Freebsd Fortunes

Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning:
        It's on the other side.

[Prime Minister Joseph] Chamberlain loves the working man -- he loves
to see him work.
                -- Winston Churchill

Pro is to con as progress is to Congress.

Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she's unable to postulate how.
                -- Frederick Winsor

Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have
orgasms?  The answer is yes, they have orgasms almost constantly, which
is why they don't mind living in pools of warm slime.
                -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every
                   Teen Should Know"

Prof:    So the American government went to IBM to come up with a data
         encryption standard and they came up with ...
Student: EBCDIC!

Professor Gorden Newell threw another shutout in last week's Chem.
Eng.  130 midterm.  Once again no student received a single point on
his exam.  Newell has now tossed five shutouts this quarter.  Newell's
earned exam average has now dropped to a phenomenal 30

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying
to produce bigger and better idiots.  So far, the Universe is winning.

                -- Rich Cook

Proof techniques #1: Proof by Induction.

This technique is used on equations with "n" in them.  Induction
techniques are very popular, even the military used them.

SAMPLE: Proof of induction without proof of induction.

        We know it's true for n equal to 1.  Now assume that it's true
for every natural number less than n.  N is arbitrary, so we can take n
as large as we want.  If n is sufficiently large, the case of n+1 is
trivially equivalent, so the only important n are n less than n.  We
can take n = n (from above), so it's true for n+1 because it's just
about n.
        QED.    (QED translates from the Latin as "So what?")

Proof techniques #2: Proof by Oddity.
        SAMPLE: To prove that horses have an infinite number of legs.
(1) Horses have an even number of legs.
(2) They have two legs in back and fore legs in front.
(3) This makes a total of six legs, which certainly is an odd number of
    legs for a horse.
(4) But the only number that is both odd and even is infinity.
(5) Therefore, horses must have an infinite number of legs.

Topics to be covered in future issues include proof by:
        Intimidation
        Gesticulation (handwaving)
        "Try it; it works"
        Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...)
        Blatant assertion
        Changing all the 2's to n's
        Mutual consent
        Lack of a counterexample, and
        "It stands to reason"