The whole "2+2=4 is racist" thing is, to me, like mudwrestling with the proverbial pig: you just get muddy, and the pig loves it.
Have you seen this one yet? A "proof" that 2+2=5? It took me a matter of seconds to find the mistake, but people are out there pushing this as, what, proof that white people are bad, or something?
Let's save math for the people who know what they're doing. The rest of you can go do your Aggrieved Victims Studies and wonder why the best job you can get is at Starbucks.
5 comments:
I was ok with it up to the second step.
The mistake is in step two, correct? Squaring part of the expression under the square root, not all of the expression, does not maintain the equality. One must square the entire RHS, and take the square root to maintain equality.
In the second step, the quantity squared is *negative*. When you take the square root of the squared number it becomes *positive*. They went from -1/2 to +1/2--a change of +1. Like from 4 to 5.
This is the one I learned:
2.4 2 (rounded)
2.4 2 (rounded)
-----
4.8 5 (rounded)
Thanks for this, by the way. I put it on my whiteboard for my students to see and think about. :)
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