2. If I spend $15 dollars a week at a bar and there are four weeks in a month, how much did I spend last month?

3. Which cost more, the total cost of the day spa, or the total cost of my tab at the bar?

4. If a therapist is worth $0.05 an hour but charges $80 dollars per half hour and I have to go to 4 two-hour sessions per month, how much more am I paying than its worth?

5. The fine for vandalizing a car is $700. The chance of getting caught in the act is 10%. If I get caught, the chance that the judge will favor me is 1%. What is the chance that I will have to pay $700?

6. A couple goes to dinner. The woman orders a $32.55 plate, and the lawyer orders a $27 plate. If only one person pays and wants to leave a good tip, how much should he pay?

7. Before, I could only watch one hour of television a day before Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, or an evening’s worth of the Food Network came on. Now, I can watch five hours of television a day. How many more hours of TV per week can I watch now?

Probably about half of the idea credit for this goes to Ryan Ebling. This is one of the many things we do during the work week that we really shouldn’t be paid for. Get divorced, I mean.

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Taken at its face, it was a story about space travel on Syfy. When I first heard about it, I immediately thought of Babylon 5, Star Trek Enterprise, and Seaquest. Knowing the plot didn’t make it any better: A race of robots destroy the majority of the human race and then chase the remnant across the galaxy to stomp them out completely. The clips I saw showed production values that were typical of Syfy. And its name is Battlestar Galactica, for god’s sake. I think if I had known about its connections to Mormonism I would never have watched it. By now its received enough critical acclaim that it doesn’t quite belong in an article like this, except when I preach the gospel of BSG, I’m still met with the skepticism I felt when I first heard about it. So allow me to proselytize.

I’ll start with the difficulties of the show. Let’s say you popped in the miniseries that kicks off the show, which is a daunting two hours. This is nothing if you want to watch a movie, but going into it knowing its television is a bit surprising. Then, you start hearing invented lingo. I’ve never heard this done well, ever. I get that writers want to use language that demonstrates a difference between the culture the audience knows and the culture they’re observing, but it usually comes off stilted. Refer to the otherwise phenomenal Firefly‘s insistence that “goddamn” degraded into “gorram” without any other shifts in English, except, of course, their shoehorned Chinese expletives. “It’s the future, here are some space swears!” The real question is, why do they speak English at all? (Doctor Who sidesteps this issue entirely; the TARDIS translates everything for the companion automatically, even, evidently, when its out of commission. Another reason that Doctor Who is less scifi and more fantasy. This is not a criticism.) BSG’s linguistic scifi is slightly more acceptable; due to their desire to use grittier language but the inability to use the word “fuck” on Syfy, they substituted it for “frak”.  Since the characters are polytheists, they say “oh my gods” instead of “oh my god”. They throw around terms like “FTL drives” and “Dradis contact” like you’re supposed to know what they mean. In one sense this is a minor complaint because the show doesn’t make a big deal about it. There aren’t any linguistics experts on the show, and they’re not running up and down halls screaming invented swears. On the other hand, and maybe because I’m a dork, it was a huge hurdle, and even now that I’m head-over-heels about the show, that still annoys me sometimes. They also invented a card game that’s functionally identical to poker, but the cards are hexagons.

There’s also the issue of the fans. In fact, this will probably be an issue for every piece of culture that gets covered in Its Not What You Think. Whatever you want to say about nerd culture, if you’re not a part of its hard to see the appeal of participating in it. It’s hard to overstate how much we define ourselves by what we consume. I don’t want to be associated with the people that get really into anime, for example, so I won’t watch it or seek it out. It has nothing (well, in this case not nothing, a lot of it is unbearably stupid) to do with the actual quality of the work in question. In the case of BSG, all the typical nerdy TV show fans come into play. The Star Trek community has been discussed to death, but BSG has a fairly similar following.

