I was first made aware of the Venn Diagram in 4th grade math. The concept was introduced in elementary set theory. At the time I thought, 'how worthless, how pointless, who would ever bother?' Today, like most clear thinking individuals, I'm enraged. The Venn Diagram must be erased from our minds like a squiggly line on an otherwise clean sheet of paper.
The literature is replete with countless examples of this pox, most purporting to expound deep mysteries. A complete vernacular has developed including meaningless terms such as union, intersection, null, and hatched. One is reminded of the annihilation operator from first year quantum mechanics. When operating on the lowest energy state of a system, it doesn't yield a lower state, it doesn't even yield zero. It yields nothing. In bracket notation one finds:
Eqn 1 O < 0 > = { }.
So it is with the Venn Diagram. The Venn, operating on a concept doesn't yield a new concept, it doesn't yield an empty concept, it yields nothing. No content, no information, no meaningful thought. Again, in bracket notation we obtain the result:
Eqn 2 V < n > = { }.
Enter the void with a thin, banal redness, the blackness of a dog's lip and Dave Pearlman's documentation. Later in my youth, I became intimidated thinking, 'what am I missing, why can't I grasp the meaning of this all important concept?' It's only later in life, having studied the insidious nature of the Venn diagram, that I have learned the truth. There is no significance and the emperor is really naked.
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