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March 29, 2004 #
As a pseudo data/stats geek by day, I felt compelled to point out a flaw in Choire Sicha's "appropriate milktubing in restaurants" formula in The Morning News after he asked for feedback on his site. I urge you not to read any further because the chances of this being of interest to you are less than 2%. I'm not kidding, fuck off. This is just for me. Here come the warm jets, I'm getting all math rock... While it has all the bells and whistles of the Quadratic Formula and the simple elegance of Pythagoras's Theorem, there is but one minor quandry with his equation. Specifically it has to do with the variables in the denominator. There's a very good chance you could end up with a value of zero for M - Q and then you're fucked. Like trying to find one good thing to say about Jayson Blair, division by zero is impossible. Academics call it "undefined." Reference Given that M and Q are defined as, M = Presence of men between the ages of 15 and 32 Q = Number of obviously gay waiters it is unlikely that both will be zero, except perhaps if the setting is a retirement home cafeteria in which case the light to suck on squirtguns is as green as the jello. BUT, it's very possible that M and Q could be equal in many other circumstances, like 4 each, and that would produce a zero denominator too, obviously. It's a tough spot, backed into a corner that even Newton and Leibniz would avoid with a 10-foot protractor. But cool your scientific calculators, there's a simple solution. The denominator just needs the addition of a positive integer such as: M - Q + 1. Please feel free to contact The Other Page with any arithmetic concerns, except taxes. We have estate lawyers for that. Update: I realized my error five minutes after sending that to Choire on Friday. I'm such a simple moron. You can't just add 1 to M-Q in the denominator because say for example, M=3 and Q=4, then we're back to the division by zero problem. I should have said add 1.1 or .9 to ensure a non-zero denominator. One thought though, aren't all waiters obviously gay? Fuck it, I'm gonna get really wasted now and feel my tits. Archives "The Other Page" powered by Removable Hype. RSS. Copyright © 2003 La Otra Pagina, Inc. All nights observed. Feel free to email "info(at)krucoff.com" for questions, comments, stock tips, and family gossip. |
