Argh

[rbandrews]

Saw a bumber sticker on the way back home today. It had an equation on it, and the equation was annoyingly wrong.

False version: Marriage = man + woman. False because it means Marriage ≡ man + woman.
It would be better to say: Marriage ∋ man + woman, meaning that the set "Marriage" contains an element equal to "man + woman" (but also allows for other elements).
More correct is: Marriage ≡ (n-1)∗man + (m-1)∗woman, m,n∈Z+ ∧ m+n≥4.

Translated: Marriage is equivalent to n-1 men and m-1 women, where m and n are both positive integers, and the sum of m and n is at least four.
This means that you must have at least two people total, and between zero and infinity (but only integral; no fractional people) men and women.


Shawn, who is more clever than I, thought of using BNF to express it, and made this much shorter version:
marriage : {[person] and} + [person]

Comments

[vond.livejournal.com]

Allowing marriage (actually, civil union, religion is irrelevant to this) between an arbitrary number of people leads to interesting legal consequences, I suspect current tax law would require substantial revision, for one.

[wyrdone.livejournal.com]

Your point. Our tax laws have needed major revisions for the past 50 years at least.

[rbandrews]

Only a minor change: make marriage have no tax benefit or penalty. If there were no difference between filing jointly and filing separately, then it wouldn't break anything.

[cxi162.livejournal.com]

Medical benefits, wills, next of kin, privacy laws, divorce settlements, immigration law, housing contracts, etc. It has a huge effect.

Although Ross, you seem to have missed the point. Also, if their version is false, then so is yours.

[rbandrews]

I got their point. My point is that a marriage doesn't have to only be one man and one woman.

How would it have any effect? What specifically about any of those categories of laws doesn't make sense with a marriage or two people of the same sex, or of more than two people?

[cxi162.livejournal.com]

I wasn't talking about whether it would make sense, I said it would have a huge effect on them because they were all developed using Marriage = man + woman. People tend to get tied up in the moral aspects and forget about all the legal contract aspects of redefining marriage.

[rbandrews]

Yes, and I'm saying, it wouldn't affect them that much. A law that says that all members of a marriage are entitled to the rights that any others have, as well as a law stating that a marriage ends when at most one of the members is alive, covers pretty much everything.

[scraun23.livejournal.com]

Marriage laws are basically a packaged set of legal documents, simplified in processing due to common usage. I can hire a lawyer and draw up contracts to basically give any number of people the same rights and obligations; the forms are just a lot more complicated. If I wanted to get really kinky, I could probably do the same with a corporate entity or three.

So I suppose the whole issue is really a variant of .dll hell. Too many laws refer to the definition of marriage that existed at the time they were written, and if that changes, the intent of the law is muddied even further than such things usually are.

Bah, I say we replace the whole thing with a couple dozen lines of Perl code.

[rbandrews]

Yeah, but then we'd need to write a new one every two months when we forget how the old one worked.

[scraun23.livejournal.com]

probably...

All kidding aside, I think there would be a great deal of benefit in limiting the federal legal code to a single book(probably with exactly specified number of pages, typeface, etc. because legislators are sneaky.)

[rbandrews]

That sounds too close to limiting the federal legal code to one religious text to me. What if we made a law that states that every law except this one has to come with an expiration date, by which it ceases to be law unless the expiration date is renewed?

[heptadecagram.livejournal.com]

Had to quote this.

[rbandrews]

Nifty! Thanks. Looks like someone on there thinks it's off-topic, though.

[noam-rion.livejournal.com]

*smiles*

What about Marriage ≡ n∗man + m∗woman, m,n∈ℕ ∧ m+n≥2.?

[rbandrews]

I pronounce this the best comment ever. Not only did I get a good meme, but you also recently read Eternity, which I started reading last night.

I like that; it's shorter. I don't think using N instead of Z makes sense though, because 1.5 women and 0.5 men isn't really a viable marriage. Also somewhat gooey. : )

[noam-rion.livejournal.com]

*laughs* So I did! It's a good book. My favorite in the series, however, is Legacy. I love the detailed description of the world it contains.

And which is the meme to which you're referring? The equation, you mean?

I know ℕ as identifying the natural numbers: ℕ ≡ ℤ⁺ ∪ {0}. But I have a feeling that it's meaning may not be as standardly defined as some of the other letterlike symbols. What do you know it as? (Gooey, indeed! Raspberry jam, wot?)

[rbandrews]

No, I meant your bookmark toolbar meme, it's nifty.

Legacy? I didn't even know there was a third one. I've read Eon several times, but this is my first time through Eternity.

If that's what N means, then it's exactly what I was looking for when I used Z+. It's been a few years since I had discrete math, and I just looked for this in my graph theory book and it's not there, but I remembered N as being all numbers (R as well as all the imaginary numbers). I'm probably misremembering, though.

[noam-rion.livejournal.com]

As far as I know:

• Positive integers: ℙ ≡ ℤ⁺ ≡ {1, 2, 3, 4, ...}
• Natural numbers: ℕ &equiv {0, 1, 2, 3, ...}
• Integers: ℤ &equiv {..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...}
• Rationals: ℚ ≡ {p/q | p,q∈ℤ}
• Irrationals: ℚ'
• Reals: ℝ ≡ ℚ ∪ ℚ'
• Imaginary numbers
• Complex numbers: ℂ ≡ ℝ ∪ Imaginary

I may be wrong about natural numbers, though. I've seen (http://id.mind.net/~zona/mmts/miscellaneousMath/typesOfNumbers/typesOfNumbers.html) several (http://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/math/numbers.html) places (http://www.rism.com/Trig/natural_to_complex_numbers.htm) refer to them as ℕ ≡ ℙ ≡ ℤ⁺ ≡ {1, 2, 3, 4, ...}, and call {0, 1, 2, 3, ...} the whole numbers.

So shall I expect to see a bookmark bar meme from you?

[rbandrews]

Yeah, I'll probably do it tomorrow.

It seems like N is exactly what this equation needs, then. m,n∈N, ∧ m+n≥2.

[noam-rion.livejournal.com]

Yay! I'm looking forward to reading it :-)

See Natural Number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number) on Wikipedia. I was right about the ambiguity.