Thursday, April 15, 2021

I Found Something I Want To Spout Off About

 

 


 

Sometime earlier this year, I announced my retirement from blogging. As with many things on this blog, that was a lie.

(I would like to note, for historians with nothing better to do in the future than read this crap - and may your superiors have a favorite body part rot off for assigning you such duty - most of the lies told here were done so with no intention to deceive for personal gain. It's just that I had a tendency to exaggerate for comic effect. If you find no comic effect, then I hope it's your favorite body part that rots.)

Anyway, the reason for my returning here is to bore the hell out of you via mathematics.

I've often found entertainment by being better at math than most people. For instance, I annoy MY WIFE repeatedly during our viewings of Jeopardy via my insistence on pointing out the inability of many contestants to do simple addition and subtraction when they make their wagers during Final Jeopardy. Please understand, I'm not saying I'm a genius. I don't consider myself ultra-talented. If you pit me against any true pro at mathematics, I'll be proven a relative idiot in short order. However, the average American truly sucks at math, even the simple stuff - thus the reason so many politicians know they can get away with so much bullshit - and that's what I base my claims of superiority upon.

The stuff that entertains me most is proving how ridiculous some memes are.

For example, I spoke here ten years ago about a meme stating the Amazon rain forest was being decimated at the rate of six football fields a minute. It sounds reasonably hideous and worthy of woe until you do the math and discover six football fields a minute would be 360 football fields an hour, and 8,640 football fields each day, which translates to 3,153,600 football fields a year, which is more than 141 billion square feet, and by this time the entire world would be paved over, leaving not even a single square foot to plant your begonias, and did you ever know anyone with square feet? Of course not. Pseudo Science!

I've already put half of you asleep but here's some more.

You've no doubt been told by some well-meaning buffoon that Bill Gates will give a million dollars to every person who shares an e-mail or who posts some idiocy on Facebook (not to be redundant). Maybe you said to yourself, "Why not? What have I got to lose?" and so you inflicted it upon your innocent friends and relations. I, on the other hand, am intrigued by the math, so I do some simple multiplication and soon enough it becomes apparent that if two people share the e-mail with two people each, and so on, doubling the amount of money Bill Gates will give away with each sharing, he wouldn't have enough money to pay off everybody with a handful of jelly beans, let alone a million bucks.

That being said, we have now reached the actual point of this post, which is a breakdown of the following:

 

It's interesting. It's harmless. Therefore, blowing holes in it is magnificent fun.

Let's allow 30 years per generation. I think that's generous; 25 would probably be more like it, but we'll err on the side of caution in order to make this more realistic. You can do the math yourself, if you wish, but if you're like most Americans, you'll be relieved to let me do it for you.

If you keep on multiplying the number of ancestors by two with each preceding generation - and we're only doing direct ancestors; no aunts, uncles, cousins or any of that crowd - in less than 1000 years we each have more than 9 billion great-great-great-great-great-etc. ancestors. The next generation results in over 18 billion, then 36 billion, and so on, until it reaches quadrillions if you go back 1500 years and multiples of quintillions (that's a number followed by 18 zeroes) if you take it back to the year of Christ's birth. We are now talking more people - hell, more anything - than have ever lived during the entire history of the earth, so logically none of us exist. Since you weren't born, why are you reading this?

No, obviously we've all been born - you're reading this, therefore you are - so what it means is that we are all hopelessly inbred. Expecting anything aside from insanity from a group such as us is, well, insane. To be more blunt, all of my ancestors fucked all of your ancestors (and probably enjoyed the hell out of it, too.) We're all inter-related and if you hate black people or white people or brown people or yellow people or red people, you're even more of a moron than I thought you were.

OK, go back to whatever you were doing before you came here. It was probably way more entertaining and not nearly as insulting. If you enjoyed this half as much as I did, I'm twice as happy as you.

Soon, with more better stuff.

(That's one of those lies I talked about earlier. Pay no attention to it.)




10 comments:

(not necessarily your) Uncle Skip said...

When I got here I found I’d missed a post in January.
You gotta keep you fans informed about theses things.
...and I have to figure out why the link on my bog’s sidebar doesn’t update.

silly rabbit said...

It boggles the mind. Lol. I enjoy stuff like this. We must come from the same humor line. ❤️

joeh said...

