A Running Tally of Metaphysical Phenomena

I got a few weeks behind. Sorry about that. Christopher reminded me the other day, and it’s not that I just wasn’t thinking about it at all, but I promised him I would get caught up on the weeklies, so here we are.

Greta’s already getting that suspicion that kids three or four times her age begin to have, wherein her toys are only lifeless and still when she’s awake, but when she sleeps, they party. So she was doing some investigation, and I got this picture from the tapes. Don’t tell.

Playing on the floor and, oh, hey there, dad!

We took this next one at the Redmond Saturday Market. There are two guys who sell sausage, onion, and pepper heros (that’s how they spell it), and they’re pretty amusing. They call everybody paisan and give out sausage samples and basically rake in all the money because their things are great and delicious. Anyway, Greta loves these guys and is always asking if we’re going to go see them. This particular day, they were topping their goods with parmesan cheese, and she was just going on and on about how good of a complement it was, particularly with the yellow peppers (they have different peppers every week), and how she was wondering if this particular parmesan was more on the nutty side, and whether it was salty, and on and on and on. She’s quite the connoisseur, and very curious.

And finally, here she is basking in the glow of just having gnawed on the length of one whole edge of Wes and Leslie‘s coffee table. After tasting the whole edge, she offered the opinion that the part just before the far corner was, and I quote, “the most toothsome.”

Alright, first things first! We now have just about three mobile people in the house! Greta’s been getting up onto her hands and knees (or her hands and toes, as the fancy strikes her) for quite a while now, so we’ve been waiting with as much patience as we can muster for her to actually locomote to some extent. Just when she looked motivated enough to give it a try, she would, instead:

1. Push off with her foot/knee but not move her hand forward, resulting in a faceplant on the bed, carpet, or big square cushion,
2. roll onto her back, spin, and then roll the required number of times to eventually get to whatever it was that she was after, or
3. rock back and forth on her hands and knees/toes excitedly and with high but unrewarded hopes.

That was until the night before last. The motivation was an Xbox controller, which she loves. It was on the floor, and instead of rolling to it or forgetting about it, she actually used her arms and sometimes legs to get herself over to it! Right now, it mostly looks like her pulling on the floor hard enough with her arms to slide, on her tummy, to whatever she’s interested in, but a few times, there has been actual “stepping” involved, with the knee first and then the hand. It’s very exciting, and of course, like any milestone that’s come before, she’ll build on it so quickly that it will be hard for us to remember what it was like when she couldn’t quite do it. In the mean time, it’s a lot of fun to watch this new ability in action! When I get a chance to trim up the video and upload it, I’ll share it here. It’s great. There are also weeklies on the way.

And the second thing is this.

If everything goes the way it’s supposed to go, we’ll be allowed to move in without it being called trespassing beginning on September 18th. And if everything after that goes the way it should, it will be an up-to-date, “livable” home, by the standards of our special FHA rehab loan, within a few months after that! There’s still a lot to iron out, and the process is pretty complex and crazy. One step at a time, though, and it doesn’t look like there will be any showstopping problems. Let’s get a little closer to closing, and then I’ll unload more of the details and share some more pictures. Stay tuned!

Kent

This from the same phone that tells me “Calling kree-STAH-fur” when I do the voice command thing to call my brother. Pretty funny. But really, kudos to [name withheld for privacy] on the new job and to Kirsten’s dad for knowing his elements.

With what I’m writing today, I’m reminded of Demitri Martin’s comment on bumper stickers. To paraphrase (but still use quotation marks because relax, English teachers): “A lot of people hate bumper stickers, but I kind of like them because they simplify things for me with people. I see bumper stickers on a person’s car, and they all say this: ‘Hey, let’s never hang out.’” I feel like getting all psyched about all of this and nerding it up has been the two-part equivalent of slapping a bunch of activist bumper stickers all over myself. But what are you going to do? I thought it was cool.

I mentioned when I wrote about Everything and More, this book on infinity by David Foster Wallace, that it was challenging me in good ways and making me think. I thought I’d jump in this time with some specific things that I thought were sort of head-exploding and interesting and—dare I say it?—fun for me to read and think about. Feel free to pull a Lifetime¹ and read something else if this sounds sort of blech to you. Don’t worry, we’ll still hang out as long as you’re willing to.

Now then. We start with Zeno. Wallace describes Zeno² as “the most fiendishly clever and upsetting Greek philosopher ever,” and even though the number of personal relationships I have with classical Greek philosophers is pretty small (and shrinking what feels like daily), I get the sense that this might be true. Zeno devised a few of these great and very famous paradoxes, by all appearances for the sole reason of annoying everyone. One of them looked very much like this, only pre-modern, probably more verbose, and in Greek.

