Also, I once wrote an essay for one of my classes (half in jest, but half serious, actually) about why Americans can't do math-- and one of the reasons I gave was that large Hummers park in spaces marked "compact". (I mean if a 50-year old adult can't get the spatial perception thing, we expect 9-year olds to figure out proportions? ) By parking in this space, I feel like I'm contributing to math illiteracy.
Granted, my car is hardly a Hummer or the 5 mongo SUVs that were parked next to my car in spaces marked "SMALL CAR", but I still felt a twinge of guilt as I pulled into the parking space clearly marked "SMALL CAR". However, the reason I chose to park here, in spite of my guilt is perfectly logical: my sense of resignation exceeded my sense of guilt--so much so that I only hesitated for about 10 seconds contemplating my hypocrisy, before I thought out loud, "well, if these 6 mongo SUVs and Hummer, and this ginormous truck is considered a small car, then for sure my Camry is a midget." In economics jargon, my marginal resignation exceeded my marginal guilt. However, if my marginal guilt had exceeded my marginal resignation, I wouldn't have parked in the small car space.
If a Hummer qualifies as a compact car, then the next time I rent a compact car, can I request a Volvo station wagon as a compact car? I surely don't want to drive a Hummer, but surely a Volvo is a compact far more legitimately than a Hummer is, no?
How come the rental car companies never confuse "compact" in this way?
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In an earlier post, I questioned the sizing practices of Banana Republic, because they claimed that zero was a legitimate size. I went into Banana Republic to look for basic t-shirts (hey, they might not have the size thing down quite right, but I still like their clothes. . .), and as I was rifling through the sale racks, guess what I saw? Something more egregious than a size 0.
Can you possibly guess what size they had? 00! That's double-zero, which is even smaller than a size 0, if one can fathom that.
I'm trying to wrap my brain around their logic (Yes, I've been doing a lot of brain-wrapping lately. . ..) of why 00<0.
Well, ok, technically, zero is zero is zero, so regardless of whether you have one of them or a googol of them, it is the same quantity.
Fine. I'm a flexible person. I can suspend my mathematical scruples for a while to try to comprehend this. Let's suspend this perfectly logical arithmetic notion that 0=00=0000000000000000 and treat zero like a number that has a value--a 1 or 3, for example. But even then, 1<11<111 and 3<33<333.
But the Banana Republic sizing folks are saying the converse. Wait wait. I think I got it. They are saying that a 00 is "more zero" than a regular zero. More quintessentially zero than zero, if you will. But then this brings us back to 1 and 11. Based on their logic, I'm confused as to whether 11 should be smaller or larger than a 1.
If Banana Republic keeps inflating their sizes, at some point, they will have to come up with an even smaller size than a 00. Will they just keep tacking on more zeroes, or will they start having negative sizes?
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