For laymen's eyes only

I was helping Franco a bit with his math homework today. He's in a class that shatters all records for lack of applications. I said on the previous post that my college experience was generally useless. Well, this class is to my college experience as my college experience is to Manswers. Somewhere between useless factorial and worthless to the good-for-nothingth power.

They learn about different sets of numbers, and how those sets are defined. These are not even interesting sets, like numbers that turn into letters when flipped upside down, enabling one to type dirty words in a calculator. They're boring numbers with "properties," a favorite word among nerds. About the only thing interesting about them are their names, and even here, interesting is a hyperbole of a hyperbole.

Lucky, deficient, perfect, happy, hungry, sociable, vampire, narcissistic, powerful, aspiring, abundant, odious, and the list goes on.

And then, as I read this list, I began to feel myself getting more and more nauseous. For it had dawned on me that this list was indeed important, and in a way I had never dreamed. Reading these silly words, I came to a horrifying and now seemingly obvious conclusion. This is a conspiracy spearheaded by mathematicians!

Psh, you may say. What's their purpose? Well I'll tell you. To turn our everyday conversations into math-talk. Given fifty years, we'll all be talking in equations with about as much awareness as we currently have for curse words. And then, once we're all talking math and not English and Chinese, we won't be able to distinguish nerds from jocks, the bullies from the bullied. It will be an apocalypse.

The clues to this conspiracy are everywhere, but we've been blinded by our disdain for those four-eyed evil-smelling geniuses. Mathematicians have been working up to this step for thousands of years without raising a hair of suspicion until now, on this blog. Has no one except me noticed that mathematicians use letters even more than numbers? The governments of most countries (minus New Zealand) are very lax in this respect. Mathematicians are almost outside the law. But now they've gone far enough. I can't even say I'm hungry in the privacy of my own quarter of an apartment without sounding like a nerd. I say we get our languages back from the nerds. Numbers for nerds, letters for laymen. Who's with me?