{"id":5201,"date":"2010-11-16T19:12:17","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T19:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/11\/16\/the-diagonal-parking-theorem\/"},"modified":"2010-11-16T19:12:17","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T19:12:17","slug":"the-diagonal-parking-theorem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/11\/16\/the-diagonal-parking-theorem\/","title":{"rendered":"The Diagonal Parking Theorem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(With apologies to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coopertoons.com\/education\/diagonal\/diagonalargument.html\">Georg Cantor<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Theorem<\/strong>: There are an infinite number of stupid ways to park.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Definition<\/strong>: We define as stupid any parking method that places any fender of a car outside the legal lines bounding the space.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Proof:<\/strong>Consider a line <i>L<\/i> through the center of a legal parking space, parallel to the lines bounding the space. Consider a point <i>P<\/i> on <i>L<\/i>. There are an infinite number of lines passing diagonally through <i>P<\/i> at an angle greater than the smallest angle <i>&theta;<\/i> at which a car pulled into the space will intersect each of the bounding lines once. Any car parked parallel to one of these lines is, by definition, parked stupidly.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, there are an infinite number of stupid ways to park. QED.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The astute reader will note that there are an infinite number of points <i>P<\/i> on <i>L<\/i> through which stupidly parked cars might pass. The implications of this for the cardinality of the stupidity of people parking their cars is left as an exercise for the reader, while you drive in circles looking for a spot that hasn&#8217;t been blocked by some goddamn idiot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(With apologies to Georg Cantor) Theorem: There are an infinite number of stupid ways to park. Definition: We define as stupid any parking method that places any fender of a car outside the legal lines bounding the space. Proof:Consider a line L through the center of a legal parking space, parallel to the lines bounding&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/11\/16\/the-diagonal-parking-theorem\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Diagonal Parking Theorem<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math","category-silliness","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}