Damn, you really were bored if you tracked that down.

This looks like one of those things that used to be forwarded around in chain emails. I received alot of them. :/

Hah. I found out the proof has a major flaw, as well as the proof for boys being more evil than girls. If you want, I'll tell you girls tomorrow. I'm too tired and I have classes early tomorrow. G'night!

OT, but I wanted to share.

I know it's a few pages back, but the sheep thing reminded me of something I read in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-tiime.
I haven't read it in a long time, so excuse anything that isn't too precise.
The main character, Christopher, suffers from a form of autism, he adores maths, physics, logic etc.
At one point he tells a "joke":

Three men are on a train to Scotland, an economist, a logician and a mathmatician. Just as they cross the border into Scotland they spot what would appear to be a brown cow.
"The cows in Scotland are brown," says the economist.
"No, at least one of the cows in Scotland is brown," says the logician.
"No, there exists at least one cow in Scotland, who appears brown on one side," says the mathmatician.

I believe it's supposed to show that economists are not really scientists, that they are beaten by logician who are in turn beaten by mathmaticians.


As for the "proof," firstly: LOL. And secondly, though it appears to work in theory, I've come to wonder whether such proof has ever been taken out of the lab, or whether specimens have been included in the research.

So what's the flaw you found?

Heeeeeeeeeey, I remember that from the book!
[great book, everyone should read it. But remember, start with chapter 2, if you get my drift. ^.^]

I read that book not too long ago!
I didn't think the first chapter was that bad.

LOl! I had the book out on a library card, so only got to keep it for 3 weeks.

I heard of that book before, though I haven't read it. In Fermat's Last Theorem, there's a similar story told, only this time he used black sheep instead of brown cows.

I think it's a stretch to say he was pointing out that Statisticians were not scientists; as benign pointed out before, his statement is statistically sound. The point of the story is to show how pernickety we Mathematicians get when making statements to avoid untruth, hence the "only half of which" part because one can never assume the other side is brown as well.

The proof for the girls is evil part has the statement money=evil as its weakness. One could easily point out that it's the LOVE of money that's evil but that won't tell you money itself isn't. So to disprove the whole enchalada, you only need to show money is good and here's the proof of that: The concept of money came after the time of bartering as a means of convenience. (money sprung forth from convenience, which is good). And we all know the saying "one good deed deserves another", or reworded, good springs forth from good. And since convenience is good, thus money would be good as well. This completes the proof that money is good.

Making the modification that money is good instead of evil, somewhere along the proof for evil girls we have the following statements:
Girls = (money)^2
and thus,
Girls = (good)^2.

So you guys turn out to be uber-good instead, according to the proof.

YAYZ! We're good again!

...That's actually pretty darn cool

I bet none of you noticed that there was a mistake at the money=sqrt(evil) part. I only came to notice this precisely because we Mathematicians are so skeptic, studying each and every step of any proof because if one step falls, the whole structure falls along with it.

The whole of any Mathematical field of knowledge is always built on a finite number of axioms, considered true without proof (Euclidean Geometry has only 5 axioms). And everything else gets derived from there. So if someone makes a faulty proof and that gets used in another and then that gets used to prove another statement, the whole thing will collapse. This is how fragile the nature of math is which is why we Mathematicians need to be overly-critical. Which is clearly shown in the brown cow story.

C'mon now, a joke loses it's humor when you dig so deep into it. It's obviously not sound logic, which is exactly why it's simply a joke.

If you're going to go all Mathematical on it, it loses it's logic at the very beginning of the joke where it states that Girls (G) = Time (T) x Money (M) because that can't be proven. In order for G = T x M, you'd need G x M = T and G x T = M to be true as well, which is all very very very very very wrong any way you look at it.

In short: laugh at it, don't analyze it.

I agree.

Let's not tarnish a legend.