Me and My Imaginary Friends

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Truly Sad

So I'm listening to a podcast game show. One of the series of questions asked the contestants to define some rules or laws that most people have heard of but may not know fully. Here are the rules that I could not fully define: The Monroe Doctrine, Murphy's Law, the 5th Amendment, and the Law of Diminishing Returns. (Evidently there are three rules to Murphy's Law, not just one.) So what's sad about this? The final thing to define was "The Prime Directive." It's from Star Trek. I knew that answer immediately and completely.

4 Comments:

Blogger Alan said...

Diminishing Returns... isn't that the one where you lose money on a real estate investment?

6:54 PM  
Blogger Horse N. Buggy said...

We think of it in terms of financial investment, but that is not the technical definition. From wikipedia:

In economics, diminishing returns is the short form of diminishing marginal returns. In a production system, having fixed and variable inputs, keeping the fixed inputs constant, as more of a variable input is applied, each additional unit of input yields less and less additional output.

Although ostensibly purely an economic concept, diminishing marginal returns appears in some form or another in most fields of human endeavour, especially in the fields of physical sciences and engineering. As such, it is probably the best-known economic principle among non-economists.

9:18 PM  
Blogger Alan said...

Also from Wikipedia...
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I like that

8:17 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Like that too, Poly.

So what is The Prime Directive?

2:24 PM  

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