I’m going to resist the whole “yeah its scifi but its not about that at all” argument because its an apologist attitude and the genre doesn’t need defending. If you still have hangups about the validity of science fiction as a genre capable of legitimate expression and depth, then welcome to the 21st century, and congrats on building a functional time machine. How shocking is 2011 compared to 1950? But there is a sense in which the response “I just don’t like science fiction” isn’t really valid, because, well… its not about that at all. Yes, there’s a race of robots bent on murdering every last man, woman, and child, yes there are space ships and faster-than-light drives. But BSG is what good scifi can be, which is a vehicle to explore and express human experience. (Quick side note: I don’t think all genres need to be about that. That’s just one of the things that they can all do.) BSG handles questions of government in times of emergency, religion and religious conflict, guilt, power, love, ethics; everything included in the business of being human. One of the greatest strengths of the show is that they don’t just put on the science fiction hat for a bit of flourish and forget about it like the Twilight series did with supernatural fantasy, nor do they make it the point of the show like early Star Trek: The Next Generation. (And no, I did not just compare Twilight and TNG. They were helpful examples. Don’t read into it! Please don’t kill me.) They skillfully incorporate science fiction tropes to augment the essentially human engine driving the show.

The writers showed remarkable dexterity in keeping the show moving, too. They weren’t afraid to completely shake down the series, and did so multiple times. Where you end is not where you began, and the path there was paved with airtight plotting and a huge cast of complex characters enacting a chess-like plot that felt like it had been mapped out in advance. People took issue with different parts of the show and the ending didn’t make everyone happy. I suppose it had its flaws, but personally I loved it and felt like the show left its weakest episodes in the first season. Spin-offs like Razor, The Plan, and the webisodes are interesting but not essential.

BSG is a rewarding experience. Regardless of its flaws, its a beautiful, compelling, and powerful work with elements that should appeal to anyone that cares about good television, and certainly to anyone that’s interested in science fiction in general.

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This is a feature I’d like to try making a regular thing. Every once in a while I come across music or a film that at first blush seems better to ignore. Maybe its in a critically maligned genre, is in a controversial context, was simply ignored when it was released, or is one gem in an otherwise unremarkable career. This feature intends to highlight what made that exception so exceptional.

The Blood Brothers

Unless you’re in high school five to six years ago, you probably don’t know much about screamo, post-hardcore, or any of those manicured and well-tended sub-genres. It’s a scene populated by androgynous teenagers that got mugged by textile factory in a Boy’s Town alley. Maudlin, disingenuous, faddish, whatever you want to say about it, there’s not a lot to recommend it to anyone over 16. But then there’s the Blood Brothers. They came out of Seattle in ’97, broke up a decade later, during which they put out five albums and a few side projects. Their screech comes courtesy of Johnny Whitney and Jordan Billie, lead dueling vocalists. A plague of MySpace mall hardcore came after them, aping the noise, their nearly nihilistic non sequitur lyrics and abrupt tempo changes, but I haven’t stopped listening to them since I was first exposed to it.

As far as I’m concerned, the first two albums, This Adultery is Ripe and March on Electric Children are fine for what they are, but the place to start is Burn, Piano Island, Burn or Crimes. Their final album, Young Machetes, is a victory lap. A lot of hardcore is one monotonous wall of noise without much variation, not much more than a slight variation on whatever everyone else has been doing since the 90s. I’m painting the genre with pretty broad strokes, but that description isn’t entirely off-base, and certainly not for someone new to the genre as a whole. I suppose to a certain extent if you don’t like it now, you never will; it can seem amusical and juvenile, and in many cases it is. What separates the Blood Brothers is a sense of real energy and explosiveness that’s easy to recognize when its legitimate and extremely difficult to reproduce. What makes them good is common to all rock, the sort of honesty you know in your gut, a balls-outness that you know when you hear.

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Its inevitable that, with a number of nuclear plants in Japan on the edge of a meltdown, there will be a backlash against nuclear power, which many people regard with discomfort anyway. Even if the Japanese plants are contained and a meltdown is prevented, it will still rank as the third worst nuclear disaster in history. No one believes that they’re anything like the plant in Springfield, but those images have likely burrowed into the popular consciousness, along with the  horrifying reality of the nuclear attack against Japan during WWII, a lingering memory of Cold War nuclear standoffs, the meltdown in Chernobyl and the partial meltdown in Three Mile Island, and half a century of sci-fi horror.

