[lojban] Re: partial recantation in favour of solomonics

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Invent Yourself scripsit:
> 
> On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, And Rosta wrote:
> 
> > But I think we also would like to be able to say
> > truthfully that "50% of unicorns are male". 

I think that in the Real World, where there are no unicorns, this
statement can't be sustained.  Simply put, the number of unicorns is
zero and the number of male unicorns is zero, so the fraction of
male unicorns is 0/0, which is an indeterminate value.  (Anything
times zero is zero, so reversing the operation, dividing a zero product
by its zero multiplier, gives us a multiplier which can be anything.)

We must move into a world in which there are unicorns in order to get
the effect you want.  BTW, in the U.S. at least, males constitute only
48.9% of the human population.  That's a deficiency of about three million.

> And you should probably
> read and meditate on what I closed message 17044 with, which shows why
> "50% of unicorns are male" is always a valid statement.

If I say that two male unicorns exist on average for every female,
how would you in principle refute me?

-- 
A mosquito cried out in his pain,               John Cowan
"A chemist has poisoned my brain!"              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        The cause of his sorrow                 http://www.reutershealth.com
        Was para-dichloro-                      jcowan@reutershealth.com
Diphenyltrichloroethane.                                (aka DDT)