Here is the title and abstract of a paper just posted on the arxiv:
Title: About the impossibility of quantifying the knowledge and of establishing consequently its correlation with money
Authors: Jose Carlos Bermejo-Barrera
Comments: 24 pages, 1 figure
Subj-class: Physics and Society
\ This article shows how the Universities and higher education and research institutions obey more and more to criteria of profitability and effectiveness, following the example of the industry. The Universities and the academic communities are the main producers of knowledge, which is not quantifiable and, therefore, cannot find an equivalent in money, which is quantifiable. Many scientists intend to establish a connection between knowledge and money, using for that a set of criteria of evaluation. Being useless these criteria, the scientists resort to a system of honour, but the science is essentially normal knowledge.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0603256 , 75kb)
I would especially like to point out the following sentence: The Universities and the academic communities are the main producers of knowledge, which is not quantifiable and, therefore, cannot find an equivalent in money, which is quantifiable.
So, on that note, have I got a proof for you...
Claim: Women are Evil
Proof: It is evident that women cost time and money. For simplicity, let's assume that women are linearly proportional to both time and money. (Admittedly, it is true that some women cost more than others. The proof can be generalized to work in such situations, so I'll take the liberty of ignoring them---the cases, not the women.) It is an old proverb that time is money, so we know that women are proportional to the square of money. Well, it's another old proverb that money is the root of all evil, so this gives us that women are proportional to all evil. This becomes an equality by considering equivalence classes (it's like saying two eigenvectors are equivalent if they differ only by a nonzero constant). Therefore, women are evil. QEFD
1 day ago
4 comments:
You have an error in one of your axioms! The *love* of money is the root of all evil. So evil = (love of M)^2. Even assuming your initial argument holds true (Women = c*T*M, and T = M, so Women = c*M^2), you can't set them equal to each other, because (love of Women) = (love of c*M^2), not (love of M)^2. And does that mean lesbians are moneygrubbers?
Worryingly, I was more disturbed by the incredibly impenetrable grammar than the logic errors in that abstract.
I've never met any money-grubbing lesbian. But then again, I have only met a small number of lesbians (and only one comes immediately to mind), so perhaps it's an issue of small sample size?
'Money' vs 'Love of money': By googling, both expressions show up. (They also both show up in publications collecting "official" expressions, so it isn't just a matter of people getting it wrong.) According to google battle, the first expression wins 185 to 44, but given that one quote subsumes the other, that's hardly fair.
Basically, assuming the axioms, the slightly different proverbs give us slightly different conclusions---just like using different inequalities.
Really, you need to be clear which branch of the root you're taking. It is conceivable that women are negative evil, as implausible as that seems.
Also, women are only linearly proportional to time *and* money in a certain regime, dependent on the woman. Outside of this regime, the partials wrt time &&/|| money can quickly become nonlinear. Assuming some reasonable bounds on time and money, however (and typical if there *is* a woman still hanging around one's sorry ass you're in the right domain) the assumption of linearity becomes a reasonable one.
Indeed, I forgot to consider the theory of complex variables. That's an excellent point.
However, then we have to start discussing contour integrals, essential singularities, and all sorts of potentially complicated side arguments. I'll leave these as exercises for the dilligent reader.
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