What's a cool thing you've deduced?

In My Humble Opinion
21

CandidGamera: I can’t express this very mathematically nor tie it into some ultimate proof, but it seems to relate to what you said…

If you imagine a square, n by n, and you want the next square. Visualise that square - you need to add a line on top, a line on bottom and one in the corner. Hence, n^2 2n + 1. 2n + 1 is a function that gives all odd numbers, which is why they appear as the differences between terms.

Visualise a cube - to get the next cube along, you need to add three squares (on top, and two sides), three lines to go in between and another corner piece. Hence n^3 + 3n^2 + 3n + 1

Now visualise a 4 dimensional cube…

…j/k. But I think you see what I’m stabbing at. We can extrapolate that turning a 4D cube of order n into one of order n + 1 would require 4 Cubes, 6 Squares, 4 Lines, and the customary corner piece.

…

As for my own deductions, I can’t really think of any truly sherlockesque moments, but…

I came up with the formula for the sum of n terms of an arithmetic sequence back in 7th grade.

In one of my primary school classes, we had a tank with snails in. Our teacher explained how “the snails are both male and female”, yet it took me to deduce that when we found one set of eggs, there had to be another. There was… damn, I was proud of that.

This is far from a deduction, and I’ve actually reversed part of this thinking since… but in one of my first years at school, I decided that God didn’t really make sense. This went down well in a song where it was still customary to sing Hymns. To be honest, I can’t have been basing it on anything serious, and it’s funny how it took longer for me to question Santa… :wink:

22

Nitpick: Aren’t most of these examples of induction, not deduction ?

23

Once, when playing pictionary, my sister started drawing a straight line and I yelled, “Pogo stick!” I was right.

24

Way back when I was just starting to date Mr. Rilch, I was at his house when NextGen was about to come on. Mr. Rilch asked if I’d mind watching the episode with him, “because it’s a pretty good one…about the only Wesley-centric episode I can stand”. I said, truthfully, that I didn’t mind, and we sat and watched “The First Duty”.

Flash forward a few months. Mr. Rilch had promised to show me his favorite NextGen episodes, but unfortunately, we got no more than ten minutes into “Best of Both Worlds” before his VCR malfunctioned :(. Now we’re at Friend’s apartment, watching a new episode in which a group of Starfleet ensigns are anxiously waiting to find out which of them will be promoted. Friend is giving careful scrutiny to a blond Bajoran girl. “Where have I seen that chick before?” he muses.

Click…click…click in my head. “‘The First Duty’?”

Friend’s head swivels, and the play of emotion on his face is something to behold: first aggravation that someone beat him to the punch, then disbelief that it was me, and finally awe when Mr. Rilch informs him that “TFD” was the only NextGen episode that I’d ever seen.

25

This was back in high school; I don’t remember the class. It might have been during Quiz Bowl practice.

The teacher asked a question, and I answered “Oedipus Rex. Killed his father, married his mother, gouged his eyes out.”

Those were the answers to the follow-up questions.

26

That Cecil is nothing more than a giant computer similar to HAL or W.O.P.R. Maybe the Chicago reader has the words C.E.C.I.L. stenciled on the side.

:slight_smile:

27

Alright, try this.

If evolution not only means the propogation of a species but also its own advancement, the question to ask is, why did apes become humans who could think about such wonderful things like God and sliced bread? For nature to actually go that far…well. ::wipes the table:: There’s my deduction. Evolution was the roundabout way of getting us to finally notice God.

28

I would have gotten that one right, but through less impressive means:

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they called Gitchegumee.
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
when the skies of November turn gloomy.

29

That hurt my head.

As for me, nothing spectacular, but I was surprised to find that, while a whole bunch of art historians claim that the flowers in Hieronymus Bosch’s “Stone Operation” painting are tulips, and deduce all sorts of allegorical meanings from that, tulips were in fact never mentioned by European botanists until the mid-16th century, nearly 100 years after the painting’s creation, which indicates that they weren’t introduced from Asia until then. So the flowers obviously can’t be tulips. That took about 20 minutes of research, so I was surprised to find that so many experts could have neglected to do such basic fact-checking.

30

Ooh, here’s an unpleasant one.

Friend Down South was married for about two years, and it was one of those deals where you could see the whole thing going downhill immediately after the wedding. “Brenda” was/is an ER nurse, which is relevant. During the final stages before the divorce was filed, Mr. Rilch reported to me that Brenda had been sleeping with someone else.

Now, Brenda is attractive enough physically, but not a very “warm” person. “Huh,” said I. “I can’t imagine who’d have a full-fledged affair with her…unless it’s some ER doc who doesn’t have time to go home between shifts…”

Mr. Rilch’s jaw dropped. “Did ‘Dylan’ tell you that already?”

“No, just a WAG.”

31

Every rational number is expressable as the sum of finitely many distinct reciprocals of integers if and only if the harmonic series diverges. But then, everyone already knows that.

32

One of my earliest memories – Ok I was three and a half.

We were on holiday and staying in some kind of single level, two appartment flat arrangement. I can still remember the red brick. It had one feature that particularly appealed – A low window that I could climb out of instead of using the door. Now I was before the age of fully understanding the properties of left/right symmetry. And I noticed that there were two identical windows side by side. But the curious thing was that when I climbed out the window I only ever climbed out of the right hand one.

So, with a bit of deduction I concluded that the only way that I could climb out of the left window would be to first climb into it. I remember being confused to see someone elses shoes in the wardrobe, and couldn’t quite understand why the lounge was back to front and there were all of these strange people partying in it.

All I really wanted to do was go back to the bedroom and climb out of the window. But they wouldn’t let me and insisted on taking me back home via the door.

My older sister said that it was a flat and I was dumb for not knowing what that meant. But I figure I didn’t do too bad; even if no one else understood my logic.