Mother Jones
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Yesterday I wrote a post that listed a bunch of things people have said about Ted Cruz, along with a bunch of things I made up. But which were real and which were invented? Here was the answer:
All statements whose ordinal number takes the integer form 2n+1 or 2n-1 have been invented. The rest are real.
I got some pushback about this, mostly asking what the hell kind of crap was this, anyway? So here goes. Here’s where it came from:
- At first I was just going to toss in a few fake statements and put the answer key below the fold. But then I realized that anyone who got here via a direct link would see the answers right away.
- So then I figured I’d add eight fakes in all the odd slots. But if your eye drifted down to the answer, you’d see “odd” right away.
- So I put it in small type. But even that was readable.
- So then I figured that instead of “odd,” I’d say that all the fakes were of the form 2n+1. My geeky readers would appreciate it.
- Then I looked for a link that defined “odd,” so that my non-geeky readers had a fighting chance of figuring things out. The only simple one I found defined odd as 2n+1 or 2n-1. So I changed the text to match.
This was pretty obviously a pointless waste of time. Welcome to my world. This is what blogging has done to me.
Anyway, in case you didn’t figure it out, all the odd numbered statement are fakes. The rest are real. The scary thing is that I didn’t have any trouble coming up with eight plausible fakes.
This article:
