Comment Re:Infinity (Score 1) 1067
You learn arithmetic long before you learn algebra, and a very basic rule of arithmetic is thou shalt never divide by zero because the result is undefined.
"How?" said Miss Pearce obediently, but without enthisiasm.
"By writing down what the answer is!" exclaimed Dirk. "And here it is!" He slapped the piece of paper triumphantly and sat back with a satisfied smile.
Miss Pearce looked at it dumbly.
"With the result," continued Dirk, "that I am now able to turn my mind to fresh and intriguing problems, like, for instance..."
He took the piece of paper covered with its aimless squiggles and doodlings, and held it up to her.
"What language," he said in a low, dark voice, "is this written in?"
Miss Pearce continued to look at it dumbly.
Dirk flung the piece of paper down, put his feet up on the table, and threw his head back with his hands behind it.
"You see what I have done?" he asked the ceiling, which seemed to flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation. "I have transformed the problem from an intractably difficult and possibly quite insoluble conundrum into a mere linguistic puzzle. Albeit," he muttered, aftera long moment of silent pondering, "an intractably difficult and possibly insoluble one."
Apologies to Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
After 20 years of programming, I've decided I'm tired of checking for div by zero.
I am amazed that someone can persist in a career for 20 years without a clue as to what they are doing. If you are getting divide by zero errors there is something wrong with your logic. Don't blame the computer and certainly don't try to outsmart the computer which is trying to help you by pointing this out. Div by zero errors aren't something you should gloss over, they're something that should make you sit down and come up with an algorithm that actually does what you thought it was supposed to do.
Do you really want people who will be shown to be wrong within 40 years to be making force-of-law decisions for you on the very things that they are wrong about? My guess is that its only not-a-big-deal when it doesn't directly effect your lifestyle choices.
Yes, my point was not to criticize correcting mistakes, but pointing out how often the reformers are wrong in their certainty. If people simply decided that X was unhealthy and advocated avoiding it, it wouldn't be so bad. But often these reforms have the force of law, everyone is coerced into going along, and then later on, we find out it was better to have left things as they were.
Ever notice how many reforms are actually reversals of previous reforms? Trans fats got a huge boost in the '70s and '80s because the reformers were convinced that saturated fat was very bad for you. Margarine was supposed to be more healthy than butter. So manufacturers ditched saturated fats and went for trans fats.
Similarly, now people want to ban animal testing, which established at the insistence of the reformers of a century ago. HMOs were a healthcare reform of the '70s, and are now reviled. People now complain about mandatory minimum sentencing, which was a '70s reform meant to end the problem of wildly disparate sentences.
And so the cycle goes....
"Floggings will continue until morale improves." -- anonymous flyer being distributed at Exxon USA
