23 jun 06
"what do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
you get the sense that this person asked this question because he wanted to see if i'd be able to get a nice-sized chunk of text out of it, and generally what i'd do, that's what you get. what do i do here? just assume that i know the answer to the question, based on my elementary school memories of the phrase "six times nine is blah blah blah"? count out the answer? assume i know how to count? deliberately answer the question wrongly, as in "haha, it's such an easy question, and yet i got it wrong!" this replaces of "how do i know if i've made a huge mistake of/in my life?" as "hardest question."
now, people know to ask me really short, obvious questions ("what's your name?"), because they know it will torture me, and that i'll have a hard time squeezing a page of words out of it, unless i totally abandon all scruples. but, that might teach them a lesson: if they ask me "how tall are you?" and i respond with an analysis of the hudson bay company in the 1900s, perhaps i'd stop getting such questions in the mail. notice that the reader/asker didn't ask "what's 1 + 1?". then, i could talk about the infamous 1,000 page proof of it, and generally how math is silly. he picked the perfect question -- for this i give him kudos. it's so lame it's brilliant.
so far, my shortest answer has been the "boricua for president" question. before that question, i didn't know what a boricua was (a native amerindian inhabitant of puerto rico). it's very educational for me, actually. i didn't use to know what a dirichlet series was, what a reimann-zeta function was, or even what the reimann hypothesis consisted of. i didn't know the airspeed of an unladen swallow. "know".
basically, my behavioral pattern is to read the question, read a few randomly-selected, semi-related web texts, and then start babbling. sometimes, i get pretty far off-track. but let's see here if i can provide something in the ballpark of "6 * 9 = __".
i have to answer this damned question before the next one arrives. it could come at any moment. see, when i have nothing significant or related to say about a question, i'll resort to the dreaded "metablogging" -- or just talking about my own project. it's horrible.
i need some new people to ask questions -- i'm quite sure it's the same few submitting over and over. my goal is for lots of strangers to come in and think the concept of a web-based answer column is interesting, and then submit their own thoughtful questions, or at least questions that i will enjoy answering.
to email strong-bad (ie, suggest a topic for a cartoon) at homestarrunner.com, one has to start up an email program (or go to a webmail site), and actually email him; there's no easy one-click web form there. amazing, what decent content will do.
what would you do if you were in my shoes and got this question in the mail? would you answer it? or talk about the implications of receiving such a question in the mail? talk about number theory or combinatorics? i might have to instigate a policy of only answering those questions i want to answer, but that can't really happen until i get a truly crippling number in the mail, which will very, very likely not happen.
do you think, little tiny pod of readers that probably consists of five people, you can tell somebody about this? i need some new submissions. it's sort of like an addiction. in a way, it's better than my old blog, because i always know what to write about (except in cases like this). but in a way, it's horrible, because sometimes someone will ask "what's 6 times 9?" that'd be funny if i got "what's 6 times 8?" next. at that point, i'd descend into madness.
i find i anticipate getting questions in the mail, because then that means that i'm "allowed to write." because that's the rule -- get a question in the mail, put it on the index page, and link to an article about the question. i get to define what i mean by "answer the question." as in this case -- i've just babbled. also, that unladen swallow and tootsie roll questions were pretty bad in that way. i believe i talked about star trek. which reminds me: i can hear "deep space 9" on downstairs, and the real star trek comes on in 50 minutes. i lead a productive life. i do, actually.
what do you get when you multiply six times nine? i can't do it. i can't answer that question. i don't know why. something is preventing me. i can't make a joke out of getting it wrong, and i can't just come and say "__" (hint: it's two digits). i mean...i'm not sure if i know it's two digits long. i don't know anything about it, or at least i'm not going to reveal that i know anything about it.
what if i didn't know it (i'm not saying that i do)? IIIIIIIII + IIIIIIIII + IIIIIIIII + IIIIIIIII + IIIIIIIII + IIIIIIIII = ?. I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I + I = ?. count the I's. can i do this? probably not, actually. six times nine. nine, six times. 6 * 9 = 6 * 9. there's something i could talk about: the commutative property: x(y) = y(x).
it's the same number of I's, but just grouped differently. this is the essence of the commutative property: different groupings.
i think i found the formal proof of the commutative property on some number theory document. it seems to rely on the assumption that 0 is an integer. i guess it is -- what do i know? but it seems like a weird enough integer that extrapolation of its properties to other numbers is iffy. i know nothing. i am nothing.
i'm listening to "blind willie mctell" singing "listen here, woman, ima tell you this: if you wanna get crooked, ima give you my fist", and it's distracting me from my discussion of 6 * 9. the concept of 6 * 9. i know what you mean, asker from hell, and i know what answer you were thinking of.
BUT I CAN'T DO IT