double negatives

I just can't think of anything to say about our current subjects of discussion that I haven't already said.

I'm with you on that one, Mr. Beagles.  Sometimes I think I'm beginning to repeat myself


Is that so bad?  Did not the prophet say that there is nothing new under the sun?  And that was like two thousand years and some change ago.  A few hundred if you think that Solomon wrote it, and maybe seven hundred if you think otherwise, which very brief internet research reveals most biblical scholars do.

To everything
(Turn turn)
There is a season
(Turn turn)
And a time to every purpose under heaven.

I don't recall that the subject came up in Sunday school at sleepy Elsdon Methodist Church, so my introduction to the book of the prophet comes from the Byrds' song.  What an interesting group that was from Dylan to psychedelic to country.

Anyway, my brief internet sorty revealed also that this was a book that barely made it into the bible.  Well it seems contrary to most everything else in the good book.  It doesn't tell a story.  It seems like a lot of folk wisdom gussied up poetically that's almost atheistic in that it doesn't say much about The Man Hisself.  I should do more research on the subject but I will wait for the resident expert to opine.

People didn't know much about history then and their science was nowhere, but they did have some pretty good mathematics thanks to the Greeks, and the word on the street is that Israel at the time was under the Hellenic influence.

The Greeks were fond of the natural numbers because they were so well behaved, add or multiply a couple and you get another natural number, but subtract or divide a couple and suddenly you are into the realms of the integers and the reals and things get messy, dip your toes into square roots and you get into the rationals which are not rational at all and the Greeks turned to geometry.

But back to the integers.  They give us the double negative as in the enemy of my enemy.  I wonder if either of the dawgs thought something was fishy when they were taught that a negative times a negative is a positive.  Wait a minute, what are they pulling off here?  I don't recall that we were given much of an explanation for why a negative times a negative becomes a positive.  Then shouldn't a positive times a positive become a negative then?  I mean just to be fair.  

I don't recall anybody objecting though.  If you didn't do it their way you would get the wrong answer and fail your arithmetic test and the horrifying specter of summer school loomed past the equinox.  

There are explanations for why a negative times a negative becomes a positive.  They are a little complex but you can see that if it were otherwise, if a negative times a negative becomes a super negative and a super negative times a super negative becomes a really super negative and so on, which common sense would seem to dictate, you can just see how everything would get out of hand, so it looks like math dodged a bullet there.

Not so with that other number which joins with the negatives, and I speak here of the humble zero which leads us into unreal realities, but that is a story for another day.


Herbert Walker, as a partisan dem I was not a big fan, but compared to his son (actually i think W might have been an ok prez if he hadn't fallen to the Cheney cabal), he grew a lot taller.  Then he became a giant compared to the present prez, but then all former prez's are giants compared to that guy.