Genius du Jour:

A person (or persons) working for the BBC.

In an article about Google Desktop potentially making the contents of your PC available to government snoops, there is this gem of an observation:

It is not known how many users there are of Google Desktop but it is thought to be a fraction of the hundreds of millions that use the search engine every day.

No, really? A fraction? Lessee... . Let n = the number of people who use the Google search-engine every day. Just to make the math really, really, REALLY easy, let's just say that there's only one (1) daily user of the Google search-engine who also uses Google Desktop. That gives us 1/n as the fraction of...whoa! Did you see what just happened?! It only takes one person to make a fraction!!

So what, you ask? So this, I reply: here's the sentence immediately preceding the one quoted above:

The software package [i.e., Google Desktop] is widely seen as posing a challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the way people interact with computers.

This is because, as the first line quoted says, there's a fraction of daily Google search-engine users who use Google Desktop.

Clearly, fractions is dangerous things. You find yourself up against a fraction – any fraction –, you know you're in some serious trouble. That's why they make themselves so difficult for the kids to learn: they don't want us using their secrets against them.

I sure hope Homeland Security has a Fractions Task Force working on this.

(This reminds me of the summer of 1997, which had a really stormy beginning. The Daily Idio...erm, Daily Iowan – the student newspaper at the University of Iowa – then posed the question, 'if the 1993 Midwest floods were the 500-year-flood, why have we been getting similar amounts of rain a mere 4 years later?'. Not surprising, really; I mean, it involves understanding not just a fraction – 1/500 –, but the probabilistic significance of said fraction. Is it fair to expect that from semi-college-educated [or is that college-semi-educated?] people?)