Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

17 May 2006, 14:15 p.m.

Three Equals Three Except After E

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2006 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Coworker 1, futzing with double-precision or floating-point or something: "Does 3 equal 3?"
Coworker 2, immediately: "Sometimes."
Me, cracking up: "Coworker 1, did you ask that just to try to get Coworker 2 to make an absolute statement?"
Coworker 2: "What I said was absolutely true."