Friday, December 19, 2008

Dumb quote awards

Winner:

Miss World Pakistan. Because she wants India and Pakistan to get together and CONDONE the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

image src: Miss Pakistan world website

http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2008/12/14/coren.intv.paracha.world.cnn.html

I guess beauty has no boundaries. Nor does stupidity?
Miss Teen USA South Carolina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WALIARHHLII

Honorable mention:


RIAA President Cary Sherman, for using language he didn't understand.

logarithmic growth

"If you can go back to that time in your mind and remember that file sharing was growing at logarithmic pace," Sherman said referring to 2003, not long after file-sharing service Napster had triggered a music-swapping frenzy. "It was unbelievable how much infringement was going on and there was no sense that it was illegal. There were no legal cases or precedent, nothing to discourage people from this kind of behavior."


Umm.. yeah... "logarithmic growth" means "growing as the logarithm of something". If that something is, say n, then logarithmic growth, Gl = log(n). Which is much much smaller than just the quantity itself (n). E.g if n = 100, log10(n) = 2, if n=1000, log10(n) = 3 << 1000, and so on. He should've said "exponential", or better yet, he shouldn't have used terminology he did not understand.

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