Comments on: Closing time again

By: molesworth 1

molesworth 1 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:18:45 +0000

BTW, where I come from the lottery is known as the ’stupid-tax’.

“It’s a struggle, but I know that my Ã‚Â£1-a-week flutter guarantees cheap ballets & subsidised operas for the downtrodden merchants & bankers of the City of London.” says Mrs. Poorprole of Shittown, Northshire…

By: molesworth 1

molesworth 1 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:09:06 +0000

You seem surprised that most of the people in this country are fuckwits, which is sweet, if mis-guided.
Most people I meet are virtually illiterate, functionally innumerate & scientifically incompetent.
If natural selection could be relied upon to take these mug-wumps out of the gene-pool before they encountered the oppurtunity to replicate then the rest of us might just have a chance, but Health & Safety legislation prevents them from shuffling off this mortal coil as a consequence of their own stupidity at a sufficiently young age.
For the future development of humanity, we must be prepared to watch countless millions of our own kind perish as they piss onto mains outlets, sniff the gas, walk back to the ‘dud’ firework, look down the rifle barrel to see what the problem is etc., etc.
So, ejh, do you or your ex have any kids?

By: Murky.org » Maths Standards

Murky.org » Maths Standards — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:07:52 +0000

[...] Via Chicken Yoghurt. [...]

By: ejh

ejh — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:00:22 +0000

Bloody stupid idea though.

People do have difficulty with negative numbers.

My former partner, an intelligent woman who left school at sixteen, used to struggle with the fact that there were two different temperature scales, possibly because she didn’t actually realise this. When it was warm, she’d say it was seventy, or seventy-two, or whatever. If it was cold, she’d say it was zero, or one, or two.

It was only when I showed her a thermometer and tracked her answers down its different sides that she understood her error.

Meanwhile I could never understand why, if I looked at a physics textbook, the circuit diagram was rectangular, but when we did the actual experiement there were a couple of wires of irregular shape…

By: Lobster Blogster

Lobster Blogster — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:32:41 +0000

Personally I believe the game should have been based upon discovering the square roots of imaginery numbers – that would learn them.

Incidentally, if the game were based on complex or other numbers which were two dimensional or higher orders, the concepts of “higher” and “lower” do start to go out of the window. You are left with comparing the moduli of numbers. In which case, Tina in the quoted example, would indeed have won. You can’t rule out the fact that Camelot may have withdrawn this lottery because players with advanced mathematical skills were walking away with large amounts of cash.

By: Philip

Philip — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:05:02 +0000

WeÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ve barely begun to explore our potential as a race

On the contrary, we have been exploring our potential as a race ever since the first pithecanthropoid picked up a handy stone and bashed his neighbour’s head in with it.

By: Derry

Derry — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:48:10 +0000

It might not be so bad overall. Lottery players probably tend to be more inumerate than the general population.

But as the daughter and mother of engineers, and as one myself, I weep.

By: doctorvee » File under ‘misanthropy’. Again

doctorvee » File under ‘misanthropy’. Again — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:57:22 +0000

[...] Via Chicken Yoghurt. [...]

By: Anon

Anon — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:32:20 +0000

The Lottery, a tax on the poor fuckers who don’t pay tax.

By: Tim Ireland

Tim Ireland — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:33:26 +0000

I caught this on Fark, but wanted to read the actual text on the scratch card before passing judgment. What if some of the ‘dumb’ people involved are smarter than they look?

For instance, the phrasing of ‘match any three amounts to win’ on scratch cards caused one hell of a ruckus a decade ago in Sydney; people who had matched three amounts (e.g. 2 x $20 and 2 x $750 and 2 x $100,000) all started claiming a ‘win’.