Let me lay out my bias before I continue: Nuclear power gave me a house to live in, food to eat, and the financial freedom that allowed my mother to stay at home and homeschool me and my sisters. I was a comfortable kid. What’s more, I ate it up. I loved talking to my dad about nuclear science. I got to go on a tour of the plant as a kid, and what is impressed on me now is a sense of awe and a little bit of fear over the enormity of this almost antique left-over from the scientific idealism of the first half of the 20th century. I, like my parents, heaped scorn on those ignorant hippies that couldn’t see that nuclear power was the answer to diminishing fossil fuels and environmental damage.

Let me also, before I continue, clear up some misconceptions about nuclear power.

1.) THEY DON’T FUCKING EXPLODE LIKE A BOMB. Nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors are two different things. You may have heard speculation in the news as to whether or not countries like Iraq or N. Korea had “enriched uranium.” Its U-235, which is the sort of uranium that goes in to bombs and missiles, as opposed to U-238, which is used in many nuclear plants. Less than 1% of naturally occurring uranium contains U-235, so you have to enrich it if you want to build a weapon. This process is (supposed to be) a secret. To take Chernobyl as an example, the core overheated because of a combination of human error and sloppy testing practices. This heat actually did cause a number of explosions, as the increased heat generated a ton of steam, which caused too much pressure. There were fires, more explosions, but my point is that none of them were nuclear explosions. The image that some people have of looking on the horizon and seeing a mushroom cloud over the plant is impossible. I’m not trying to diminish the impact of Chernobyl; it was a horrible event and there are no excuses for how the test was approached, the immediate response of those in charge, and the response of the Soviet government.

2.) They don’t put out radiation like some kind of glowing monster. In fact, “ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.” (FYI, that article is a little hysterical, but the point is still valid.) There are no open drums full of neon goo lying around. Whatever concerns there are about nuclear power (and there are many) the idea that nuclear plants are pumping out radiation into a river like Mr. Burns’ plant and making three-eyed fish is ignorant.

Clearly there are other concerns, nuclear waste storage being chief among them. Most, plants store their waste on-site, although that will obviously not last forever, and many of them which were meant to be temporary are being used far longer than intended. This is due to a number of things, not the least of which is politics. The issue isn’t simply that places are needed for storage, but they have to withstand all conceivable natural disasters and remain intact and operational for thousands of years. The possibility of a leak is unthinkable. More extreme measures like strapping all of it to a rocket and shooting it into space are too expensive. (And, to me, inconsiderate, although to who exactly I’m not sure.) Nuclear power is extremely clean in terms of climate change, but waste storage is a specter that refuses to leave.

Additionally, building and maintaining a plant is among the most expensive sources of energy. Exact figures vary on the type of plant, its location, and the interests of the one doing the estimation, but it takes a long time to build them and a long time to recoup the cost.

Finally, accidents tend to be catastrophic. The Chernobyl disaster was a mixture of poor planning and ugly government cover-ups–they didn’t admit there was an accident until radiation alarms started going off in a plant in Sweden. Hundreds of workers died, and the 10km radius around the plant is the most irradiated place in the world. There is controversy surrounding the exact impact of the incident, but its clear that it has had an impact on the health of people in the region. The lesson from that disaster and the partial meltdown in the Three Mile Island plant were well-learned and plants are safer than ever, but no safety measures are perfect. (Its worth comparing nuclear disasters to disasters linked to fossil fuels. A nuclear disaster is more newsworthy than a plant fire or an oil spill. Consider the impact that burning fossil fuels has had on the environment against the impact of a handful of nuclear accidents. Consider politicians arguing against radiation poisoning while they say nothing about the measurable and definite impact that coal plants have had and continue to have.) (One final interesting side-note: one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history couldn’t destroy the containment buildings in Japan. They were tested by launching jet-propelled projectiles at them before 9/11.)

So I’m stuck. I can defend the family business as both idiotic and legitimate criticism of nuclear power increases. I can conclude that the risks are worth it and continue irritating everyone I know with my opinions whenever it comes up. Or I could decide that the risks and costs aren’t worth it and turn my back on the industry that helped raise me. I’m not worried about being demonized, of course–my parents are more reasonable than that. But its an additional layer of uncertainty in an already uncertain issue. It’s difficult not to stay in apathetic cynicism as politicians step in and make things even more confusing and difficult with the bare minimum of education.

I can only wait and hope for enough radiation for superpowers.

