Happenings

First my roomate said he wanted to print something.  So, on my recommendation, he bought a refill kit for his empty printer cartridges (he already had a printer). The refilling did not work.

So he decided to buy a new printer.

He bought a printer that could also scan AND fax because, he said, he needed to send faxes.

In the process of hooking up the phone line to the fax machine, something in the phone-line-splitter box short circuited.  We discovered that by connecting an old ISDN modem (not even plugged into the PC anymore… just a card dangling there) it somehow fixed the problem of nothing working.

My roomate decided that he wanted a way for people to be able to reach the fax line independently of his normal voice line.  He went out and bought some digital doo-hickey to route calls.

Which… upon subsequent purchase and further inspection, needed a regular anologue phone to function properly. Which, of course, he didn’t have.  He went out and borrowed a phone from a  neighbour and hooked it up.

Now, everything is sort of set up (dangling ISDN modems and all).  When the phone rings it’s quite a racket.

And somewhere along the way, an answering machine was purchased and duct tape has appeaered everywhere (I swear that stuff grows organically wherever you put it down).

 

I thought it was amusing.

On why it’s not about the destination

First, consider the age-old (and perhaps slightly over used) philosopher’s problem:  The man shooting an arrow.

We suppose that the arrow will travel from point A (where the man is standing) to point B (the target).

The problem comes in when we realize that for the arrow to get from A to B, it must first travel to the half-way point between A and B (let’s call it C).  BUT, in order to do that, it must travel to the half way point between A and C (call that point D) and so on.  If we keep going eventually we see that the arrow never actually leaves it’s starting point because it must always travel to the half way point between two subsequent points first.

How then, do we reconcile what we know for a fact (the arrow does indeed travel and – depending on the skill of the marksman – will hit its target) with what must logically be true?

The answer is that this philosophical conundrum is in fact just a problem of language. The language here fails to accurately describe what’s really going on.  The only way for us to reconcile what really happens, and what *should* logically occur is to recognize the fact that the arrow does not travel from A to B… or C… or D.  In fact, I would state that /nothing/ truly travels from A to B. The only state of moving things is that they are TRAVELLING.  The arrow only moves. It does not move from A to B.

To see how nothing can have an exact destination, think about trying to place the point of a pen exactly in the center of a sheet of paper. I guarantee that no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to place it exactly in the center of the page. Even if you use a machine. If you zoom in close enough you will see that the tip of the pen (or pin, or carbon nanotube, or.. whatever you like) will never be at the exact center of the page.  You will always get closer to the true center of the page, but (I suspect) never actually on target. Essentially, you always get asymptotically close to your destination but you never actually arrive.

ANYWAY, what has this got to do with the price of tea in china? Well… probably not much. Except to say that you can liken this to your life, if you like.  People are geared to never be truly satisfied with what they have. I’ve found that this is especially true for me. I will always want more.  So, if this also applies to you, you can take solace in the fact that you’re not weird and the universe isn’t against you. It’s just the natural way of things.

You don’t have a destination, only a journey.

Might as well enjoy the ride if that’s all you’ve got, eh?

OH and if you totally didn’t understand my shitty explanation of the Paradox of Movement, here is a nice youtube clip that does a pretty good job (SEE BELOW):

 

And, you’ll see in the comments people say things like “oh but 0.9999999 = 1 or close enough, that’s why it all works out.”  The explanation in the post attempts to reconcile things without creating new rules for the universe (so the universe ’rounds off’ when it comes to movement, but not with other things? When does it decide to do this ’rounding off’? Why only for movement? etc etc).  YMMV

 

EDIT: You can find the youtube clip below, and a nice wikipedia page about what Zeno’s paradox (the arrow stuff I’m talking about in this post)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u42Y3RbP7JE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno’s_paradoxes#The_arrow_paradox

I thought this was interesting

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=394576

Give it a chance (at least, read it through to the end).  At least it gives one of the more reasonable interpretations of what the big g might be…

Or at least, I thought so when I looked at it the first time

I’ve added a twitter feed

It should be on the right side-bar.  You can view it directly at http://twitter.com/Unleaded12

Sometimes I don’t have much to say, except a sentence or two.  So this might be…easier? Who knows.