Monday, August 4, 2014

Question of the Day

Am I the only one who never got the point of Venn diagrams?   I got a good grade in the Foundations of Math course I took and at one time had what was probably a somewhat better than merely average grasp of set theory but Venn diagrams always seemed irrelevant to me.

In what might be a good example of how the set of really smart people can contain some entirely stupid thinking, here's one of the celebratory Venn diagrams I saw online today.


Since the God presumably being addressed includes that God is any number of stated ultimate superlatives, surpassing human understanding and many if not an infinite number which even surpass human definition, including the entire universe and all of existence, the diagram is stupidly drawn.   I'd give it a failing grade.

Not to mention the clever boy (a guess at the gender in which the stupid often is strong) who drew it doesn't understand much about the other sets and subsets, not to mention the intersections of them.  I mean, Saint Nicholas predates The Spanish Inquisition by any number of years and there is no record of him ever leaving Lyia in Anatolia for the Iberian peninsula that I'm aware of, give or take a few miraculous apparitions to save sailors at sea.   I'm rather doubtful that he could even be considered a member of the Roman Catholic Church.   How he comes to be in the same subset as Spider Man is also something I'd have expected even my Algebra 1 instructor to demand an explanation for.    This diagram is an element of the set of all x such that x is a rather stupid and puerile means of showing how stupid an attempt at cleverness based on putting other people down with implications of class snobbery can be.   So it's only apparent use, to show how clever the one drawing it and posting it online, is, only shows how clever they are not.   Hey, I might not see the point of Venn diagrams but that doesn't mean I can't respect the integrity of the system.  I did take the course.

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