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GRTM doesn’t have a review ready for your consumption, but most of the contributors, like everyone else, were looking forward to it eagerly. New Radiohead is a big deal! What’s the deal with your thoughts on it? Where does it rank? Do you even like it? What’s your problem?

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Disclosure: In a chapter entitled “Hipster Christianity In Practice,” McCracken sketches his impression of seven individual churches he has labeled as hipster. One of those seven is a church called Life on the Vine, which I’ve been attending for a few years now. (Pastor Dave Fitch addresses the quote used by McCracken about youth groups at LOV on his blog in an insightful and worthwhile post.) I first started attending while I was at Trinity International University, which he names elsewhere in the book as a hipster Christian school. (The five or six people who were told about his claim asked the exact same question: “has he ever been there?” It has no arts programs, a single film class, and an anemic English program. Its a graveyard for arts clubs.) What’s more, TIU and LOV are both situated in the Chicagoland area; guess what makes the #1 spot on his list of CH-favored cities. I felt weird reading this, to say the least. Ultimately, I decided that because it hits so close to home for me, I should speak up and address some of his claims. There is no sense in which he’s not getting at something in which I am involved, something by which I define myself. I won’t waste time with the “hipster” label by itself; as soon as that term comes up, it becomes an idiotic conversation that must immediately end. There is nothing worthwhile to be said about a group of people contemptuous of everyone else that could reasonably be included in their group.

With Hipster Christianity, Brett McCracken intends to “explore the whole concept of ‘cool’ as it pertains to Christianity… It’s a critical analysis.” My main beef, in short, is that it did not and is not. There’s a core here, a seed that’s not bad. One of the big questions posed to the church throughout its history is how to engage the culture it finds itself in. There are three sections: I, The History and Collision of Cool and Christianity, II, Hipster Christianity in Practice, and III, Problems and Solutions. But what exactly this book is criticizing is never clear. The claim is that this book is “a critical analysis… about the contradictions inherent in the phenomenon of Christian cool and the questions Christians should be asking of themselves if they find themselves within this milieu” but the majority of his analysis amounts to itemizing a subculture. The first 2/3rds of Hipster Christianity gleefully parses out a largely superficial culture, tries to find a synthesis between the church and a shallow and ephemeral concept, and then goes on to talk about the incongruities between “cool” and real Christianity. The end produced is diffused and contradictory.

What criticism there is comes in the form of a background of a knowing smile while he’s doing this itemizing, as if liking this set of stuff works out to being somehow silly. If you listen to Sufjan and read N.T. Wright, anyone can fill in the blanks about you. But very little of it is criticized. In fact, much of it is lauded.  What he will criticize, however, are things like “wannabe hip churches.” He won’t call anyone out by name, but paints a picture of youth pastors cramming cultural references into their messages and creating a space to “just hang out”, familiar to anyone that grew up in Evangelical Christian culture. Later he draws some contrasts between legitimate Christian life and the negative, shallow aspects of “cool” (if, in fact, there’s anything else to it). Because there’s so little space devoted to it, the discussion is cursory.

At the end of the chapter entitled “Authentic Christian Cool,” McCracken concludes that “to say that there is such a thing as ‘authentic Christian cool’ is largely an exercise in rehabilitating the term. It requires and understanding that cool is actually a marker of distinction that connotes something profoundly unique, respectable, and against the grain… we are going to be oddballs, outsiders, humble prophets speaking truth to a world that isn’t sure what it needs… we should not be surprised when some people find the whole thing pretty dang cool. But whether they do or not shouldn’t matter.” Then why bother at all? The question is rendered meaningless, if it really meant anything to begin with.

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Windjammer is the newest LP from singer/songwriter and Chicago resident Carl Hauck. He’s been generating some buzz in the Chicago scene and was recently interviewed on WBEZ’s Eight Forty-Eight. The album cover will take you to his site, which lets you stream the whole album for the low low price of zero dollars. Do it!

This album frustrated me. Between moments of lovely introspection there were unfortunate moments of too-slick and safe instrumentation. Understand: I’d still recommend it to anyone that likes folk and overall it’s good stuff, but with a few caveats.

“Rooster” is the track that exemplifies my frustration. I’ll just get it out of the way: the saxophone has absolutely no place on this record. In fact, it has no place in recorded sound whatsoever.* But “Rooster” has such a lovely melody and killer harmonies between Hauck and Molly Robison (whose voice is just damn beautiful and reminiscent of Deb Talan of The Weepies) and swells to an affecting climax; that it’s a shame the sax had to come along and sap the late-night melancholy.

