Saturday, October 28, 2006
(3:15 PM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:
Math is hard
First of all, I'd like to apologize for not posting here more often. Many of you obviously got your hopes up when you saw that I had returned, but I have not been "pulling my weight" sufficiently, and so this cesspool of anti-Quinean filth remains just as dull as ever. My excuse is simple, yet tragic: both of my legs were broken in a freak croquet accident. Scientists are reconstructing the exact sequence of events as we speak, but in the meantime, I've been effectively paralyzed below the crotch (NB, ladies: still open for business, don't worry).After three days of this, I finally broke down and read the Valve. This was of course only after reading the complete archives of Unfogged -- that is, the archives ever since I stopped posting there under my other pseudonym of "Unf" -- complete with comments, and after reaching what I believe to be the practical number of times I can masturbate in one day without serious ramifications.
I was delighted to find that this self-described "literary organ" -- apparently some kind of psychoanalytically-inflected reference to the male genitalia -- was discussing math, or as the British call it, "maths." Young Adam Roberts, English professor and science fiction writer extraordinaire, promised us a paradigm-shattering post -- at long last, the pretension of the so-called "circle" would be shown up for the farce that it is! A figure made up of all points a distance r from a center point -- it doesn't even pass the smell test! Finally, something useful -- and on a blog, no less!
But no.
Predictably enough, this scurrilious mountebank did not possess the mathematical "chops" necessary to pull off this task -- or, more accurately, to recognized that some other person known only as "John Sladek" had failed to do so. Simply put, he seems to think that there is a number called "infinity." Presumably this would be the biggest number of all the numbers. Very big indeed. (NB: Ladies, remember what we were discussing earlier? Yeah, like that.)
Yet in actual fact, there is no such number, i.e., one called "infinity." Nor is a circle a "polygon of infinite sides" -- it would be more accurate to say that for an n-gon, the limit as n approaches infinity (or, to avoid confusing Dr. Roberts, as n increases without bound) is a circle. Dr. Roberts is, as they say in German, guilty of Dummheit. Yet he defends himself! He continues to peddle his lies about the number called infinity and the infinity-sided polygon (or INFINIGON!!!).
This is not something that can be settled by dispute and argument. The proof that Adam Roberts advances is false on a priori grounds. As such, I hereby declare that Adam Roberts is, a priori, a fucking idiot.
Thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to a calm and respectful discussion of this matter in comments.
