Still not dead (or king) - interlude

[johnpalmer]

I'm still thinking of how a person with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can fight back against the GOP, in hopes of making them sane again. Blogging is all I can think of. I'm not sure if I should try to blog elsewhere, or just say what I have to say here (or seeing if LongHairedWeirdo - my nom du blog - is available on LJ/DW). Any thoughts?

Interlude: At work, there are a collection of clever and cute bumper stickers. One bothered me for a long time... I finally figured it out recently, though.

It shows a picture of a brain, and a > (greater than) sign. On the right hand side, it had sigma (sum of) i = 1 to n, of (a picture of a bear)/n.

So:

brain picture > (sum from 1 to n) of (bearpicture)-sub-i, divided by n

Can you figure it out?

Hint: think cartoon

Comments

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Bingo! Though I always heard Yogi use just "smarter than the average bear" as his catchphrase.

One of the additional tricky bits was realizing that it was "Bear-sub-i" not "bear * i" which could be "imaginary bear" or could be 1 bear when i = 1, 2 bears when i =2, etc..

But I couldn't think of how a brain is greater than a sum and quotient of imaginary bears, or now a brain is greater than (n+1)/2 bears.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Ironically, I am severely dyscalculic, and my knowledge of mathematics (and mathematical symbols) is woefully inadequate. I somehow intuited that the right-hand expression might mean "average". Hmm... "average of bears"... "brain greater than"... oh, right, "smarter than the average bear!" (I've never actually seen any Yogi Bear cartoons, but the expression has been part of American cultural awareness for a long time, which is why I got it sort of wrong anyway.)

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Yes - Yogi Bear was so long ago that I wasn't going to bet against "slightly smarter" as the initial form of the phrase :-).