But aside from those complaints, this album is lovely. Hauck is a gifted songwriter and an even more talented guitarist. “Terms of Endearment,” for example, explores the lower class effort required for suburban comfort, and in his and Robison’s emotive and subtle delivery manages to make an oblivious privileged couple’s love and desire for a child just as sympathetic. The title track is a series of childhood memories (“eyes wide, night-light on”) that are likely shared by everyone that grew up in the Midwest accompanied beautifully by a cello and ending in a great mix of melodies and harmonies.

Windjammer seems to be around the point where the thrill of leaving home has faded, and you start to look back home, with the sort of fear, melancholy, childish pride, and homesickness that comes with it. My frustrations aside, it’s a solid and well-crafted example of the genre.

*All right, yes, I get it, the saxophone and its variants are nuanced instruments and it’s silly to dismiss it because a few lunatics turned it into the musical equivalent of artificially sweetened tapioca (bland, sickening, most often consumed by the elderly and found in hospitals). It’s just that the emotional or thematic stuff this particular sound is supposed to evoke is actually evoked elsewhere on Windjammer without it. Whatever that sax sound used to signify, it conjures something entirely different now. Maybe there’s still life hidden in this sound, and all it would take is one fearless and innovative musician to find it. Maybe this is low-hanging fruit. I did like the album.

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I just set my clock back for some arbitrary and outdated reason, which means its going to get darker earlier. The sun will peek at us for a few minutes before it goes off to chill on a beach somewhere, leaving many of us sobbing, miserable wretches until May. In the meantime, as per my recent post-Halloween ritual, I’ve put together a Sad Bastards playlist to accompany my big fat tears during the long darkness of winter. Not all of these dwell on unhappy subject matter; they were more chosen because of their tone. There are a number of them with which I have especially weepy associations. Share the songs you play when you want to feel sorry for yourself!

(Grooveshark didn’t have “Dreamer” by Tiny Vipers (grumble) so I opted for a particularly miserable Mogwai track to open ‘er up.)

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Day 4: The Principle of Explosion

This isn’t a paradox, exactly, it’s really just bad reasoning. Here goes. I exist and I don’t exist. If I say both of those statements are true, then I can conclude anything I want. This is a blast to abuse. Let’s say I have the statement “A and not-A,” where A is “I exist”. Then I could have the statement “A or B,” or “I don’t exist, or I have a billion dollars.” Well, “I don’t exist” was posited as true in the first statement, so then B must be true, “I have a billion dollars.” Wee! Do it yourself, you can make whatever dumb shit you want true (provided you’re willing to suspend the law of contradiction)!

Day 5: Russell’s Paradox

This one is just so beautiful I can’t fucking stand it. You have to understand very little of set theory to understand the nature of this paradox.

If you don’t know who Bertrand Russell is, I would recommend Logicomix as an excellent starting point and an all-around fun read. It’s a graphic novelization of his lifelong attempt to discover the foundation of mathematics. Would mathematical facts be true if humans weren’t around to know them? Do they exist independently of the mind? If so, how do we get into that world?

Russell’s answer (or one, at least) was to write an unbelievably dense, tedious, and long three volume book called Principia Mathematica that only a small group of people could even understand at the time. Here’s an excerpt:

I don’t want to diminish its historical significance; I’ve heard it declared anywhere from among the most important books of the 20th century to being among the most significant books in Western civilization. (I couldn’t possibly say one way or the other. If you stopped me on the street and demanded to know what 4 x 9 + 5 x 6 equals, I’d stutter and then throw up.)

But anyway. A guy named Georg Cantor was the first person to articulate set theory. A set is a group of stuff. Maybe the group of all jerks in the world, or the group of all fans of Slayer, or the group of all positive integers. Bertrand Russell was among the first to discover a paradox in this idea of sets. Let’s say a group of people wanted to write a book that catalogs all books that don’t talk about themselves. A collection of Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t mention itself, for example, so its in, but the Bible isn’t, because it talks about itself. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in, but if Wikipedia were a book it’d be out. And so forth. So all the editors trying to put this catalog together go about their business and all books are cataloged, until one guy says “so should we list our catalog in the catalog?” Another editor says “yes, because it doesn’t reference itself.” “Yeah, but if you do include it, then it mentions itself, so it can’t be included in a list of books that don’t mention themselves.” It can neither include or exclude itself. The office where the catalog is being compiled burns down and divides by zero and everything goes to hell.

