Rooting around in your friends’ business

A comment from a reader led me to challenge my math (singular, because I employed only one mathematic). As you will no doubt recall, I recently calculated that a friend of a friend was a friend squared. This made sense only when I assigned a numerical value less than or equal to one (1) to my friends (which has gotten me into trouble before).

My fuzzy maths were incorrect (obviously), but I didn’t realize it until Steve pointed out the humour potential of calling a friend of a friend a square root of a friend.

Not only does it make numerical sense in my fuzzy head, but it makes humourous sense in Australia.

And that’s really all I care about most days.

If a friend of a friend is ?F, and an enemy of your enemy is your friend (?E = F), then it follows that one enemy is worth a friend squared.

And this time, there isn’t any playing with negative numbers because the square root is going in the wrong direction (right).

How does it make sense that a friend is only worth the square root of an enemy?

I’d wager to say that it’s because the units are meaningless. I mean, I came up with them out of nowhere and attempted to force algebra into everyday life, which isn’t as easy to do as you may have thought.

…

Mr. Melendrez was full of it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 9 August, 2006 at 16:57 and is filed under fuzzy math. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.