Small Fish, Big Pond

No this isn’t a retaliation post for taking down the page I made extolling my greatness to the world. Alot of the time I find myself being rubbed the wrong way by wikipedia content. The constant reminder that most of the internet’s content is made by petty nerds in their parents basement (although it’s not nearly as bad as the comments sections on youtube for for destroying my faith in man).

One is the overuse of the “citation needed”.
I understand the need for accuracy and that’s what that tag is for, however some people go on sprees throwing it at any sentence that doesn’t have a link to an external reference even when the comment itself is speculative. An example is a sentence like, “Some people even think the moon landings were faked by the government “.
Besides the fact this can be proven by reading the idiotic comments on youtube, how about the guy who made the edit? There citation made, no need to get equally unreliable proof linked off the internet.

But what got me riled up this time was how some people feel the need to see inferences and connections where none exist and then spew the nonsense online like having it on wikipedia somehow validates their idiotic ramblings. It’s those same people you see in a coffee shop spouting false pseudo-philosophy to an ignorant wide eyed freshman girl because he just watched “What the Bleep do we know?“. Although in the girl’s defense she’s probably just playing along because she knows the guy is a virgin desperate for attention and will be an easy lay.

Anyway in the entry for Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll left the following references to the field Mathematics:

In chapter 1, “Down the Rabbit-Hole,” in the midst of shrinking, Alice waxes philosophic concerning what final size she will end up as, perhaps “going out altogether, like a candle.”; this pondering reflects the concept of a limit.

Yeah it COULD be a mathematical reference to limits or just a simple comment that she doesn’t want to shrink to death.

In chapter 5, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” the Pigeon asserts that little girls are some kind of serpent, for both little girls and serpents eat eggs. This general concept of abstraction occurs widely in many fields of science; an example in mathematics of employing this reasoning would be in the substitution of variables.

I know that substitution of variables is common in math but it’s more common in real life, even by people (children) who have now idea of the mathematical concept of variables. Just like when how all mathematicians I know apply math to things that don’t warrant it, thus when I meet somebody making making more out of circumstances than there really is I ask, ” By chance are you a mathematician?”

The Cheshire cat fades until it disappears entirely, leaving only its wide grin, suspended in the air, leading Alice to marvel and note that she has seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat. Deep abstraction of concepts (non-Euclidean geometry, abstract algebra, the beginnings of mathematical logic…) was taking over mathematics at the time Dodgson was writing. Dodgson’s delineation of the relationship between cat and grin can be taken to represent…

God, please just shut up!

Sometimes somebody slips in a math reference for the nerds out there and sometimes a story is just a story.

By the way did you know that the upcoming Tim Burton “Alice in Wonderland” movie with Johnny Depp is not a remake or an adaptation but a sequel to the books? I didn’t. In them alice is all grown up.