You don’t see that too often.

I went out the back to play with the dogs yesterday, and as I was walking down the hall I heard a helicopter that sounded pretty close. By the time I made it out into the yard, I noticed this…

"Hmm, interesting" I thought. "I wonder what’s going on?"
The chopper isn’t as close as it looks, I’ve actually zoomed in. It had landed on the highway about a half a kilometre away.

Next I noticed this…

That’s an ambulance and a fire truck. If you click it, you may be able to make out a wheel pointing up next to the guy in the safety vest.

And finally, I noticed this…

There was a line of cars and trucks backed up for miles in each direction, I guess landing a chopper on a two lane highway will cause that. Thing is, I didn’t even hear it (that’s not unusual, I’ve tuned out the cattletrucks that bounce over that rickety bridge), and wouldn’t have even known about it if I didn’t go out to play with the dogs.

And now, just because I can, here’s some live action footage.

   

I don’t know what happened to the people in the car, I’ve asked but no-one knows (and no one particularly cares it seems). They weren’t locals and the helicopter took them to Tamworth. I drove past the scene today and couldn’t even tell for sure where it the crash happened.

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Very interesting…..

I may have been a bit premature in declaring Judy the winner, but the
decision stands(if only to demonstrate the correct usage of irony). Except now she’s now been awarded second prize, but don’t worry, all the prizes are the same anyway . Who’d have thought that my little mini contest would have generated such a mathesophical discussion (or should that be philomatical? I always get those two mixed up) but then it’s as it should be as Pythagoras was a philosopher as well as a mathematician.

"Ironic you say?" Yes, ironic I say. I made up this little contest to show my gratitude and to reward one of you for voting for me. The irony is that the person who won the prize was the one person among you who definitely did not vote for me! Judy, you see, was nominated in the same category (mind you she may have voted for me, I voted for her).

And that brings us to the results:

1st Prize goes to Kila for her well thought out corollary.

2nd Prize goes to Judy for being the closest first.

3rd Prize goes to Melissa for single-handedly raising my comment count.

Honourable mention goes to Colette for being such an enigma.

If you want your prize, I need your address, email me.

And here is the explanation…There were two quotes from the Wizard of Oz, the first from the Lion and the second from the Scarecrow both from when they were given their prizes by the Wizard. On the surface, it looked like a simple quote from the movie illustrating that as a result of being awarded a prize saying I’m brainy, I actually got smarter. And that would have done if no-one actually got the real answer.

However, Kila uncovered the deeper meaning. In a perfect demonstration of just how ridiculous that concept is, she pointed out that the quote from the Scarecrow was wrong. The wording was correct, but what he said was completely wrong (which, incidentally Jenn, is why it wasn’t said by Pythagoras, you may want to hold off on lowering your goals for a bit).

To explain I’ll have to get a bit technical. In it simplest form, Pythagoras’ theorem is and is solved by

In English that’s "The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides."

Compare that to the Scarecrow quote which is "The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining
side."

Given that we are talking about a hypotenuse, by definition we are only talking about right angled triangles, and not all isosceles triangles are right angled, in fact only those with one 90 and two 45 deg angles are. Plus, he not only mangled the theorem, it’s just plain wrong, as we need the length squared, and not the square root of the length.

Anyone still awake?  Good, then have a look at this…