Here’s a case of some mathematicians a few tools short of a full toolchest…
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
Related Posts
About The Author
Kevin
Kevin founded Wizbang in 2003. He still contributes occasionally and handles all the technical and design work for the site.
y=sin(x)
Kerry is a flip-flopper.
I have a shiny new penny for anybody who can truthfully say that he actually read that piece of crap.
You can keep your penny, there’s no way I’m wasting my time on that crap.
Ruth, Benito, Lisa, Peter, Angel, June, and Peter have too much time on their collective hands. Greg is the fortunate one. He died (to make it possible).
Thanks for the generous offer, Jeff. But, no thanks.
2+2=5
I just read the last few paragraphs. The idiots spent hours of time, energy and money to produce lines of “difficult” math equations, using new forms of math that no one cares about, and killing their friends to show that the United States is the only country in the world that is not so afraid of losing that they won’t put anything in the middle. Duh.
It doesn’t take math (very few things do) to know that the US has put more into this than anyone else. Common sense tells you that.
Guy read the Foundation triliogy one to many times.
I have a short attention span, so I went right to the conclusion. Man, these folks have a lot of time.
A friend of mine had another thought: If we consume 2/3 of the resources and the other 1/3 are distributed among the other nations, doesn’t that mean we are the only significant nation and the others, for all practical purposes, don’t exist?
Heh heh
As far as I read, the mathematics is straight forward and correct. The problem is a) the administrations definition of “coalition” does not necessarily agree with the dictionarys definition, b) the dictionary’s use of significant doesn’t agree with the mathematical definition that they choose.
Of course, you don’t have to know a whole lot of mathematics to realize it isn’t much of a coalition when the Oregon National guard contributes more troops than 20 of the countries involved.
It’s like “Yeah George, we’ll send 50 soldiers to fight in Iraq, now get of our friggin’ backs.”
Gee, It’s so obvious when someone puts it in simple terms!
HA!
Mathematical proof the CBS memos were typed in “Typewriter” font after all!
TWreck.. Perfect
Otherwise, that’s a load. I didn’t read anything between the 3rd line and the concluding paragraph(s), which can’t even be called that because it’s to be continued.
Besides, they base their conclusion of the Dictionary definition of a word vs how it is used in the title of a group of people.
The limit (of my anger) as BS approaches eye level is 0.
Kerry + Edwards = black hole
You just gotta be kidding me. Anyway, by their own logic, the number of people that have died compared to the number of people we have there is insignificant anyway.
Whats funny is that he states 1.32 rounds off to 1.
You can’t round off to one when what we’re talking about is politics, heads of state, and all that nonsense.
I don’t understand how he can put numbers on a friggin war where people are dying just to determine how many countries are involved.
Besides, by the same token, the UN peacekeeping troops are nothing as well. I haven’t looked into the numbers, but just about the same percentage are US troops anyway. Look at the troops that fought in the first US-Iraq war.
thats apparently the United Nations, but for some reason, the United States contributes the largest part of the United Nations’ peacekeeping forces, so then there is no such thing as the UN, just one significant member, so technically, we can do whatever we want. Which, actualy, we did.
Without the United States, any coalition of nations fails. Look at what the League of Nations did back after WWI, they did not prevent WWII. Now look at what the US is doing without the UN, whatever we want. Hell, we went back and got UN approval for what is going on AFTER we did what we want.
Anyways…I digress
Whats funny is that he states 1.32 rounds off to 1.
If he can do that, can I round off my IQ to 200?
Did anybody check to see if the superscript “th” was photoshopped in?
Just sayins all.
Dang, Gina.
I’m still baffled as to why it matters. The US was going to supply the lion’s share no matter what – when’s the last time we _didn’t_?
What we honestly really _wanted_ was a decent shake stancewise. “Ok, we’re France, we don’t like this, we aren’t going to be obstructionist.” That would be fine. That leads to 0 French troops. But… 0 French forgeries, 0 French diplomatic missions to the other Security Council members in opposition to the US, 0 snarky speaches, and if we were blessed, 0 AFP reporters getting advance knowledge of rocket attacks.
Rance: I’m not sure what the heck you’re talking about. The mathematics is neither straightforward nor correct, insofar as he’s trying to apply strict stochastic modeling to political contentions. The vast majority of what’s on that page is nothing more than derivations of existing theory. I.e. wankery to prop up his bitter worldview.
What matters is the nations offered to help.
Something Kerry doesn’t seem to understand.
He dropped a decimal point and forgot to carry the 1 in step 32. As a result, in step 37 he divides by zero, yielding utter nonsense.
A similar error later on the page results in taking the square root of -1, which is of course, an imaginary number. This factor is later multiplied across the entire expression.
Q.E.D.
Wow, maybe they can make a movie about this guy called “A Beautiful Mind”
I sent this along to my brother who is at the fore of
….ready for it? Chaotic Mathematics. He lives 3000
miles miles from me. If sound travels at the speed
of sound and I don’t move … how long will it take me to hear his laughter?
Hint: Hee=MC/BSx infinity
Patrick, what Kerry believes we need are the French, Russians, etc. — our true allies. Oh, wait… I forgot, France and Russian were busy counting their bribe money from Saddam and the profits from their arms deals with Iraq. Hmmmm. These are Kerry’s friends. And he fits right in.
Stoopnocracy is Peachy!
Using the level of precision listed in the hypothetical v = 1.0003, ’rounding off’ 1.32 leads to 1.3200 not 1.
“2 + 2 = 3 for sufficiently small 2s”
Who said that, again?
Bush “I don’t own my timber company.”
2 liberals + pi = nonsensical spiral of doom.
John Kerry +/- John Edwards (divided by) an elipsoid of information = or does not = invisible numbers