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.)
