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The Enemy of My Enemy (nytimes.com)
5 points by ojbyrne on Feb 15, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment


There won't be any surprising math here for programmers, though some of the author's efforts to explain math involving negatives in pragmatic, real-world terms were quite interesting. I also enjoyed this anecdote:

> The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, but none in which a double positive makes a negative - to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, "Yeah, yeah."




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