Evil Doug's Existential Journal

Bringing You the SCIENCE behind the funny...
Bear with me...as I've been working this out all in my head instead of utilizing my TI graphing calculator because I have forgotten the means with which to program such formulas as this and am too lazy to try harder...

Anyway...

I was thinking today about how funny multi-legged vampires are. You know...if you see a vampire with seven or eight legs chasing after somebody, it's kinda funny.

So, what makes vampires with a number of legs other than two funny? I think I've worked this out. It's mathematical. Lookee here...

1/x^2 -7x +10 or, broken down 1/ (x-2)(x-5)

It works like this...you plug in a value for x to be the number of legs you see on the vampire. So, obviously, a two legged vampire would result in an undefined situation (and an asymptote on the graph of the equation) and would thus be not funny. HOWEVER, since it is undefined, it is possible that it MAY be funny. The same dilemma pops up with vampires that have five legs. Again, an undefined quantity and an uncertainty...it's not funny...but it could be. Do you see where I'm going with this?

I understand that, by using imaginary numbers, one might be able to circumvent this, but, right now I'm working from purely a cartesian coordinate system of values and am leaving out all imaginaries as, stated earlier, I'm just doing this in my head.

Now, for what values would a multi-legged vampire be unfunny? Well, we look at our equations and get our critical points...it looks like 2 and 5 are obvious...and they're undefined. So, a little experimentation and I find that 3 and 4 would give interesting results...actually, both would have the lower half of the equation turn out to be negative 2...so, since the bottom half is negative, the entire equation is negative...
THUS...
A vampire having either 3 or 4 legs would, mathematically, not be funny.

All other values I've plugged in and tried have come up positive. So, without benefit of actually graphing this puppy, I feel safe in suggesting that ALL vampires with legs NOT EQUAL to 2, 3, 4, or 5 would be funny.

By this theory, a vampire with 17 legs would be funny. But, likewise, so would a vampire with -17 legs. As I said, I have not graphed this, so I don't know the trends and cannot yet ascertain if there is a fluctuation in humor as the number of legs increase. But, for now, you may laugh at vampires who do not have 2, 3, 4, or 5 legs with confidence knowing that, mathematically, they are funny.

Current Mood: Optimistic Paranoia - "On the bright side, everyone is out to get me!"
Current Music: Rich Mullins "My Deliverer is Coming"

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