Think Fast...
New Improv Game:Sit, Stand, Heart Attack
Essentially after Sit/Stand/Lean or Sit/Stand/Lie Down, but one person must always be having a heart attack. Haven't tried it out yet, but it should be hilarious.
Optimus Prime with no legs...Pessimus Prime
A biker gang made out of mathematicians...Hell's Angles
I'm currently writing a multiple choice placement test for engineering calculus students. I wrote a draft, and sent it in to the professor I'm working for, where he found an error in this question.
Which statement is correct about the f(x) and its inverse, g(x)?
1. g(x) is the reciprocal of f(x)
2. An output so that g(x) = - f(x)
3. g(f(x)) = x
4. g(x) undoes the action of f(x)
5. 3 and 4
6. I don’t know
Have you spotted the problem?
In the question, #3 is right, #4 is right and so is #5. Or is it? The choice #5 doesn't say that it itself is right. #5 needs to state this fact, given that it isn't talking about statements about calculus, it is talking about statements which may or may not be true.
I'm reading too much Godel Escher Bach.
Perry Bible Fellowship has been going slowly for the past few months (although I did still check it obsessively while I was in Southeast Asia), so I'm happy to resort to xkcd for my visual endorphin needs.
It was St. Patrick's day. I had finished several Bailey's on the Rock, three cans of Guiness, two black velvets, two Toucan Breakfasts and seven episodes of Arrested Development. The group decided to stop by at QP for some pool. Naturally, the combination of the bodily abuse I was giving myself now and the payback from Player's last night led to the deterioration of my mental and physical state. I began to subconsciously ask questions like:
"Should I go home and go to sleep?"
This would have turned out to be a mistake, based on events that would happen later in the night.
But I didn't. I left my friends at the pool table, and turned to something that I do often in a social bar environment. I wander, and begin to the speak to the first person who makes and holds significant eye contact. I actually found many groups that I knew this night, and wandered around and through them, causing the occasional laugh, or hugging or shaking hands or remembering names.
Then I settled on a really good one introduced to myself by my good friend Kelsey Benning; and this is where the meat comes in.
Some how the phrase "Green with Envy" came up. It occurred to me that there are seven deadly sins, and seven colours in the traditional high school rainbow. Our goal was to find a 1-1 relation between colours and deadly sins, preferably which would fill in the phrase
"Colour with Deadly Sin"
We looked for cases where the association would "seem" right, not for any sort of formal meaning. And so we came up with:
Red Rage
Orange Gluttony
Yellow Sloth
Green Envy
Blue Greed
Indigo Lust
Violet Pride
Green and Envy were pretty obvious. Yellow was associated with cowardice, and Sloth. Orange came to mean candy wrappers or something, hence Gluttony. Blue was Greed because of conservatism or something (Blue is the colour of the conservatives in Canada). Red was a toss-up between Rage and Lust, but it eventually went to Rage because it fit the phrase "Red with Rage" better. Violet came to be associated with gay Pride. Finally, leaving Lust with Indigo, which I justify as the colour your genitalia turn after hours of rough sex.
While over a discussion with my linguist/awesome/web programmer friend Eric Akaoka, I discovered the most interesting thing.
He was going about correcting people on the proper use of the plural form of words, which is completely normal for him.
e.g.
Octopus -> Octopi
Uterus -> Uteri
Clitoris -> Clitorises
Clitoris turned out to be a bit confusing, since most people expected the plural to be Clitori, but Eric corrected us that it was, in fact, Clitorises. For it to be the way we expected, the word would have had to be "Clitorus" with the -us ending.
Suddenly it hit me.
I turned to Eric, and asked
"So, what's the plural of 'us' then?"
There was a few seconds of silence, and then we realized that we had discovered something beautiful:
The plural of I is US, and the plural of US is I. Mathematically speaking, {I, us} is a group under the "plural" operation.
So,
plural(I) = Us
plural(Us) = I
also, the product plural*plural is the identity operator.
i.e. plural(plural(I)) = (plural*plural)(I) = I
fantastic!
I think this is fantastic.
Found here: http://indexed.blogspot.com/2007/01/were-all-going-to-hell.html
I just realized - perhaps its just me - that the word "shat" is an acceptable term for the past tense of shit.
I'll have to use it in a paper to find out.
Go nested sentence structure!
