[ExI] You know what?

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Fri Jan 25 17:28:21 UTC 2008


Spike writes

>[BillK wrote]
>> The expression 'I could not care less' originally meant 'it 
>> would be impossible for me to care less than I do because I 
>> do not care at all'...
> 
> BillK you have stumbled upon the key.  Clearly luck can have a positive or
> negative value, or zero value (leaving the poker table with the same amount
> with which one came for instance.)  Thus the saying "if not for bad luck I
> would have no luck at all."
> 
> We could apply the same scale to caring, assigning any real number, so one
> need not assume that zero caring is the minimum possible.  One could care
> negatively, so that if one began to care more she wouldn't care at all.
> Under these assumptions, the phrase "I could care less" is always true of
> all people under all circumstances.

Your efforts to think positively are absolutely amusing,
but somewhat alarming. Oh dear, I may have to 
consider positive and negative amount of those too!  :-)

> But since we are on this tangent, why must we assume luck and caring must be
> only real numbers?  Why not imginary luck?

I'm all for it!!   Then we can have complex caring, complex luck, 
and so on, which compels us to get rid of comparisons! (No one
has found an order for the complex numbers.) 

> The imaginary luck is where one
> thinks one is lucky, such as thinking you won at the poker table when
> someone folded with a full house on the last hand just to make you think you
> won.  Then like complex numbers, one can have positive or negative real luck
> along with positive or negative imaginary luck.  Perhaps if you score with a
> pulchritudinous avatar in second life, that might be imaginary luck, but
> then if she morphs into some big ugly galoot while you are doing it, then
> that would be negative imaginary luck.
> 
> Perhaps we could express it thus:
> 
> e^I(luck) = cos(luck) + I sin(luck)

Don't forget coefficients. But this may be getting entirely out of hand.

Lee

> Likewise with caring.  We can imagine we care or imagine we don't care, or
> some combination, along with our real component which is how much we really
> care.  The whole concept extends nicely, even to humor.  Imaginary humor
> would be some yahoo who thinks he is funny, for instance.
> 
> spike
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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