The essay Singular Limits in the May 2002 issue of Physics Today has a vivid illustration of a discontinuous function which measures the ickiness one feels after eating an apple but observing that proportion of a maggot is still inside the apple. For this function, .

Biting into an apple and finding a maggot is unpleasant enough, but finding half a maggot is worse. Discovering one-third of a maggot would be more distressing still: The less you find, the more you might have eaten. Extrapolating to the limit, an encounter with no maggot at all should be the ultimate bad-apple experience. This remorseless logic fails, however, because the limit is singular: A very small maggot fraction () is qualitatively different from no maggot ().