Friday, August 08, 2003

Sclar Tabotage!

That is what some junk mail just told me. My sty went away.

I bought a couple of tickets to the Fiend Fest show at Club Exit NYC. They were very expensive, but I was worried that Leonard might die or The Dickies might break up before I saw them again.

Okay, so people were talking about this guy who wrote a paper that says there's no such thing as a fundamental unit of time -- as evidenced because of Zeno's so-called "paradox," that says it's impossible to move anywhere because in order to have moved x units of distance, we need to first have moved half of x units of distance and so on, until we use up infinite time going nowhere. It's a paradox because motion is clearly possible. Anyway, some other people are saying that the paper doesn't make sense, and that the guy who wrote the paper doesn't understand infinite series. Now, I haven't read the paper in question, nor do I really understand math that well, but I don't see what the problem is. The opposing side's argument is that you can have a sum with an infinite number of addends, and it'll come out to a non-infinite value (like when you sum 1 + (1/2) + (1/4) + ... and get 2). The thing is, numbers can be infinitely subdivided, but the understanding of time that the author is arguing against says that time can't be. So if you've got a minimum unit of time that it takes to move any distance, no matter how small, and you've got an infinite sum of these fixed units of time (corresponding to the infinite sum of the distances), then Zeno's right and it takes forever to go somewhere. The guy who wrote the paper is saying that time is continuous, and thus can be infinitely subdivided -- to the extent that time even exists, anyway. So he does understand infinite series, right?

Here are some movies I want to rent:

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