It's been a slow-burn issue, but gradually Scottish politics has come to be dominated by a single question: what is twenty-four divided by zero?The crisis began five days ago when Frances Campbell asked the BBC's Brian Taylor to put The Question to First Minister Alex Salmond. His reported answer was:
"Twenty-four divided by zero would be infinity - because you can't divide by zero."
It was a pretty contradictory response from the First Minister, who perhaps was seeking to hedge his bets. Is the real answer actually infinity? Or can one in fact not divide by zero, which would make the first answer incorrect?
Brian Taylor ignored this problem, and blundered in with a different line of attack:
"I think the answer is zero, actually, but never mind."
A classic schoolboy error from BT, who appeared to confuse multiplication with division. The teachers got excited, and the leading light of the SNP blogosphere (non-cybernat division) demanded an apology. It took some time, but it was properly forthcoming.
However, the truth is, as Scottish Unionist pointed out, that Salmond is wrong too, or at least his first answer is: it's undefined, even if the graph tends to either a positive or negative infinity. The question can be rephrased as follows: how many times do you have to subtract zero from 24 to get to zero? There is no sensible answer to that, obviously, not even infinity. Here's another way of getting to the same answer.
Given this mathematical quagmire, why on earth would the LOLITSP have led with accusations of arithmetical impropriety against the FM today to try and attack his budget figures? And why didn't the FM simply give him the answer above? At least they didn't get dragged into the even more fraught issue of imaginary numbers, though...
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