Yeah, some celebrity on some "Ancestry" show was excited to find that Charlemagne the one time King of the world was her 9 X great grandfather. Given Charlemagne was said to have had dozens of children by various wives and concubines I figured that she shared that ancestry with only about another several billion of her closest relatives.

Since you enjoy math, I just saw this the other day. Multiply your age by 39 and that multiply that by 259.

Hope you go back to posting. BTW, I'm pretty sure we are both Cousins!

Suldog said...

(not necessarily my) Uncle Skip - Your name here takes on an entirely new meaning when considering this math. Insofar as January is concerned, you didn't miss much (but I am troubled that Blogger isn't doing its job to promote my ego.)

SR - So nice to hear from you! I'm glad to hear we share the same DNA (but, given this post, I would have been surprised if we didn't somehow.)

Joe - That's a very cool math trick! Insofar as Charlemagne is concerned, I think it's somewhat similar to what I've found from learning about people's searches on "23 and me" and other DNA sites. Just about everyone I know has come back with some portion of their heritage being supposedly Ashkenazi Jew. Both My Mom and My Uncle (from My Father's side) came back as approx. 18%, making me also 18% (half of each.) It was a total surprise to us all, but having done this math... well, not so surprising now.

Barbara said...

I'm a recovering genealogy addict, but when in the midst of my addiction, I came to the conclusion that we are all actually related. :) But yes, I also realized that those who came before me went through some serious stuff, and in comparison, my life is really easy. Plus, I came from some tough people.
Thank you for posting!!

Suldog said...

You're welcome, Barbara. Thanks for reading!

Craig said...

What Skip said. . . my sidebar should've shoved you higher on my list for you having posted this, but for whatever reason, it didn't, and I'm getting to this a month late. (*sigh*)

Of course you know, I'm both a math nerd and an amateur genealogist, so I had some fun with this one. Even for someone like me, who has large chunks of ancestry that go back before the Revolutionary War on this side of the ocean, it is fairly common to find X-great-grandparents who are, say, siblings of other X-great-grandparents, which means that your (X+1)-great-grandparents are the same people (or, to put it in hillbilly terms, the family tree doesn't branch all the way back). Even by 1630 or so (when English-persons started coming to America in earnest), there were still only 20,000 or so Europeans living in North America, and of course their children and grandchildren would (*ahem*) reproduce together, and have children and grandchildren who would, in due course, (*ahem*) reproduce together. So 12 generations probably doesn't get you the full set of 2048 unique 9th-great-grandparents (heck, in West Virginia, you might not have 8 unique great-grandparents). Likewise with Charlemagne, who is an ancestor of pretty much all white people anywhere (and a goodly number of non-white people, besides).

Hope all is well with you, my friend. I missed your 64th birthday. . . does YOUR WIFE still need you / feed you?

Leilani Schuck Weatherington said...

By any chance have you been invited to read the blog Somewhere on the Masthead? He hasn't written for a while but I occasionally check to see if he has written anything. Except now I need to be invited to read it, but I can't get invited because I can't get to the blog to ask him. Just wondering.

Ron said...

Nice to see you again Sully, I don't get notified of your blogs anymore....

I hate to say this but your self-recriminations over your football field meme was unfounded, mathematically speaking.

Happily, your math about football fields was a bit off.

There are 525,600 minutes in a (365 day) year. (60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days)

A football playing field is 300x160 feet, that's 48,000 square feet.

525,600 x 48,000 = 25,228,800,000 square feet.

There are 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile (5,280 x 5,280)

So there are about 905 square miles of land in 1 football field per minute over the course of 1 year
(25,228,800,000 ÷ 27,878,400).

There are about 196,000,000 square miles of land on the earth. (Source WikiPeeingYa)

But there are only 2,587,000 square miles of Amazon Rainforest (Wiki again) so they could happily Dr. McCoy land (DeForest) at this rate for more than 2,800 years before running out
(2,587,000 ÷ 905).

See? Nothing to worry about. :D
-Ron

It's.a.crazy.world said...

I am not a math person. It's a minor miracle that I passed college algebra with an A! I took advantage of every extra credit assignment our instructor gave us...
All of a sudden, your last 6 posts show up in my feed, even though this one is the most recent and a year old. I can't figure that out....what are the odds :D