Put another way, some sets can contain themselves. The set of all non-stock traders contains itself, for example, because the set of non-stock traders is not a stock trader. The set of all sets contains itself. Somehow. So imagine the set of sets that contain themselves, A, and the complimentary set, B, which is a set of sets that do not contain themselves. Does set B contain itself? If so, then it can’t contain itself, because it would violate the nature of the set. If not, then it must, because it’s a set of sets that don’t contain themselves.

Well, shit. If I’m not mistaken, Georg Cantor’s set theory eventually got re-labeled as “naive set theory” and an army of people attempted redefine set theory such that it could deal with this paradox, among other things.

(Biographical note: Georg Cantor led a remarkably tragic life. He spent a good deal of time in sanatoriums because of his chronic depression and bipolar disorder, and had to bear the death of his son. Initial reactions to his articulation of set theory met with theological opposition! Cantor posited the existence of an “infinity of infinities,” which a number of theologians felt was an offense against the infinity of God.) (One final note on Cantor: he demonstrated that there are more real numbers than there are natural numbers. Remember that natural numbers are positive integers. If it can represent a real thing, like dollars or donuts, its a natural number. Real numbers include things like fractions and pi. Again, if I’m not mistaken, then there are an infinity of natural numbers, but there is an infinity of an infinity of real numbers. Between each natural number is an infinite number of real numbers. If you’re counting, then when you go from 1 to 2, you’ve got two natural numbers, but real numbers have already gotten to infinity.)

Day 6 — Zeus avoids prison time

This is similar to Zeno’s paradox, so it’s nothing new if you’ve been following this column. Honestly, I wanted to write about it because I thought it was a hilarious illustration of a supertask (which I want to tackle in a later installment).

Zeus is pissed at Prometheus for stealing fire, so he gets an infinite number of demons to kill him. To the first demon he says  “if that son of a bitch isn’t dead in an hour, kill him.” To the next one, he says “If that goddamn asshole isn’t dead in a half hour, kill him,” and so on, splitting time in half like that over and over. Obviously, the dude is in the Elysian Fields within an hour. The other gods, impelled by some kind of bizarre sense of justice, decide to find the demon that killed Prometheus (because they can’t take Zeus to trial; he can basically do whatever he wants). Apollos asks the first demon “did you kill that guy?” And the demon says “no, it wasn’t me, it was the guy that had to kill him in thirty minutes.” So Apollos asks the next one, “did you kill Prometheus?” and that one says “nope, it was the demon that had to do it in 15 minutes.” And so on, forever. Each demon can blame the next one, because every one that could have killed him can simply point to the one that had to do it in a shorter time span than him. Someone must have killed him, because he’s dead. But no demon will ever stand trial for it, because any given demon has a perfect alibi. Someone did it, but who? It’s the world’s most convoluted hit. Plus, Greek gods are so capricious that I doubt they’d question more than ten demons before they’d get bored.

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In service to a rather Eastern idea, Zeno cooked up a paradox to demonstrate that motion is bullshit. There are a bunch of his paradoxes still around, and they’re all variations on a theme, which is more or less the many strange flavors of infinity. There are two versions in particular that seem to hold the most sway over the imagination. Behold!

Let’s say Wolf Blitzer sees a donut sitting on a counter, 20 feet from where he’s sitting. He wants to eat it before someone else gets to it, and he sees an intern ogling that very same donut. He resolves to go get it. Before he can cross the 20 feet to the donut, he obviously has to go 10 feet first. But before that, he has to go 5 feet. Before that, 2.5 feet. Before that, 1.25 feet. Before that, 0.625 feet, before that, 0.3125 feet, and so on. Obviously. Zeno said, however, that since each distance can be cut into bits like that, and every bit has to be crossed, he’ll never get there. He has an infinite number of distances to cross before he could even get to 1 foot. Hell, he can never even start, because there is no starting point. Every starting point can be cut in half to lead to another starting point that can be cut in half, and so on, forever. Put another way, Blitzer has to perform an infinite number of tasks (that is, crossing a given distance) to get to that donut. Lucky for him, the intern can’t get there any faster, or at all. The donut will remain uneaten by journalist and intern alike for eternity.

