What Happened To That Global Warming?

What the--

It's winter?!?

How is that POSSIBLE?

Al Gore told me that we were having Global Warming! That means we can NEVER HAVE WINTER AGAIN!

The fact that today's winter solstice happened right on schedule is CONCRETE PROOF that global warming is a myth designed to keep those multimillionaire scientists in the lap of luxury, drinking Courvoisier and smoking fancy cigars rolled from carbon credits!

Of course, I can't fully blame the scientists. They were relying on numbers to make their climate predictions, and as we know all numbers are false.

Maybe the embarrassment they're feeling today, knowing that their Global Warming predictions went so utterly wrong, will get them to give up their silly reliance on numbers.

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A MOST DANGEROUS BOOK

Some authors just don't know when to leave well enough alone.

It's not enough that John Derbyshire taunted the evilicious forces of numeracy with his 2004 tome about Bernhard Reimann's unsolvable math problem. He just had to follow it up with Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra.

As any Math Skeptic knows, algebra is known universally as the most dangerous of all the maths. First, the use of variables creates a dangerous portal to the unknown netherworld of quantum stochasticity, from which any manner of random hideous creature could emerge.

Secondly, the juxtaposition of numbers and letters leaves our poor, innocent letters susceptible to bad influence and peer pressure from the numbers. I mean, one minute you could be solving for y, and the next minute the letters are conspiring the overthrow of human civilization.

Derbyshire takes the book one step deeper into dangertown by fictionalizing some of algebra's evil history. It's not bad enough that he glorifies the many times algebra has led to the downfall of human civilizations, but by delving into the real and imaginary history, he gives algebra plenty of tricksy ideas.

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