Philosophy is a minefield; I could end up trolling even if my intention wasn't to.

woo equations:



Most of y'all have probably seen this one, but it's one of my favorites:
Three guests decide to stay the night at a lodge whose rate they are initially told is $30 per night. However, after the guests have each paid $10 and gone to their room, the proprietor discovers that the correct rate should actually be $25. As a result, he gives the bellboy the $5 that was overpaid, together with instructions to return it to the guests. Upon consideration of the fact that $5 will be problematic to split three ways, the bellboy decides to pocket $2 and return $1 each, or a total of $3, to the guests. Upon doing so, the guests have now each paid a total of $9 for the room, for a total of $27, and the bellboy has retained $2. So where has the remaining $1 from the initial $30 paid by the guests gone?!

Go Seigen: The go board has 6 sides

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ ------------
$$ | . . 3 . . |
$$ | . . . . . |
$$ | 4 . . . 5 |
$$ | . . . . . |
$$ | . . 6 . . |
$$ ------------[/go]

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

I do not know how Hegel proved it, but there really is seven planets. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and seventh Neptune. Earth-Moon system is a double planet, so it should not be counted as a planet in singular.

I like that, very clever. Took me a couple of minutes.

Why is the citric acid cycle called a cycle?
Because it goes round.

Trolling the troll thread? Subtle

Had to mention this.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bcm1 White 8 is bad.
$$ ---------------------------------------
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

In the same vein:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bcm1 Move 2 lost the game
$$ ---------------------------------------
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . |
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

@amnal I actually thought of mentioning Curry's paradox but wondered if it would be trolling by posting an actual paradox that isn't based on any obvious error in reasoning, and which lacks any accepted solution.

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Occupy Babel!

More for children than adults:

Q: Which is better, a peanut butter sandwich, or eternal happiness?

A: A peanut butter sandwich, of course.

Proof: Most would agree, that nothing is better than eternal happiness. But on the other hand, a peanut butter sandwich is certainly better than nothing. (Just ask a hungry person.)

Ergo, a peanut butter sandwich is better than eternal happiness.

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And the go-fever which is more real than many doctors’ diseases, waked and raged...
- Rudyard Kipling, "The Light That Failed" (1891)

Asian trolls:

Japanese, arashi (あらし)
Korean, nak-si (낚시)
Chinese, diào yú (钓鱼)

I think I'm going to add the Japanese one to the common go terms page on Sensei's

_________________
Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

Funnily, I saw this one mentioned as an example in set theory... (probably not aimed for children). It goes as follows:

The set of things that are better than eternal happiness is empty. But the peanut butter sandwich is better than the empty set. So the paradox is that in one case,
the empty set is the set of objects that are being compared, while in the other, the set itself is being compared to something. It illustrates that the set itself
can be viewed as an element, as in 0 and {0}, where 0 is the empty set.

Trypanosma brucei populations undergo apoptosis.
Boom!
[Edited for italics and phrasing]

Go is 100% Theory and 0% Reading

_________________
"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." -- Bruce Lee

Hegel's proof that there are seven planets (or more specifically, that there is no planet between Mars and Jupiter) is quite funny. There is a vague (verrry vague) regularity in the spacing of the planets called Bode's Law. It's hard to even express what the relationship is with an equation, which shows how dodgy the law is. However, on any formulation of Bode's law there is a large error term for each entry in the sequence, and - oh yes - one step in the sequence doesn't have a planet in it.

Any empiricist might say "this isn't a very good astronomical law." Starry-eyed 18th c. rationalists instead decided to find the planet which must exist between Mars and Jupiter. So Hegel wrote an essay attacking Bode's law, in which he defended an alternative, equally arbitrary cubic equation (which Hegel fit to the data, so the error terms were smaller). And of course, Hegel's equation doesn't predict another planet (which at the time would have been an 8th planet) between Mars and Jupiter.


**********And my own contribution:

Have you ever wondered if you were actually a brain in a vat? Or maybe a body in a vat, like in the Matrix? Well, don't worry. If you were actually a brain in a vat, you would never have seen any actual brains, or any actual vats, for that matter. In fact, if you were just a brain in a vat, you'd have no way of knowing that brains, or vats, really existed! If you think about it, if you don't know anything about what sorts of objects actually exist, on the whole it's highly unlikely that the sort of objects which you believe exist, actually exist. (After all, for every object that actually exists, there are millions of objects that only exist in our imaginations.)

So if you were a brain in a vat, then it would be almost certain that there were no such things as brains or vats; and if brains and vats don't actually exist, then you definitely aren't a brain in a vat.

Aren't you reassured?

It was only a matter of time: http://www.urlesque.com/2010/10/25/i-sh ... professor/

bah already saw it on reddit

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"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." -- Bruce Lee

This reminds me of another favorite troll: Why are you alive right now, and not in the far future? The human population is increasing exponentially. If it continues to increase, or even if it stays steady in the future, then the probability of you being born so close to the beginning of human history is almost zero. Surely if in the future humanity spreads throughout the galaxy and there're trillions of people alive at any one time, you're almost certain to be born then and not now.

Unlikely explanation: you're the equivalent of a jackpot winner, an enormously rare "early human".

More likely explanation: in the near future, the human species will die out. Then it's not strange at all that you're living now.

A hard tesumego

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bcm1 Black to play and win
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$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]