Techie Break

A New Orleans lawyer sought an FHA loan for a client who lost his house in Hurricane Katrina and wanted to rebuild. He was told the loan would be granted if he could prove satisfactory title to the parcel of property being offered as collateral. The title to the property dated back to 1803, and took the Lawyer three months to track down. After sending the information to the FHA, he received the following reply.

(Actual letter):

“Upon review of your letter adjoining your client’s loan application, we note that the request is supported by an Abstract of Title. While we compliment the able manner in which you have prepared and presented the application, we must point out that you have only cleared title to the proposed collateral property back to 1803. Before final approval can be accorded, it will be necessary to clear the title back to its origin.”

Annoyed, the lawyer responded as follows:

(Actual Letter):

“Your letter regarding title in Case No. 189156 has been received. I note that you wish to have title extended further than the 194 years covered by the present application. I was unaware that any educated person in this country, particularly those working in the property area, would not know that Louisiana was purchased, by the U.S., from France in 1803, the year of origin identified in our application. For the edification of uninformed FHA bureaucrats, the title to the land prior to U.S. Ownership was obtained from France, which had acquired it by Right of Conquest from Spain.

The land came into the possession of Spain by Right of Discovery made in the year 1492 by a sea captain named Christopher Columbus, who had been granted the privilege of seeking a new route to India by the Spanish monarch, Isabella. The good queen, Isabella, being a pious woman and almost as careful about titles as the FHA, took the precaution of securing the blessing of the Pope before she sold her jewels to finance Columbus’ expedition. Now the Pope, as I’m sure you may know, is the emissary of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and God, it is commonly accepted, created this world. Therefore, I believe it is safe to presume that God also made that part of the world called Louisiana.

God, therefore, would be the owner of origin and His origins date back to before the beginning of time, the world, as we know it AND the FHA. I hope you find God’s original claim to be satisfactory.

Now, may we have our damn loan?”

He got the loan.

I was writing a post at http://www.dbtechie.com/sql-server/how-to-return-an-empty-set-with-named-columns/ where I made the statement that “1=2” will never be true. This reminded me of my teaching days when I used to baffle my algebra students by proving the absurd, so I decided to post this for all you parents with children of algebra-age. Get them to agree that if you can prove that 1=2, they have to clean the house.

1.       Let’s start with a simple mathematical expression that we can all agree upon:

2.       Which can also be represented as (distributive property):

3.       Or, another way to represent the same thing (think of the pattern for the difference of two squares or multiply it out and you will find it to be true):

4.       So taking the equivalent values in step 2 and step 3 we get:

5.       Now divide each side by:

yields:

or:

6.       Simplify:

7.       Divide each side by :

yields:

8.       Simplify to yield the desired result:

     1 = 2

The reason for this is because we are dividing by zero.  It is not as obvious because zero is cloaked as:

 Have fun, and if your kids are smart enough to catch you on this one then at least you’ll be cleaning the house by yourself with a smile on your face.