Thursday, August 7, 2008

A Whole Nother Math Joke

So, um, have you heard

the one about Noah’s instructions to the animals when they departed the ark: “Go forth and multiply”. The snakes, who were back then called adders, insisted “We can’t multiply; we’re adders!” Noah’s reply: “Use logs”.

Incidentally, a bit of Anglo-Saxon pedantry. "An adder" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "a naedre"; the n later drifted to the article. Carson Mitchell once told me about a few other examples of this process, but I don't remember them.