This SO makes my head hurt.
Translations:
"natural numbers": apples and oranges. Actual, physical things that you can count on your fingers, even if you never lost parts of your digits to frostbite*. Not decimals, or fractions, or negative numbers -- just the actual pieces of fruit. So if you try to take away more widgets than you have, you've got none left, end of story.
"closed set" is a little trickier: you say that a set is closed under a particular operation** if you can do that thing between any two members of the set without things going kablooey. You can add any two quantities of fruit and get more fruit, without slicing or dicing or buying anything on credit. You can slash any two male AtS characters.
* Now that I think of it, it was negative temperatures that led to my "numbers below zero don't exist" fight with Mrs. Wossname. Huh.
** Ugly, UGLY English. I know this. I cannot excuse it.
(doubtless x-posty.)
Huh. Never heard of Madeleine Smith. Sounds a lot like Strong Poison, though, doesn't it?
When Bunter walks in on Wimsey, who has just solved the mystery, one of the books Wimsey was reading was the Madeleine Smith trial. A classic, if you like arsenic and middle-class mayhem.
Ooh. I know what that means! My mathematical education hasn't completely disappeared.
Me too! Hooray for residual math-brain!
[And...it would have been a lot smoother had I posted this before the explanations went up. Oh well.]
Yay, I'm still in time to say b Happy Birthday Beth and Beej.
Did you all know that Mary Queen of Scots had porphyria? Wicked!
Sure, that's what they say now. Note that Elizabeth had her decapitated...
Did we know that Robert Reich (sp?) former Secretary of Labor, currently on TDS, is a little person?
And also -- dude, I knew about King George III and the madness, but I didn't know he had porphyria! Did you all know that Mary Queen of Scots had porphyria? Wicked!
I knew this.
Knew, because I've killed a few brain cells tonight, and I may not know in the morning.
And a lovely good liberal, too.
But yes, very short.
Did we know that Robert Reich (sp?) former Secretary of Labor, currently on TDS, is a little person?
I thought he was just really short.