Saturday, December 27, 2008

Under the bridge?

I can't tell if the author of http://sciencedefeated.wordpress.com/ is a troll or an idiot.

For example, here is an excerpt from a post entitled The Three Thousand Year Reich of Negative Numbers:
The curious reader might be interested to know that Diophantus and the Greek thinkers rejected the concept of negative numbers (and irrational numbers, of course) as “patently ridiculous” and “idiotic.” And we are a Greek-based society. So to borrow David Hume’s plaintive question - Then whence Negative Numbers? The answer to this question lies in the Orient. If there was ever a “yellow menace,” negative numbers are it. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Muslims gave us negative numbers. Not the superior Greeks. Is this a coincidence? I think not. These countries have had a vested interest in the concept from the very beginning.

Fortunately, however, negative numbers are behind a very thin conceptual veil. Once removed, it is easy to see the “Chinaman behind the curtain.” I’ll just say QUED ahead of time. Observe:

I can have three horses, but I cannot have negative three horses. Some people, suffering from Cognitive Dissonance (CD), suggest that “debt” is a manifestation of negative numbers. But that’s really just arguing semantics. Wittgenstein and Derrida disproved semantics back in the 20th century. In any case, what’s really going on in the situation is not that I have negative horses; rather, I owe some positive horses (Positive horses=horses that exist; countable horses. Who would want to be owed imaginary horses?). We can get by just fine without negative numbers. Besides, the Universe is full of stuff, not -stuff. ...


Godwin's law notwithstanding, it's astonishing to me that someone can stand by those statements. The entire blog is full of such nonsensical drivel...

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