carrot or stick, to stop growing opium poppies.” -Lisa Schiffren
Comment:
This sentence is utterly baffling. “We, in the form of the DEA . . . .” What?! We can take form as different things? We are mighty morphin’ power . . . Americans?
The DEA isn’t even elected by “us”!
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B:
“There is nothing complicated about why our many attempts have failed, or, at best, only temporarily displaced poppy growth.” -Lisa Schiffren
Comment:
Do tell us why your attempts have failed. While you’re at it, tell me why my attempts have failed. Then you can tell me why “our” attempts have failed.
Don’t you love it when people tell you you’ve been failing at something you’ve never even tried?
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Judgment:
Did you feel the despair rising in you, as you were WEedily informed of your DEA doppelganger’s failures? (”What’s wrong with weeds?“)
WEediness Quotient: [FAQ]
2/0 = ∞ [A tie for the highest WEediness Quotient record! (Though, because it has more WEedy sentences that the other two pieces which achieved a WEediness Quotient of ∞, it will be awarded first place!)]
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2/0 doesn’t equal infinity. Division by zero is illegal in Iowa (and probably D.C. as well) and the answer to the equation is undefined. If we take n/0 to be infinity then this implies that zero times infinity equals every number, which would mean all numbers are equal. 2/0 equals infinity is a tempting conclusion, but not correct. (It also implies that positive infinity is equal to negative infinity, which causes some problems in analysis.)
Let f(x) = 1/x
What value will f(x) approach as x approaches 0 (zero)?
PS
My Calc III prof would always tell us that if we divided by zero, the world would explode. So we better not do it. :-)
PPS
And I meant: “as x approaches zero from the positive side,” since the number of non-WEedy sentences in a WEedy-winning piece is always either positive or zero.
*grin*
UPDATED
Micah, what value f(x) takes depends on whether we take the limit from the right or from the left. If we take it from the right, it approaches infinity, but if we take it from the left, it approaches negative infinity. Thus, when x=0, the answer seems to be both infinity and negative infinity, implying that the two are equal. The two are not equal, therefore division by zero is undefined.
Oops, didn’t see your PPS. It is true that we can define division by zero on the non-negative reals and extend the non-negative number line to include infinity, but if you do that, you’re leaving subtraction undefined in many places since negative numbers don’t exist. (By the by, including infinity in the non-negative reals is also a problem since infinity isn’t a number at all.)
Indeed! Which is fun.
And all the logical/arithmetical problems with dealing with division by zero and infinity and what not are fun too :-)