Occasional Tales

The slightly annoying philosophy problem. To prevent a bunch of freeloaders overwhelming the Society for Useless Information (SUI), the Society demands a single item of useless information from prospective members. But twelve years later, there’s not a single new member and it appears this noble and august society is going to have to close. What’s gone wrong? I can imagine this being the sort of problem presented to you by some smug git who knows the answer, taunts you for not being able to work it out, and provides with a series of useless clues until you punch the annoying twat in the face. I would argue that there’s no such thing as completely useless information. It might be of limited use to the point of being almost utterly uninformative, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn’t be useful to the right person in the right circumstances. In fact, this is more or less what the book suggests, but with particular reference to the SUI. No matter how banal and pointless the informatio...

But we can't let you in. Today's problem is about the Society for Useless Information which decides that people can only join by submitting a piece of useless information. The problem is that years pass and there are no new members. What's gone wrong? I thought about this and wondered whether it had something to do with the information. The answer is a little less exciting than you might expect and lies in the word "useless". The information being submitted is not completely useless because the one thing for which it is useful is the gaining of admission to the Society for Useless Information . Hence, no one can actually join the Society . A silly dinner party exercise, methinks.