Senseless Utterance == On the Doctrine of Angels ... (No Content)

derick · #1 10-04-2005, 10:48 AM

I love the 2+2 magazine, every article has been good except this one ...

Either I totally missed the joke or this article is a waste of bits.

Is it a joke article for people who enjoy pedantic blubbering?

ZenMusician · #2 10-04-2005, 09:22 PM

...or useless rhetoric?

Impress me with coherent, well-constructed articles - not
a paragraph containing all the grown-up words you Googled.

-ZEN

timprov · #3 10-05-2005, 06:18 AM

[ QUOTE ]
I totally missed the joke.

[/ QUOTE ]

So I see.

To be fair, it wasn't a very well-executed joke.

DyessMan89 · #4 10-05-2005, 02:31 PM

[ QUOTE ]
...or useless rhetoric?

Impress me with coherent, well-constructed articles - not
a paragraph containing all the grown-up words you Googled.

-ZEN

[/ QUOTE ]

StellarWind · #5 10-05-2005, 11:53 PM

[ QUOTE ]
I love the 2+2 magazine, every article has been good except this one ...

Either I totally missed the joke or this article is a waste of bits.

Is it a joke article for people who enjoy pedantic blubbering?

[/ QUOTE ]
It's only fair play that I answer this.

I have a rather dry sense of humor as my long-suffering wife observes. Sometimes I provide the most outrageous "logical" explanations with a completely straight face. Occasionally the audience doesn't get it and that's when the long-suffering wife has to explain that I'm up to my nonsense once again and it's a joke.

Anyway, back to your answer. This article looks like something I might have written except that it's more elegant than I usually am. Plus I know that humor like this doesn't work on the internet.

No, I don't think he's serious. Nice of you to take the bait though.

Mason Malmuth · #6 10-06-2005, 04:50 AM

Hi derick:

I think the key to this article is the idea, impled but not stated, that we should be teaching our children probability theory at an early age. I think it should start in about the third grade and continue right through high school.

If this was done there's no question that our whole society would function much better and our accomplishments would appear to be virtually unlimited relative to what is being done today. Of courst the poker games wouldn't be as good.

Best wishes,
Mason

kidcolin · #7 10-06-2005, 04:59 AM

[ QUOTE ]
Hi derick:

I think the key to this article is the idea, impled but not stated, that we should be teaching our children probability theory at an early age. I think it should start in about the third grade and continue right through high school.

If this was done there's no question that our whole society would function much better and our accomplishments would appear to be virtually unlimited relative to what is being done today. Of course the poker games wouldn't be as good.

Best wishes,
Mason

[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting. I've always wondered why our math education progresses so slowly (I've always figured 'algebra' as taught in highschool could start at least in the 5th grade for most students, and then so on), but I never considered probability and statistics for some reason. I believe you're right, though.

BarronVangorToth · #8 10-06-2005, 07:25 AM

[ QUOTE ]
we should be teaching our children probability theory at an early age. I think it should start in about the third grade

[/ QUOTE ]

This is 100% correct - we should.

However, another percentage ... what percentage of 3rd grade teachers could correctly teach it?

4th grade?

7th?

12th?

Therein lies the problem any time you radically improve a system, or try to.

Barron Vangor Toth
BarronVangorToth.com

Piers · #9 10-06-2005, 05:33 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Plus I know that humor like this doesn't work on the internet.

[/ QUOTE ]

Depends whether you are referring to effect or appearance.

The problem with internet ‘jokes’ is that the typically only people who bite publicly are the ones who did not get it, or do not have a suitable sense of humour. This gives the appearance that such humour does not work.

However the people who appreciated the humour will typically just smile and more on. Since that is generally the main objective of humour I would say that irrespective or whether the humour works or not, it usually appears not to.

shark6 · #10 10-06-2005, 08:04 PM

This article was not written as joke.

I enjoy reading the 2+2 magazine because the articles are simple, well written and improve my understanding of poker. That is with the exception of this one.

I am stunned the editors would publish this garbage. I read this thing twice and I haven't the foggiest idea what point the author is trying to make. This board is frequented by the general public, not mathematics PhD’s.

Also, the article sounds like a high school student wrote something, then ran every word through a thesaurus with complete disregard for conveying a cognitive thought.