How to fill up space

Here's a situation most of us have experienced: you're up late writing an assignment for one of your classes, and you get to a half page short of the required length. You are completely out of ideas and don't have time to set it aside and come back to it when you're fresh. Before the personal computer you really didn't have any options other than turning it in a little short (and hoping for mercy) or turning it in late (and hoping for mercy). The personal computer and the word processor added a number of options, including:

• Change the point size of the text
• Adjust the margins
• Adjust the line spacing slightly
• Use British spellings for words like colour
  

WordPerfect even had a feature to do some of these things for you to make the text you wrote fit in the required space.

So, you're all thinking, the problem has been solved? The answer is a resounding "no". Once teachers figured out that students were playing these sorts of games they made tighter restrictions. Students are now often required to write in a specified font and point size, with specified margins and line spacings, which leads us directly back to the problem we introduced in the opening paragraph.

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not committed to making your life better, and so we have been spending a great deal of research trying to solve this problem. We got permission from our R&D today to share with you one of our most promising techniques. It's not perfect yet, but it certainly fills up a little extra space.

The technique is based on propositional logic. The underlying assumption is that any statement is either true or false, and that you can combine statements with "and" and "or". The wonderful aspect about propositional logic is how you can continue to build more and more complex statements quite easily. Let's talk about an example. Assume that you stated in your paper that "A dime is worth ten cents." This statement, when made about US currency, is true. So that we don't have to keep writing this sentence we'll call it "A" from now on. Suppose you need to come up with more sentences for your assignment. All you have to do is come up with another statement, such as "Osama Bin Laden is no longer alive" (from now on "B") that may or may not be true. Because we know "A" to be true and "B" to be either true or false, then we can write a phrase of the structure "A and either B or not B." This statement is also true, and will not get you docked. In words, the sentence would read, "A dime is worth ten cents, and either Osama Bin Laden is no longer alive or not." You have now taken a sentence with 26 characters and transformed it into a much longer 80 characters without adding any real content or going to any real effort!

We know that this system is still in its infancy, but we hope to have a web-based tutorial to teach the basics and a series of lectures where devoted students can learn advanced rules such as using implication to create valid statements out of completely false information (e.g. "If the earth is a cube then the people living in Kenya breathe water instead of air.") We envision a world where artificial space limitations disappear as a complete lack of content reigns supreme!