There is no barber
Every barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself. No barber shaves someone who shaves himself. Prove that there exists no barber.
The trick is -- if you follow this statement to its conclusion using formal logic, then you really can prove that barbers don't exist. Absurd, you say. The flaw lies not with our powers of deduction, but rather with the premise. This is a trivial example, pertinent only in the minds of theoreticians. But there is a lesson to be learned here... no matter how carefully we may analyze something, we can still go astray if our initial assumptions are not correct.
Anything to do with the way we interpret tax laws?
Legal Corner Icon — the image was hosted by the publisher and was not captured.This is a cartoon by Geoff Draper, PhD student at the University of Utah, [http://www.cs.utah.edu/~draperg/] who has drawn hundreds of intellectual cartoons and who has been very kind in allowing us to use his cartoons, some of which we will bring occasionally, though he says, "I am curious: on what section of the taxindiaonline website do you plan to put these cartoons?"
This cartoon also appears in the book Computation Engineering: Applied Automata Theory and Logic by Dr.Ganesh Gopalakrishnan.