So, lets talk about infinity

Yesterday we had a discussion about infinity. Alan said that there is more than one type of infinity because there are an infinite number of even numbers for instance, and even though there are an infinite number, it's only half of all the numbers. He said that some infinities are "countable" and some are "uncountable". Alan is a theoretical physicist. So I said, if infinity can be expressed as 1 divided by infinity, does that mean there are multiple types of zero too? Alan was not comfortable with multiple zeros. George on the other hand, who is a hardcore pure mathematician, claims there are multiple types of zero and started talking about set theory. I lost it there and changed the subject.

Apparently a mathematician called Cantor actually went mad trying to grasp the concept of infinity. I think there are multiple types of zero by the way, because 1/infinity = 0, and so does 2/infinity, but they aren't the same number.

Mr Punk has asked how the Dragon got her moniker - duh, she was born in 1977 (right at the beginning), the year of the dragon, and is therefore a dragon. I was born in 1967 and therefore I am a stupid sheep. Clearly there was some admin cock-up as I am nothing like a sheep. I think it's to do with shifting time zones or something.

And jinxkytn wants to know if the boy is bi-lingual, and I can confirm he is. He chats away in English and Chinese, and his mother even drops in a little Hakkenese and Taiwanese when talking to him. It's odd, but he doesn't mash the languages together. He speaks to me in English and his mother in Chinese. The dragon speaks fluent English and Chinese and is also conversational in Taiwanese and Hakkenese. Her sister is the same, but also speaks Japanese. No one else in her family speaks English except her cousin. Her Grandfather speaks fluent Japanese in addition to Hakkenese, Taiwanese and Chinese because Japanese was the language spoken in schools when he was young.

I remember one Chinese New year when we all sat round the dinner table in the Dragon's Grandfather's house. The older generation of the family tend to speak Hakkenese at home, but the younger ones tend to speak Chinese. There was some English going round too, because I speak only English and really bad Chinese, and the maid spoke only English and some Indonesian language that no one understood. The dragon's aunt was also there with her Japanese husband who speaks only Japanese, so there was a bit of Japanese going on too. Now that was a linguistic minestrone if ever there was one.

Parliament was due to vote tomorrow on whether to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information act. This is because the High Court ruled that MP expenses details should be published. And MPs didn't want us to know what they were spending our money on. However, the Tories and the Lib Dems both opposed the government's plan to keep expenses secret, and the government has backed down.

The atheist bus campaign continues to make news headlines. Today it seems that the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that the adverts on the sides of buses do not break any advertising standards ruling. There were 326 complaints, mostly arguing that the wording was offensive to people of faith, but also that the claim "there is probably no God", cannot be proven. The ASA ruled that it was an opinion that could not be objectively substantiated. So there you have it. I so hope that got up Stephen Green's nose. He's the militant nutter that runs Christian Voice.