What an Ass!

It's funny how long one can sometimes labour under a false assumption in spite of the evidence clearly to the contrary. Just look at religious people! Hah! Barrel of laughs.

*warning mathematic content*

So having deduced that eigenvectors of a symmetric matrix are orthogonal, I assumed that a matrix comprised of said eigenvectors was naturally orthogonal. Which is why I got rather confused when my matrix of eigenvectors, B, was not B-having like a orthogonal matrix. Indeed it was violating all properties of being orthogonal, its determinant was not +/-1 its transpose was certainly not its inverse indeed it was being a right c***t.

Backwards and forwards I went checking my eigenvectors and eigenvalues, my arithmetic, over n over, coming up with the same results. Until I read up some more on orthogonal matrices on wikipedia and hit upon the phrase, it may be tempting to assume that a matrix whose columns are orthogonal is a orthogonal matrix. But it isn't. You tool. In fact a matrix comprised of orthogonal columns is completely not special at all and certainly not worth the several hours you spent f*king round with it. Its late. Go to bed.

Okay so maybe I paraphrased a little but you get the picture. Well maybe Anonymous does, probably everyone else is just staring blankly.

However the moral of this story is that just because you think its a duck, if it happens to be mooing, doesn't have feathers and ruminates, well then, even though its in a duck pond, chances are it sure as hell ain't a duck. So get a bigger rifle if you want to make it dinner.

The shorter moral is STOP ASSUMING SHIT. Dad and Mum could especially take that lesson to heart methinks......

PG Out