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Never Say ‘Yes’ to Strangers and Other Scam Hacks
“Hello, this is Leila. Can you hear me alright?” the bright and cheery voice on the other end of the phone started the conversation.
“I can,” I replied.
There was a click on the other end.
“Hello? Are you still there?” I asked. Nothing.
Had she been expecting a different voice? Or had she been hoping I would say, “Yes.” I have heard about cons where someone calls one up and gets one to say, “Yes,” and then the perpetrator will ship something out and say they had recorded authorization to do so, and present a recording with a different question and one’s “Yes” to the scam question. I have no idea if it is true. On the other hand, I am very careful what I say on phones so that something like that can’t happen.
Have you heard about other scams, telephone or otherwise? Is there an easy way to avoid the scam?
Published in Culture
Not true. What you describe is NULL. Zero can be multiplied, added, subtracted. It is a number.
That misstates the issue. You can ADD TO nothing, you can SUBTRACT nothing… allowing for negative numbers, you can subtract FROM nothing… if you multiply by nothing you always get nothing… but you can’t DIVIDE BY nothing.
Null covers more ground, it can be a string field for example, in computer terms, that contains no characters… In that sense, zero is a subset, the null form of numbers.
“Zero is (a) null, but not all nulls are zero.”
Actually nothing from nothing leaves nothing, so it’s sung.
Nope. Zero is not a null. Source?
Recently, while writing a philosophical essay that asserted that there is no such thing as “infinitely small”, I used a mathematical proof that just as 0.9̅ (repeating) = 1, this indicated that this was because 0.9̅ really does equal 1, and not “nearly equals” 1 if you keep going for ever. And so the implied 0.0(repeating)1 [or 0.0̅1] that would seem to make up the difference between 0.9̅ and 1 doesn’t actually have existence — much like zero doesn’t have existence. Then I worked out a proof of this but it doesn’t import from my word document.
Most of the ones I get are robots, so I am short without guilt.
Yes, 0.999… (zero point nine repeating) does in fact equal one.
But zero is a number.
Incidentally, and I’m sorry to have to point this out, Arahant’s post ends with two questions, each of which invites us to respond with either a “no” or a—
Well, with the monosyllabic affirmation that begins with a “y.”
A wholly innocent coincidence? You decide.
(We are on to you, Arahant.)
Of course it LOOKS LIKE a number. But it represents nothing. Same as “null.” I could argue that “null” isn’t nothing because “null” is clearly a word, spelled enn, you, ell, ell.
But that would be silly, like claiming that zero is a number.
0 is a whole number, just not a natural number.
Of course those are all human-made conventions.
Mathematics is a human-made convention, Grasshopper. All of it.
Yes, but some get carried away with that hubris and forget that zero REPRESENTS nothing, so really IS nothing, and so NOT a NUMBER in the way that others are.
Also, 3 is not a number in the way that others are.
99.999999% of mathematicians and English teachers will disagree with you. ;)
Natural numbers → 1, 2, 3 … ∞
There is one more in the set of whole numbers. Guess which one.
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It’s the loneliest number since the number one
English teachers don’t know about math, and mathematicians think EVERYTHING is a number.
This is why I would advise anyone who is working on a proof of something really important never to use MS Word.
I myself wrote two. One proving I’d squared the circle and one giving the Grand Unification Theory.
I tried twice to import them to Ricochet, and they wouldn’t import. I finally deleted both files.
Too bad. You could have posted screen shots. Nobody would have read them in that format, so your proofs would have stood, unchallenged.
I solved Fermat’s Last Theorem but it’s a .bmp so the world will just have to continue in ignorance.
And all prime numbers are odd.
Thanks for responding.
0.9… does equal 1. But that assumes that there is a number 0.0…1 out there that adds to it. I believe that the number 0.0…1 does not exist. Just like the number of things specified by number zero does not exist.
Where’s Mark Camp when you need him. @markcamp !
No, my friend. A number that ends in 1 is necessarily of finite length. Because, well, it ends.
So tell me how many zeros are represented by the “…” and I’ll tell you just how far your number is from zero. ;)
What, is Mark Camp an English teacher AND a mathematician? That probably just makes him doubly wrong, in my book. :-)
No. There is an even prime number.
But if .999… is the same as 1, then .0000… is the same as 0.
Yes, but just the one, which makes it…
wait for it…
the ODDEST prime of all!
Indeed. Someone forgot part of the definition of “prime.”