Go Forth and Divide

News scientists at Fleet Street University have discovered a remarkable new function on calculators which looks set to revolutionise. The function is believed to map the Cartesian product of the reals and the reals excluding zero onto the reals. Its symbol is described as “something like a horizontal line with one dot above it and one below.”

“It’s an amazing operation,” one boffin raved. “It allows us to relate one random quantity with another to give a third, totally meaningless figure. With this function, if we don’t like an amount, we can make it bigger or smaller at will. It’s every journalist’s dream, and so easy to use. For example, did you know that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi served just eleven and a half days for each of the 270 people killed in the Lockerby blast? Of course, by this logic, to find the appropriate term for a single murder, we’d have to divide the maximum time a human could spend in prison by the maximum number one person can kill, say 70 years by 70 million, for a Hitler, which comes to one millionth of a year, or – um – 30 seconds...

“Or did you know that one British soldier was killed for every vote cast in Afghanistan’s lawless Helmond Province? Where is the fairness in that? After all those fatalities, by rights, our beautiful boys should have won. We shall certainly be lodging an appeal with the UN to look into the matter, and hopefully get the Talibans to concede us the victory. Of course, we’ll probably never know how many Talibans and civilians were detonated to achieve the opposite result, but that’s the great thing about ratios; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to find one.”

And it’s not just killings that can be divided.

“No indeed! Forget global warming! Dividing the mean annual temperature of the earth’s surface (17 degrees Celsius) by the number of human beings who have to live with it (6.67 billion) gives us a cool forty billionths of a kelvin, about as cold as a Bose-Einstein contensate, the bizarre state of matter in which quantum effects appear at a macroscopic scale. Compare this with Pluto’s minimum surface temperature: a balmy 33 kelvins. Carbon footprint, carbon schmootprint.”

However, other news scientists, experimenting with the saltire button, have pointed out that, with over 80 sunny days this year, having a combined temperature of 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, we should all be sweltering at somewhere between the melting points of iron and titanium.

“True,” the boffin conceded. “Well, I guess the verdict’s still out on that one. Still, it is a more depressing result, so they’re probably right.”

Others have questioned why were there any victims of Lockerby at all when the passengers and crew of Pan Am 103 should have had a combined arm-strength divided by weight equivalent to the thrust/weight ratio of the Lockheed SR-71 advanced, long-range strategic reconnaissance aircraft, allowing them – in theory – to fly themselves home at three times the speed of sound.

“It’s puzzling, yes,” the boffin squirmed, “but it’s early days. It was only this week we really got to grips with division. Who knows what other functions these calculator things may have in store? It’s quite possible that one of the crosses, or the plain horizontal mark may hold the key to that one.”