On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: >On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, David Silberstein wrote: > ># Never go off on tangents, which are lines that intersect a curve at ># only 1 point and were discovered by Euclid, who lived in the 6th ># Century, which was an era dominated by the Goths, who lived in what ># we now know as Poland... > >Euclid. fl circa 300 B.C. > -- Merriam-Webster OnLine I think part of the humour of that quote is that it gets some of the information very wrong. The line fails to interect the curve at any point, as it were. ># >#OTOH: ># ># If you never go off on tangents, you keep going around in circles. > >Nitpicks aside, I *do* like that! > It's also amusing, but of course, pedantically speaking, the curves that lines can be tangents to need not be circles at all.