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: