My Most Irrational Post Ever. Plus? Hot Chicks.

“Cassandra, in Greek legend, was condemned to know the future, but to be disbelieved when she foretold it.” – Twelve Monkeys

Proof that Jerry Lee Lewis was psychic with at least one of his songs:  A man from Florida was arrested for dipping his testicles into salsa.

One of the simplest geometric forms is a triangle.  It’s just three points and the lines that connect them.  See?  Simple.  Elegant.  The only thing simpler is a circle, but we’ll get to that, at least in passing.

The Greeks were crazy about math, like a geometry teacher on meth and Adderall® who was also genetically spliced with the Taco Bell© chihuahua, and loved dividing things.  Every time they divided something, though, they got either a whole number (1/1=1), a fraction that ended (1/4=0.25) or a fraction that repeated the same number or sequence of numbers forever (1/3=0.33333333…).

See, simple rules.

Rational output.  Literally rational output, because the numbers could be expressed as a ratio.  That’s actually where the word rational comes from:  if something can be expressed by a ratio of whole numbers, it’s a rational number.  In these combinations of numbers and ratios, these Greeks saw the perfection that came from a designed universe, a place where things made sense.

The one cult died out at ate-a-Glock™ in the morning.

And that was important, since math was a cult back then.  Yes, an honest to God, Waco-level showers-optional cult based as near as we can tell on math, mysticism, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and politics.  Since they were vegetarians, we know that they had poor grip strength and were shunned by women.  Basically, its as if they put your high school math club on an island for six generations and made them wear togas.

Triangles, though, eventually ended up driving the Greeks crazy, even crazier than the hot chicks they couldn’t get to talk to them.  Actually, it wasn’t the triangle itself, but what happened when they started thinking about the simplest right triangle, one with two sides that are 90 degrees apart, and are only one unit long.

What’s the hypotenuse of that triangle?

Well, Pythagoras figured it out. With the old a²+b²=c², the Pythagorean Theorem®, right?  Turns out that it had been developed as early as 1300 years before Pythagoras became a Grecohipster by the Babylonians.  I guess the Babylonians had bad press.

Enough history, back to the hypotenuse.

If a=a²=1, and b=b²=1, then c²=2.  Easy.  That means that c is equal to the square root of two.  Or the speed of light.  But let’s stick with the square root thing.

Funny thing is that their friends were imaginary, too.

Some weak, protein-starved pale Greek from the cult of Pythagoras was able to prove that the square root of 2 was irrational.  It goes like this:

Assume that the square root of 2 is rational. That means we can write it as a fraction of two numbers p and q that have no common factor:

Square both sides to eliminate the square root:

The right side is clearly even (it’s 2 times something), so p² is even.  The square of an odd number is always odd, and the square of an even number is always even.

Therefore, if p² is even, p itself must be even.  So, we can write p = 2m for some positive integer m. Substitute this back in:

Now the left side is even, so q² is also clearly even.

By the same logic as before, q itself must be even. But now both p and q are even, that means they share a common factor of 2.

This directly contradicts our starting assumption that p and q have no common factors

Therefore, the original assumption must be false:  the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.

It is irrational.

I know it’s irrational, but I do love pumpkin pi.

This baked the gourds of the cult.  Rumor has it that they kept it secret and may have even killed to keep it a secret.

This was where the word irrational came from.  But the word in our language came from a concept of a number can’t be expressed as a ratio.  So, before my ex-wife even existed, people were talking about the word irrational.

The square root of 2 is thus irrational.  So are a lot of other numbers, like pi.  The Greeks thought pi was irrational because they kept making bigger and bigger models of circles with smaller and smaller units and could never come up with a ratio that made sense because the denominator kept getting bigger, also like my ex-wife.

But here’s the part that bakes my gourd.  The square root of two never ends.  It’s been calculated to more digits than the weight of my ex-wife in grams, and that’s a lot, and it looks to be very random.  But since it goes on forever . . . that means my social security number is in there.

And so is yours, if you have one.

Those Gen Z kids have a lot of nerve, always walking around like the rent the place.

Everyone’s social security number is probably there.  And if you did something crazy like do a substitution into a different mathematical base (I used base 28) and have it map to the alphabet plus a comma and a period instead of numbers, you could have something like this for the first 400 digits of the square root of two:

AKPTVWWMVL,BOOLWLVQY..RDWM.BHVFYCFJMIAHGIU.EYMXWLPWZ.V.NT.AUBXB.UEGICHKTBRYATPCKPPUFOPWLDTVOOISWJKN,FJGOHZESKBQHPAKZ.OZHSFTPFZRQDTYDN.N.HCSTLQYYQK,HVKIQQGHYMEYDOMPGFSNNMHJAKSHC,,F,YWKSBJLQPAFZGRDMCEIXQGPVQ.NUEQOLDYFGFSRJPR.WMAXMV,NNSGRIGPGKPKGLXSCQR,SYFPHQCJXEMUEWLHOUMDSSMYDAVNXTFWOC,YBNZHBN.GNIHXSU.UBB,CHQCOATUL.AYPALBNAFHOD.ZQB,SHIWDZPCZIM.OL.TRUP.XGJLEWUUIZTCOHXBNUXGVCSVMUPFFHCBJCWMVTUXSNWHSNS.

You could even map it into the ASCII code that I’m typing in, but I was too lazy to do that, but the Sumerians calculated it in base 60 which may have made them more insane even than the Greeks.  But the good news is that every post I’ve ever put up (or ever will put up) is available in the square root of 2.  In order.

That also means that, rolled up in an infinite number is every possible thing that could ever exist.  Every thought that could ever be had.  Every .jpg of Kathleen Turner.

Don’t look up current pictures.  She’s gone into Kathleen Turner Overdrive.

All of it.  In one number.  And in an infinite number of random irrational numbers, like pi.  The Greeks couldn’t prove pi was irrational because they didn’t have calculus until one of them was reincarnated as Newton.

Now, the downside is that we have no index to where everything is sitting the square root of 2.  Where, exactly, all of my posts are besides my hard drive and on the server of the hosting company are unknown.

But they’re there.

That means that everything that is, ever was, or ever will be is compressed in a single number, yet to us, also unknowable because we don’t have the index.  Infinities are embedded in some of the simplest shapes in the universe:  that shape which defines a plane contains, well, everything.

But this is a little deep for a Friday.

Who wants to talk about hot chicks?