[118] You’d somehow think that Mario would be thick as thieves with the blue-collar custodial and kitchen and physical plant/grounds staff, but it’s odd, he and they never have much to say to each other, and with rare exceptions none of the E.T.A.s including Mario has anything interpersonal to do with the nine-month part-time halfway-house rehabilitating workers, who mostly mow and mop and empty trash and load dishes into the dining hall’s steamer, and who radiate a kind of slitty-eyed reserve that seems far more sullen and ungrateful than shy.
[119] also overshot the spot to include that Mario’s a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise; it’s a source of unending struggle for Ted Schacht, who tends to avoid Mario because whenever he’s around him he has to fight the urge to have him open up and submit to scrutiny, which Schacht can well imagine would hurt his feelings: nobody wants to be an object of clinical interest like that.
[120] This basic phenomenon being what more abstraction-capable post-Hegelian adults call ‘Historical Consciousness.’
[121] Eschaton’s pre- and post-procedures are convolved enough so that an actual game gets gotten up every like month or so at most, almost always on Sunday, but even then not all twelve of a year’s kids can get the hours off to play, which is why the latitude and surplus in game-personnel.
W-520-500-268-6w-9w-9w-
[122] O.N.A.N.ite Classroom Cartographic Series 14W4, © B.S. 1994, Rand McNally & Company.
[123] Pemulis here, dictating to Inc, who can just sit there making a steeple out of his fingers and pressing it to his lip and not take notes and wait and like inscribe [sic] it anytime in the next week and get it verbatim, the smug turd. Using the Mean-Value formula for dividing available megatonnage among Combatants whose GNP/Military // Military/Nuke ratios vary from Eschaton to Eschaton keeps you from needing to crunch out a new ratio for each Combatant each time, plus lets you multi-regress the results so Combatants get rewarded for past thermonuclear largesse [occasional verbal flourishes Hal’s — HJI]. The formula’s also provable by the Extreme Value Theorem, which the EV Theorem itself has a proof that’s just about the biggest Unit-twisting bitch in the whole of applied differentiation, but I see Hal grimacing, so we’ll keep it compact, even though this whole thing is real interesting if you’re interested and whatnot.
Say you’ve got a Combatant and a record of his past GNP/Military // Military/Nuke ratios. We want to give the Combatant the like exact average of all the past megatonnages he’s gotten in the past. The exact average is called the ‘Mean Value,’ which ought to give us a bit of a giggle, given the hostility of the context here.
So then but let A stand for the Mean Value of a Combatant’s constantly fluctuating ratio and so constantly fluctuating initial megatonnage. We want to find A and give the Combatant exactly A megatons. How to do it’s pretty elegant, and all you need for it is two pieces of data: the most his ratio’s ever been and the least it’s ever been. These two datums [sic] are called the Extreme Values of the cn-n function for which A’s the Mean Value, by the way.
So then but so let / be a continuous non-negative function (meaning the ratio) on the interval [a, b] (meaning the difference between the least the ratio’s ever been and the most it’s ever been and whatnot). Are these little explanations aggravating [sic]? Inc’s looking at me like butter would freeze. It’s hard to know what to assume v. what to explain. I’m trying to be as clear as I can be [sic]. And now he’s looking at me like I’m digressing. Why don’t you just pass that certain item back on over here, Inculator. But so we’ve got / and we’ve got [a, bj. And let r and R be the smallest and biggest values of the function /(x) on the interval [a, b]. So now check out the rectangles of height r and height R over the interval [a, b] in the diagram marked let’s go ahead and mark it say PEEMSTER:
PEEMSTER
The Mean Value we’re after, A, can now be expressed integrally as the Area of some intermediate-type rectangle whose height is taller [sic] than r but shorter [sic] than R. From here on it’s just tit. We need a constant. You always need a constant. Inc’s nodding his head sarcastically like I think I’m saying something sage. Let d be any constant, for computational reasons the closer to 1 the better, so like let d be the size of Hal’s Unit.
Hal Incandenza’s Addendum: In meters.
Michael Pemulis’s Resumption: Very funny. So now, just looking at the wicked-illuminating PEEMSTER diagram above, you can see that this Area we want:
is going to be bigger than the area of the rectangle with height r and but also smaller than the area of the rectangle with height R. Pure mental reason [sic] compels, then, that [sic] somewhere in there between r and R there’s an exact height, f(x’), such that (I have to say that every demonstration of a stats theorem has Let and such that in them, mostly I think because they’re so wicked much fun to say) such that the rectangle of this height f(x’) over the whole interval [a, b] has exactly the Area we want, the Mean Value of all the historic [sic] expenditure-ratios; in other words in abstracted form:
where (b — a) is just the size of the interval. And so have a look at the revealing diagram labeled HALSADICK:
This fucking works. You don’t have to crunch out a whole new ratio each time for each Combatant to dole out the ordnance. You just skim the highest and lowest ratios off the Eschaton records the Beanie-man keeps on each time. This is wicked. This is fucking elegant. Note that (Note that’s another like compulsitory [sic] term) note that the Combatant’s Mean-Value megatonnage will change, slightly, from Eschaton to Eschaton, exactly the way a like hitter’s season average will alter just a bit from at-bat to at-bat, depending integrally on what he delivered on his last trip to the plate and whatnot. Note also that you can use this Mean-Value time-saver with anything that varies within a (definable) set of boundaries and whatnot — like any line, or a tennis court’s boundaries, or like maybe say a certain drug’s urine-level range between Clean and Royally Pinched. As a like exercise, if you’re interested, play three hours of high-level competitive jr. top-level [sic] tennis and then calculate the Mean Value of the ratios of first serves to appearances at net and appearances at net to points won; for a serve-and-volleyer, this is how to tell how serve-dependent his match-performance is. DeLint does this kind of exercise every morning sitting on the can. It’s going to be interesting to see if [sic] Hal, who thinks he’s just too sly trying to outline Eschaton in the 3rd-person tense [sic] like some jowly old
Eschatologist with leather patches on his elbows [sic], if Inc can transpose [sic?] the math here without help from his Mumster. Later. P.S. Allston Rules.
[124] Both EndStat and Mathpak are registered trademarks of Aapps Inc., itself now a division of InterLace TelEntertainment.
[125] Plastic-mesh laundry baskets take two hands to carry and keep you from being able to dribble up more balls with your stick’s face; the cast-off janitorial buckets are the size of like a middle-size wastebasket, but they have a sturdy steel pail-type handle, and their hard-polymer composition makes for lasting wear. It was into just such a bucket that Pemulis threw up before his kind of suspicious V.D. down at Port Washington.