Ban All Cartesian Coordinates

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Has it occurred to you that Rene Descartes was French? :eek: So obviously, he was an EVIL EVIL EVIL person and the spawn of Satan. We need to act quickly to immediately ban the usage of Cartesian coordinates in all mathematics classes and by any physicist, mathematician, or engineer who receives government funds. We also must ban the teaching of analytical geometry or any mathematical theories that can be traced to the thought of the demon seed Rene Descartes. All these years, college kids have been reading the Meditations or Passions of the Soul in philosophy classes–completely unaware that by purchasing these subversive books, they were supporting terrorism and undermining all that is good and right in America.

Either that, or we could start calling them Freedom Coordinates, or we could start telling people that Descartes was really Dutch (since he did live in Holland from time to time) and then we’d just need to Dutchify his name to remove the taint–perhaps something like Rijn Dittohead.

2

Maybe, even ideas influenced by the French Revolution.

3

Bout bloody time.

[singing]
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart,
“I drink therefore I am.”
[/singing]

4

OK, lets all start using spherical co-ordinates!

5

No, better yet – oblate spherical coordinates. Or hyperbolic/elliptical coordinates. The further we get from straight axes crossing at right angles, the better.

6

Damn, I may have to start passing this one around campus…math humour that’s actually funny is so rare!

Oh, and I vote for hyperbolic coordinates. Five-sided rooms with five right angles, anyone?

7

Can we get rid of Blaise Pascal, while we’re at it? Alternatively, we could just change his name to Billy Pickle, or something.

8

There’s really no connection between Descarte and the modern French.

Would you ban everything we got from the Greeks and Romans because they are now from non-combatants in our Selected President’s replay of daddy’s war?

9

I dunno…those curvy-bendy coordinate systems seem kinda…french…too.

I say we go back to banging rocks together.

10

Goddammit, vb-man, it’s exactly your brand of unpatriotic effete intellectualism that’s undermining the moral climate of this country!

Any real American would embrace cylindrical coordinates, at the very least.

And we can do it without the namby-pamby zed’s of Great Britain, also, by God!

11

Absolutely!

I say we get Ashcroft to declare as terrorist devices to be banned immediately arches and armless statues of women. (He is already moving to outlaw democratic and republican ideals.)

(We may have to rename gyros to Freedom Spirals, however, I kinda like them.)

12

Well, the Turks are still allied with us, so we could call them Liberty Döner Kebap, or something like that. Of course that way they won’t taste quite the same.

But maybe we could run with the Greek thing and ban Fraternities and Sororities while we’re at it.

And what about a good ban on French Kissing?

Did Congress outlaw German Potato Salad or German Chocolate Cake during WWI or WWII?

13

You can have my x-axis when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

14

You know how hard it is to draw a line in polar coordinates?! I’d rather not use polar graphing for anything but circular things.

15

That’ll really throw those guy a Freedom Curve.

16

Descartes dreamt it all up when he was way out of France. Denmark, for example. He died on his way to take up a teaching position in Russia (any teachers think they’ve got a bum deal bussing thirty miles, think again). Maybe ol’ René should have thought again.

For mapping reasons GPS can be used. This is of course subject to reality variations and distortions of ±30 yards or so, and maps to a world in which there is no President of Pakistan and G W Bush’s pronouncements really do make sense.