If you use Facebook, you may be familiar with the groups based on the ‘million march‘-principle, who are trying to get to a certain number of members to affect some change.

A lot of these groups are outright silly, or based around issues unlikely to drum up the enthusiasm of the masses. A quick search finds individuals offering to give up smoking, get a tattoo and eat their keyboard. Groups range from the unbelievable “If this group reaches a million, I’ll name my kid after a diacritical mark“, to the much more grounded in reality* “If this group reaches 1,000,0000 NOTHING will happen“.
(* in concept, although the representation of numbers leaves something to be desired)

Then there are the more serious campaigns, like “One Million Strong for Barack“, “1 Million Strong For Same-Sex Marriage Throughout The Entire United States” and “One Million Strong for the Separation of Corporation and State“. These are centres for activity on serious campaigns and tend to have more members (the first two have hit their mark).

Anyway, earlier this week I saw an xkcd cartoon suggesting the Facebook group of a Tautology Club be called “If 1,000,000 people join this group, it will have 1,000,000 people in it”. And today I was invited to join “Aleph-One Strong for the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis!” by Tony Mann, who wrote:

This group wants Aleph-1 members so it can test the Continuum Hypothesis. It already has almost 700, so only another Aleph-1 are needed. As the group says, invite all your friends to join, but if you only have finitely many friends you’re no use to them.

On the group Wall, member Justin Howard Wilson has a way to check on the progress of the mission: “Are we there yet? *Counts members* Crap, I’m still able to count them!”

This also reminds me of a group I saw quite a while ago, “If this group reaches 4,294,967,296 it might cause an integer overflow“.