2 Ridiculous Concepts

Here are 2 daft ideas that people hold and WILL NOT be persuaded against, much to my bafflement and exasperation.

1. That it is statistically wise to buy Lottery tickets

When my daughter became 18 she asked me how to enter the Lottery. Poor child! My advice was not to on any account. I had forbidden her father to enter the stupid thing when it first came out.

The odds may be illustrated as follows: Consider a lush meadow verdant with grass. Now select one blade of the grass - out of all the myriad blades of grass available in the meadow. Leave it there (don't pick it), and when Camelot's officials come along at the end of the week, see if they select your blade, out of all the blades. They won't, will they? No. They will not. Add to this scenario the appalling idea of paying a £1 for your participation in the charade, and the fact that should they, in a freak occurrence, choose your blade of grass, you will either have mislaid the ticket proving it to be your blade of grass, or you will forget to check the meadow at all - and you begin to appreciate the idiocy of the proposition. Also bear in mind that a tiny proportion of the money goes to a charity (and not one of your choice), while the rest bankrolls the nest-feathering activities of the Camelot executives.

Alternative Lottery Payment Facility

Better, I suggested, that she go out into the alleyway, find a drainhole, and insert money into the slot provided, thus:







This course of action is more beneficial than buying a lottery ticket since

i) the money could at least assist some wretched tramp who might find it later down at the sewage works, and

ii) one is unlikely to repeat the experience even once, let alone week by week.

The thrust of my argument is this: why, why, WHY pay good money to increase your chances of winning by so negligible a degree? Keep your £1! Buy some beer with it! You are no less likely* to win the big prize, AND you get some beer. 

*well, OK, you are 0.000007% less likely, but really, what's the difference?

2. That a tree falling over makes no noise if there is no-one there to hear it.

This makes me so cross that I can hardly address the question. Of COURSE it makes a dratted noise. Sound waves are generated when trees fall over. Sound = noise. All it means is that no-one hears it. It is simply a matter of definition. MY definition of sound is that it is a sequence of waves of pressure that propagates through compressible media such as air or water. People who are trying to annoy me have a different definition, which involves their egocentric assertion that unless the sound waves get to their ears and register in their brain then there is no sound. 



This brings us to Bishop Bally Berkeley who has been the cause of more arguments in this house than... well than my spending habits and the amount of orange juice teenage boys get through if you must know.  Bishop Berkeley (of Cloyne) was a dear old boy who was very keen on getting people to use pine tar, but he also advanced the theory now known as subjective idealism. This says that stuff only exists when it is perceived to do so. In other words when you leave the room, the table, chairs etc. all vanish because you aren't looking at them. This seems to be astonishingly arrogant. [In the Bishop's defence I admit he did say that since God is always perceiving everything the tables and chairs are actually still there.]  Besides, it would be utter chaos, with things appearing and disappearing all the time - and what about things you didn't notice? The other day I was looking for my glasses EVERYWHERE, and eventually found them in the refrigerator, where I had already looked several times and not seen them. Do you think this might have been due to a malfunction in the Subjective Idealism dynamic? No, I think I'm just a silly woman who couldn't see her glasses when she was looking straight at them. And what about things you did see, but have now forgotten about? How do they fit into the system, eh?

No, Bishop old chap, we've all come up with this idea - surely - in approximately our sixth year (it would be a blithe and heedless child whose mind it did not cross, would it not?), considered it, and then dismissed it as absurd and unworkable. Are there any subjective idealists over the age of 8? Unlikely. I can't see any in here, anyway, Heh heh!



Gratuitous picture of tree. This failed to win the local Tree Photograph Competition and I was very insulted.