Friday, November 30, 2007

The overdue book


It's out there. Somewhere. That class you never attended. The overdue book from five years ago. Your clothes that you thought you had on. The job you thought you left, but no, you still are on the payroll and they wonder why you haven't been to the last 635 daily meetings.
Can we make these things happen? Is the line between dream and reality drawn in sand, or in dijon mustard?
There have been far too many instances of dream made into reality for it not to be possible. I still think back to the day I heard 'American Band' on the radio, three weeks before it was released.
Logical explanations in many cases are beside the point. Puzzles would not exist if logic were completely transparent. And why wouldn't it be transparent? That's not logical. Bertrand Russell already showed us that our current logical system is built upon self contradictory assumptions. The halting problem cannot be stopped.
I notice this post has been autosaved. In a short time, we will be hearing from a fringe group about the Autosavior. Your soul guaranteed not to be deleted. Be careful what you say about the infinite. You don't know what you're dealing with.
Are these the ravings of a paranoic or a stoic? How come the maps changed? Last night I looked at a map that had four different south poles marked on it. Turns out that the perturbation of the earth's rotation causes a procession, and there is no south pole, only a fuzzy boundary where the south pole may be at any moment.
If we think about it, quantum mechanics was just the beginning. The concept of the Dedekind cut shows us that angels can dance on the head of a pin, and that goes for something as big as the south pole as well. The butterfly effect would be more noteable if we realized that the butterflies are themselves not determinable.
Meanwhile, the book fines are mounting.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Infinity again and again

Salvador Dali was struck by the realization that the universe was converging on a railroad station in Perpignan. He was convinced that this confirmed his madness.



Georg Cantor suffered mental illness from the contemplation of infinity and the rendering of it in mathematical language.



There is a certain type of mysticism that equates the infinite with God. This is a part of human history and sociology going back to prehistory. Strangeley enough, we find actual taboos in modern mathematics, and not surprisingly, one of the most strict is division by zero to define infinity. The logical reason for this is that the operation is not determinant in the reverse: divide two by zero and get infinity. There is no way now to get back to two. You could just as easily get back to four, or four million googol. In a way, we can look at the division by zero as an abomination, a pseudomystical manifestation of the Devil aspiring to be the Godhead. I'm sure that Phillippe has notes on this somewhere.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Hronir


The details are in the devil. The order of wait not will underlie the arid. Space. Coriander the door opener from track of the place of time.
Borges can't be fixed.
I wanted to find this, but it hasn't been lost yet, as far as I know.
Maybe tomorrow.
Or yesterday, depending.




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