Monday 2 March 2015

it’s a fact: potato is an imaginary number

The internet cannot be extolled enough for inciting curiosity and bringing the obscure and sometimes abstruse into the light, but sometimes that highly specialised knowledge and semantics twisting in the wind prove a bit too contagious, as if there’s some cameo by an Evil Genius ready to pounce on any given string of conventional wisdom. For instance, sauntering down the produce-aisle of the information-superhighway, lately I have been schooled several times in the classification and naming-conventions of my fruits and vegetables. Today I found out that while carrots and cantaloupes are Tories, the casaba is in fact uncountable and the banana is, rather than a mineral as some of you were no doubt led to believe, actually an Eisenstein-Bose condensate.