Sunday, August 10, 2008

The Smallest Integer

A quick summary of The Incredible Hulk:
You wouldn't like me when I'm... hungry. Don't make me hungry... Do you remember when we were at Harvard and we participated in those induced hallucination experiments? It was like that, only a thousand times more intense... I want to get rid of it, not control it... They want to make it a weapon... You don't understand, something very bad is going to happen... If I am off by even the smallest integer, this could go drastically wrong...
Things that can happen if you are off by even the smallest integer:
  1. Nothing. By absolute value, zero is the smallest integer. Additive identities have a habit of not doing much... under addition!
  2. Immediate death. It just sometimes happens. A doctor said so. Reference.
  3. Partial credit.
  4. Off-by-one errors. (If you are not convinced that zero is smaller than one.)
  5. Wouldn't 'The Smallest Integer' be a great name for a rock band?
  6. Bad dialogue (cf. 2, above).
  7. One is the loneliest number that you ever knew...
  8. The other integers feel slighted. You won't get invited to their parties any more. Good job. Working in unary sucks, doesn't it?

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