Saturday 14 June 2014

Broccoli and (propositional) calculi

One of the good things about being alive is that life is forever affording you the opportunity to learn little lessons so that you can conduct the rest of it with less difficulty than you have previously experienced.

Take for example this simple (and I imagine, universal) rule: If you have in your possession a Brassica and you don't have a specific meal planned that involves it, in three weeks time you will be dragging a plastic bag full of cauliflower sludge out of the fridge. This can be formulated using a fairly standard notation as (p & ¬q --> ¬p).

Human brains are brilliant at rearranging such logical formulations and I expect you will quickly notice that (¬p v q) follows and so next time you're browsing the broccoli aisle you can think to yourself: Either don't buy it or make a plan to use it now. 

And that is the lesson that I had intended to implement in the coming weeks. Except then I had to buy a sweetheart cabbage today because otherwise my shopping would have consisted of a bottle of wine and a pack of butter and I don't want to be judged by the staff in Lidl. Although, I think they might have judged me because I was the only person who wasn't buying or wearing something with the St George's cross emblazoned on it.  

    

2 comments:

  1. That is spot on. Currently we have two sweetheart cabbages fermenting in the fridge

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  2. That article reminded me - whenever I bough spring greens dad would always say 'shall I put these straight in the compost now or shall we wait three weeks until they have gone yellow with grey spots on and THEN put them in the compost?' !!!

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