SHARKWATER

Friday, May 05, 2006

Wronger Than Wrong

I just stumbled onto a hilarious blog post. How many times have you heard the phrase "He couldn't be more wrong"? Here, a scientist dissects that notion:
You see, wrongness is a fermionic property. That is to say, a statement is either wrong or it is not wrong; you can't pile on the wrongness to make a condensate of wrong. By the conventional rules, n declarative statements can be wrong at most n times. By the Pauli exclusion principle, you just can't be more wrong than that!
...
So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.
Even after submitting my own little contributions to the "blogosphere," I have to admit that a fairly good majority of the material out here is bad: poorly conceived, poorly written, poorly presented. You can add a few more adjectives, like "smug," "snarky," and "rude," too.

But now and then I find something clever or thoughtful or humorous. This was one of those good bits.

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