Suppose you are on the sidewalk somewhere—let’s say the huge intersection at Shibuya in Tokyo, just for kicks (but here’s the fun part: you can use your street if you want!)—and you’re waiting for the walk signal so you can cross the street. When the signal changes and all the cars stop, you have half a minute or so to make your way to the other side. If it takes much longer than that, you’re going to either annoy a bunch of people, or get smacked by (a) car(s), or both. Here’s the problem. Before you can get all the way across the street, you have to get to the halfway point, right? Now the trip can be thought of as two “subtrips,” if you will. One from Sidewalk₁ to the median (assuming there is one) and one from the median to Sidewalk₂. But the kicker is that the same problem arises when you try to make the first subtrip (the one to the median): you have to get halfway there first, and halfway to that point. And so on, into infinitely smaller and smaller subtrips until it’s basically impossible for you to cross the street at all.³ (The upshot, of course, being that it’s also impossible to get a fraction of the way there and get in the way of a speeding black German sedan, which situation would likely be fatal. The additional down side being that you also can’t go anywhere to eat or get out of the rain, which situation Maslow reminds us is also fatal.) Of course, we know from many, many experiences crossing streets that it’s not actually impossible. In fact, the synpases successfully firing in Zeno’s brain to come up with this in the first place all tell us that, as Wallace puts it, “there has got to be something fishy about Zeno’s argument.” However, as he (Wallace, I mean) goes on to point out, and then explain, “[f]inding and articulating that fishiness is a whole other matter.” It’s also a whole other level of nerd which I won’t go into.⁴ Suffice it to say that this is one of the parts of this book that put some new wrinkles on my brain in the best possible way.

Here’s another. Remember repeating decimals? Things like ¹⁄₃ being represented as 0.333 or ²⁄₃ as 0.666? Well, remember those, and then remember also that any digit is ten times larger than the one to its right. For example, take the number 555.55. The third digit is five, and that is ten times larger than the fourth digit, which is one half. OK. Armed with these things, we we enter the next puzzle, in which we will prove that .999 is the same thing as 1. Which practically, yes, is basically true as far as any of us actually care. But mathematically, that’s unsettling, right? (I assume that if you’ve read this far, then you’re engaged enough to at least humor me here.) It goes like this. Assume that x = .999 and that, therefore, 10x = 9.999. Then subtract x from 10x. 9.999 – .999 = 9, which means 9x = 9.0 and, therefore x = 1.0. But we just said at the beginning of this part that x = .999. Math strikes again!

The problem in both of these cases, of course, is that language can very easily come close to describing mathematical truths but can only sometimes really tighten down all the bolts, as it were, and make an airtight formula without being just incredibly and off-puttingly verbose (or what mathematicians, both amateur and professional, call “inelegant,” which is about the worst insult there is for them. Not the most creative bunch in the world…)

One more. And this isn’t so much a contradiction or anything as it is a cool illustration of a property of lines, points, and infinite quantities. Remember from early math (or don’t; whatever you like) that a point is a specific location with no size whatsoever and that a line goes through infinite points along a single plane. “Infinite points” means that a line one inch “long” goes through, or contains, just as “many” points as one that is one light year “long.”⁵ And here’s a cool illustration of that. If you were to make a perpendicular line from the base of a triangle (QR), up through the hypotenuse PQ, like this…

…then that line would go through only one point on the base and only one point on the hypotenuse. No leftovers or shortcomings or anything. Just one and one. And then suppose you drew a bunch of these lines, like this:

You can see how the distance between points on the hypotenuse starts to look longer than the distance between points on the base, right? But the thing is, if there are infinite points to draw the line from on the base (and there are), and every one of those points corresponds to one and only one point on the hypotenuse (which it must, or all sorts of nerdy people will come and find you and beat you with pocket protectors, psychological afflictions, and all manner of other cliches), it must mean that the number of points on both of these lines is equal. And that number, in fact, is the enigmatic ∞ that we’ve been concerned with for these couple of posts. Hopefully this gets itself into your head just enough that I don’t feel like such a weirdo. What do you think? Let me know.

I’d like to tell you that I’m done throwing this stuff at you and that I’ll just eventually finish this and you’ll never hear another word about it. And that might be true. But if this book keeps dropping things like this on me and ruining my stuff… Well, I can’t make any promises, I guess. Chances are, though, you’re safe, so keep reading. See you next time.

¹ This is what it’s called when you’re flipping through channels and stop on something and then realize after a few seconds that ohmygoodness! you’re watching a Lifetime movie and then panic and flip to a different channel—any other channel!— faster than you ever thought possible.