Okay, so, that was space being cut into a lot of pieces. The same thing applies to time. If I want to ram my car into a hot dog stand, I need to move the car forward. The time it would take from starting my car to smashing the vendor can be split into individual instances. In one instance, I can either move my car to a space, or move it into the same space it already occupies. Since moving it to where it already is doesn’t make sense (there’s no movement involved in standing still, after all), I’ll have to move it forward if I want to smash the hot dog stand. But in that instant I can’t move it forward, because it’s just one instant. But if I can’t move it forward in that instant, I can’t move it forward in any instant! I can never achieve my dream!

There are some obvious answers, of course, (like how the smaller the distance, the less time it takes to cross it, or how time isn’t quite a discrete series of instances) but it’s important to know that these problems were not sufficiently dealt with in mathematical terms until the 19th century, and even now they present philosophical and logical problems. Infinity and the various subtly different sorts (like infinite subdivisions (the infinity of numbers between 1 and 2) vs. infinite magnitudes (the entirety of the number line)) are a… well, Pandora’s Box of logical, mathematical, and philosophical questions.

Day 3:Laplace’s Demon

One of the reason I enjoy this stuff so much is the mythological doodads it has produced, like Thompson’s Lamp, Plato’s Cave, and what I’m writing about today, Laplace’s Demon. Western thought is populated by all sorts of bizarre little objects and places. My interest in them isn’t so much the joy of solving a problem as the joy of knowing and trying to understand these hiccups in thought. It’s a collector’s impulse, I guess. This is why I’m essentially useless. Anyway! Pierre-Simon Laplace was a scientist in the 19th century who suggested that if some mind out there somewhere could know every bit of information about every particle in the universe, it could accurately predict the future. (Some writer on Wikipedia was quick to point out that it wasn’t Laplace that called it a demon, but rather biographers after the fact. He is a scientist, and scientists are not prone to such flights of fancy. God forbid he show the slightest bit of creative or whimsical impulse. But no, this all has to be deadly serious in a world where a man loses a race to a turtle and obsessive lunatics fill vases with ping-pong balls.) It wouldn’t need more than the information about every atom in the universe at, say, 6:15 A.M. on July 7th, 1814. (This is the year when the paper first describing this entity was first published. Also, the year when the United States capitol building burnt down! Coincidence? Yes.) This demon could analyze the data and know what led those particles there based on the positions of other matter and where they’re headed, thus outlining the past and the future. Like a comic book panel. If I see Iron Man flying through a building and the Hulk’s fist outstretched, I can guess that the Hulk has been causing trouble again and Iron Man was once again commissioned by the government to deal with him, and the Hulk will get away like he always does. Story plots aren’t as predictable as the activities of atomic particles, at least as they were understood in the 19th century. Given sufficient analytical power, the demon could come up with an accurate timeline for the entire life of the universe. Laplace’s point was that the universe is essentially deterministic, or bound to go a certain way.

One particularly interesting (but impoverished–meaning that the counter-argument doesn’t address the heart of the conundrum) argument against it is that given the amount of time it would take for information to cross the smallest possible distance, the speed of light, and some other factors, it would take too long for the demon to crunch all the numbers, even if it started at the beginning of the universe. Of course, it’s imaginary, so it doesn’t have to obey stupid rules like “nothing can go faster than light” or whatever. BUT! If it existed in a universe much older than ours and is running its calculations from there, it could totally predict whether or not I’m going to win the lottery. There is a down side; if you traveled to the demon’s universe and asked it whether or not you’re going to get laid, you wouldn’t be able to do anything meaningful with that information, because the universe is still just as deterministic as it was before you asked.

: (!

(Here’s something fun you can try at home: apply the ontological argument for God to Laplace’s demon, but instead of “greatest”, use “best calculator”. An existing calculator could calculate better than a nonexistent one, so it must exist! Wee!)

Related Posts:

• 1MAaT: Days 4, 5, and 6
• 1 Month About a Thing: Day 1