Humour VIII

I just noticed today that the Turd still hasn't posted on his new social media app that Russian Operative Nunes is managing for him. It's interesting observing that claiming he is accomplishing something (like a well oiled machine) is not as effective as actually accomplishing something. Surrounding himself with other incompetents has humorous outcomes.

I got my pension information from the government, so now I can do my taxes. It seems I get a retirement benefit and a post-retirement benefit. Hmm.... I would have thought that retirement was the period of time in which I have been retired - and post-retirement is the period of time since I retired. I'm not quite clear on the distinction.This year's tax return has 48,000 lines. (There may be some numbers missing - I didn't count them.)I have to enter two numbers: old-age security and Canada Pension Plan - or maybe three numbers if I have to keep retirement and post-retirement separate. Then I have to add them together.Then I have to enter zeroes on all of the other lines and add them together and subtract them from my total income to get my taxable income. Then I have to multiply by some percentage to get the amount of tax I owe. If it's less than $48,000 (it is), I enter zero and I get a refund of all the taxes I have paid in (zero).I had a heck of a time finding the provincial tax forms. For a minute I thought they had stopped collecting taxes. (How will they survive without my zero dollars?) But I found them in the back of the "guide", which rivals War and Peace in size. I have to enter the total income from the Federal form and then a lot of zeroes, etc. etc. to find out that I get a full refund of the provincial taxes that I paid in (zero).Then they calculate it all for themselves in Ottawa and tell me what mistakes I made, which change my refund from zero to zero.

Thanks! That made me laugh!

I ran across this list this morning on Facebook. I need to memorize a few...

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The following insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words:
1. "He had delusions of adequacy ” Walter Kerr
2. "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”- Winston Churchill
3. "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. - Clarence Darrow
4. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”-William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
5. "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
6. "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas
7. "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” - Mark Twain
8. "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” - Oscar Wilde
9. "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” -George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
10. "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one.” - Winston Churchill, in response
11. "I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here” - Stephen Bishop
12. "He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” - John Bright
13. "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.” - Irvin S. Cobb
14. "He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” - Samuel Johnson
15. "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. - Paul Keating
16. "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” - Forrest Tucker
17. "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” - Mark Twain
18. "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” - Mae West
19. "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” - Oscar Wilde
20. "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.” - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
21. "He has Van Gogh's ear for music.” - Billy Wilder
22. "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I'm afraid this wasn't it.” - Groucho Marx
23. The exchange between Winston Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison." He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."
24. "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." - Abraham Lincoln
25. "There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." -- Jack E. Leonard
26. "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." -- Thomas Brackett Reed
27. "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them." -- James Reston (about Richard Nixon) —Robert L Truesdell

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Liked this one: --Percy

Years ago, a guest on Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Star Talk was talking about the large number of math nerds who work on The Simpsons -- I seem to recall that he was one of them. Naturally, they will sneak in a lot of math jokes that hardly anyone in the audience will get, like Homer using a narcissistic number (his specific example; that was the first time that I had ever heard of narcissistic numbers, AKA "pluperfect digital invariant" (PPDI)). A narcissistic number refers to itself in the form of being "a number that is the sum of its own digits each raised to the power of the number of digits". I seem to recall that the number that Homer used was 8208 (8⁴ + 2⁴ + 0⁴ + 8⁴ = 4096 + 16 + 0 + 4096 = 8208).I remember the episode where the school's math club goes to compete in the Math-lympics. Their tshirts said:

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π ≠ a/b

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I hate to admit that it took me a couple seconds to get that one. But then my last math class was half a century ago (strange how I keep having to say that).

I learned what a googolplex was in first-year university when I accidentally bought the wrong math textbook. (For the youngsters out there, that's long before Google.)

My generation learned about the googol (10¹⁰⁰) and the googolplex (10^googol) from Carl Sagan on Cosmos. The story was that a mathematician asked his son for the largest number and that's what the kid came up with -- Wikipedia dates that at 1920 and that the kid named it "googol" after Barney Google ("with the goo-goo-googly eyes").A couple years ago I wrote a web page about number names, Number Names. For example, a value which is close to a googol is 10⁹⁹ which is a duotrigintillion (short scale) and a sedecilliard (long scale). But the largest number name I list is for one millinillion (short scale) for 10³⁰⁰³. Those entire number naming systems, short and long, should make high school students appreciate having to use scientific notation since it lets them avoid the names.The long scale/short scale issue is why when I write "billion" I always add (10⁹) to indicate which billion I'm talking about (CosmicChimp, who lives in Germany, should understand that, while members in the UK won't because they switched to the short scale back in 1974, at least for billions).BTW, ain't no such things as jillions, zillions, or even bazillions.

Those are just synonyms for "lots." I remember my mom telling me the story of googol and the mathematician's son. I don't think she really understood it, because she called the googolplex as the largest number and I remember asking why you couldn't just add 1 to it.It's funny how some obscure conversations from childhood stick in your memory.

I remember a sci-fi short story from high school (so it pre-dated the late 60's, most likely from the 40's or 50's) where a mathematician is kidnapped. The kidnapper had been injured or disfigured because of an industrial accident caused by a mathematician having made a mistake, so now he wants to take revenge on mathematicians. He'd kidnap one mathematician after another and present him with a problem. If he can solve it, then he can go free, but if not then he dies. The protagonist is the first one.The problem is to guess a number, n, with particular properties. All I remember is one clue and maybe a second:

1. Adding any value to n results in n -- ie, n + x = n, for x non-zero.
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2. Subtracting n from n results in any number -- ie, n - n = x, for x non-zero.

According to the short story's author, the value of n is infinity. That first clue was your observation that if you add 1 to the largest possible value then you get the largest possible value:        ∞ + 1 = ∞ .Edited by dwise1, : ABE: "most likely from the 40's or 50's"

i'll add what Dylan asked the science student in Dont Look Back:"Weren't your friends lucky before you had any friends?"

googolplex (and even googolplex^googolplex) is small potatoes compared to Graham’s number, which is tiny compared to the number(quantity) of rational numbers between 0 and 1/googolplex.And the Bible is right about pi (ratio of circle’s circumference to diameter) being exactly 3, at least in god’s world, which apparently has positive curvature.

My imagination doesn't work in a way so I can picture what the Universe would be like if pi=3. I assume everything would be skewed, but how?

Yes, they were!

Okay, I'll admit it I don't get this: π ≠ a/b