The other day and in fact for the past week one of my somewhat deluded classmates (inevitably female) has been peddling the daily mail-esque lie that Maths and English are equivalent. Unfortunately I can’t name names as she’s part American and thus impulsively and frivolously litigious. In addition to the fact that she neglected to define “english” in the first place leaving any rational human being to wonder whether she’s referring to the “academic” subject or the language itself, she bases her entire argument – or more accurately, flagrant and speculative opinion – on the thoroughly twisted  thread that since english is studied and maths is studied, they are apparently that same thing. Now I can remember somewhat overzealous careers advisers and even my own father telling me that “it doesn’t matter what degree I get as long as I get a degree”, but surely this short sighted and actually dangerous pseudo-philosophy takes that well exercised mantra a gargantuan leap too far.

Now to be a little fairer, I will take the only argument expressed eloquently enough for me to follow. Based on equivalence theory for two items to be equivalent, they need to posses ALL 3 of these qualities.
1. Reflexivity -  An item must be the same as itsself
2. Symmetry – If one item is equivalent to another, the other item must also be equivalent to the first.
3. Transitivity – if A is equivalent to Band B is equivalent to C, then A must be equivalent to C
It all makes sense so far.

So lets apply this to english and Maths
1. Reflexivity – english is equal to itself. Well I’ll allow this one to slide. I think in most situations english could be said to be the same as itself. Obviously this isn’t very mathematical, but I want to get some false jeopardy going.

2. Symmetry – Now obviously as is a continual theme with my dealings with the “fairer” sex I haven’t been supplied with enough information and will have to assume a few things. I’ll assume in this case that by “english is  equal to maths” I’ll assume that we mean “Every basic concept in Maths is present in english and vice versa”. Now there are a very many ways to prove this wrong. I could do this a very many ways, but I’ll settle for conciseness and flamboyance. Maths is a field based on being concise, and straight to the point.  A field where you have to accurately, quickly and conclusively put your point across with as little fuss as possible. Mathematics isn’t about making simple things complex. Its about making complex things simple. English on the other hand is a field where long windedness is encouraged and in certain cases mandated. A perfect example of such would be an annual ritual that I was recently made aware of I am of course talking of the spuriously capitalised NaNoWriMo. Far from being the fearsome Mario boss that the naming convention suggests, participants in this writers convention are practically forced to write a badly rounded 1666 words per day. The real irony of this is that most of them begin with fully functioning story lines and are goaded into “fleshing them out” by inconsiderately adding more and more words. I think it is thus safe to conclude that maths is not the same as english, and english is not the same as maths
3. So basically if english is the same as Maths (which it itsn’t), and maths is the same as physics (which it itsn’t), english must therefore be the same as physics. Which is further from the truth than Heather Mills is from a second marriage.

In conclusion I think I’ve proved without a shadow of a doubt that english is by no means equivalent to Maths. Not that I’ve actually met more that one person with the lack of foresight to claim that it is.

The 7th episode is out. And theres a special next week, so make sure you tune in. Details are in this video

Part 1:

Part 2:

Well Google has started granting invitations again, and I’m putting 4 up for grabs. So if you would like to try out google wave just leave a comment to this post and I’ll send you one. I won’t be publishing any of the comments so your email addresses will all be safe.
Roll up roll up. First come first served

Yes its true. Google wave is out, and has been for some time. Unfortunately Google didn’t see it fit to grant such an eminent person such as me an invite, so imagine my surprise when I walked into the Zepler computer room to find that a classmate was quite literally hawking them out to unsuspecting passers by.
Now I was planning to send out invites to my loyal readers, but unfortunately there servers are overloaded as it is, so they’ve halted invitations for the time being.
What I can tell you however is that its just as good as I expected. If not slightly better. Its a great interface and is only set to get better when we finally upgrade to HTML5.

So if you can get your hands on this people, go for it. Its great, and I see no reason why when its deployed full scale to dump all my IM clients and switch to hits superior service.

They’re online now
Just look for the latest videos on my channel

www.youtube.com/user/AppreciateTheFunk

Due to complications with my laptop, this weeks episode of look at the week in TV has been delayed till this afternoon.
In addition to this the release day for future episodes has been moved to Monday (at around 8PM). Obviously I apologise for the late release. Hopefully it won’t happen again.
On the plus side, you get 2 episodes 4 days apart which isn’t a bad thing.

The 3rd episode it out already. And as readers of my blog you get to watch it 1 hour before everybody else.
Enjoy

For quite a few years now I’ve had the compulsive urge to test the speed of my internet connection.

By far the best of the tools that I’ve come across, must be speedtest. Nice flashy interface, an increasingly wide selection of servers,  and a comparison to your ISP’s average.
For the gamers out there, speedtest had recently rolled out pingtest. This tests you computers ping time, measures packet loss and also something called jitter which is as incomprehensible to me as wow and flutter.

So if like me your an obsessive compulsive when it comes to testing your internet speed, try speedtest and pingtest.

The second episode of my little telly mickey take is now online. Please rate and review. Its the only way I’ll learn…

Being a budding television pundit, I’ve started making these videos. I’ll aim to release them every Sunday afternoon, or at least every other Sunday on the brand new AppreciateThefunk youtube chanel.
The first episode is just a pilot, but as I write I’ve filmed the second one and will start editing as soon as possible.