#Zeno's Paradox

[mollyjames]

If I had to travel a distance, and knew I first had to travel half that distance, then half the remaining distance, and so on such that I might never reach my destination, I would simply travel to a location in the direction that was twice as far as the first

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Zeno's Paradox: ½ + ¼ + ⅛ ...

The "..." represents the rest of the infinite series. In this case, it would add up to another 0.78125%, but each element is supposed to be half of the one that came before it, so after 0.78125% comes 0.390625%, which rounds down to 0%. I want to see if it's possible to get a perfect Zeno's Paradox, half plus a quarter plus an eighth plus a sixteenth plus a thirty-second plus a sixty-fourth plus a one-hundred-twenty-eighth, and so on. This is one of those poll games like trying to make every option even, or trying to make stairs, or trying to split it 69-31. Try to make it 50-25-13-6-3-2-1-0.

[sepdet]

So I've been decluttering/cleaning the garage.

This morning, I dreamt that I came across a canister of rice.

For some reason,instead of just throwing it away or putting it in the kitchen, I had to get out a large chessboard and sort the grains of rice into pairs and take photos of myself with them for their (yes, the rice!!!) photo album.

Which is a modern spin on an ancient parable about a sneaky fellow asking to be paid in rice on a chessboard in which the amount of rice doubles each square, but either way, I think my subconscious is making fun of how I tend to Zeno's paradox every task I tackle.

HAHA VERY FUNNY SUBCONSCIOUS YES EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION DO BE LIKE THAT

and then, on top of that, it's taken me two flipping hours to write this because of arthritis/fibromyalgia micro-naps, which seem worse post-covid. To think I used to be a writer!

it's funny, but AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I miss being a functional human being.

I guess I should just thank my min/maxxing lucky stars I'm a (undeserving & privileged, but I don't deserve to have been born with arthritis either) trust fund baby with inherited UBI, because otherwise I'd be screwed.

[jeffmumm]

A high-quality print is now available of this comic!

[etakeh]

Is 3:00 in the morning and I'm sitting here thinking about how badly Zeno's paradox has fucked me up.

Nothing is ever actually clean. It's only half as clean as it was before. It can only ever be half as clean as it was before.

No job is ever complete. It's only half as complete as it had been. It's only ever going to be half as done as it had been.

Nothing is ever completely finished. Ever. Because it's ever only going to be half as much as it had been. And then half as much as that. And then half as much as that. And it never gets to absolute zero.

In conclusion: fuck off Zeno I hate you forever.

[thisismyideaofhumor]

I FINALLY HAVE POLLS!

[lyssified]

[trunkards]

Trunkards #575. Telling Zeno to step on it does no good at all.

© 2022 Rick Hutchins

[miss-hartsblight]

Maybe you and her could make out ;)

What is the difference between making out and kisses?

[tarotmander]

The composition is my own, the photos are not.

[coolmaycroft]

Mappa's paradox of impossible adaptation

[vaguely-none]

Zeno's essay conclusion

Why do you have to conclude essays...if you don't get my point read the essay again ❤️

[tishinada]

This may be old speculation; I didn't start playing until just before the last patches for Shadowbringers were released. But I was rewatching the Shadowbringers trailer & suddenly realized...Zenos had to survive Ghimlyt Dark. And didn't in the original timeline.

In the trailer, it shows the WoL killing Zenos, and it looks like that fight, using that cracked mask to suggest Zenos in someone else's body while showing him in his own so we know for certain who it is. And that's not what happened. *That* was the moment G'raha first significantly altered the timelines, by pulling the WoL out of their body for a conversation, which of course seemed like the absolute worst timing. Instead, I think it was the opposite, G'raha chose that moment intentionally. Because without Zenos, Black Rose was deployed which was what devastated the original timeline

There may have been nudges to the timeline earlier when he grabbed the Scions, but we know those weren't intentional. People like Estinien and Gaius were trying to stop Black Rose production, but they weren't enough. We know they weren't. It was only stopped because Zenos survived to kill Varis, reclaim his body, & stop Black Rose, whatever his twisted reasoning for doing so. So his survival was an important turning point.

Either way, I think that fight at the beginning of the trailer represented the moment the WoL killed Zenos in the original time line. It has no resemblance to what ultimately happened to Zenos in our timeline.

Zenos deciding to destroy the production of Black Rose might even be a bizarre instance of Azem's gift working even on an enemy who had begun to think of the wol as a friend in a twisted way, whatever the WoL thought of him. Certainly Azem's gift best accounts for his surprise appearance in U-T later.

EDIT: OK, rewatching some of the scenes (it's been quite a while since I watched the final Stormblood scenes), I'd confused the timing. That was actually Elidibus-in-Zenos's body, though it's also the battle where Zenos-in-an-elezen body starts trying to get to Garlemald (and he is also fighting with a katana). But I still feel like that's the point that was altered from the original timeline.

[lyssified]

it's the way half of our cast and crew are sobbing because we ran halfway and now we have to take 10 to cry

maybe this says something about us

[chiarrara]

sorry not sorry, I love jjk but the power system doesn't make any sense. it's a lot of hand waving over vague intellectual concepts the author doesn't actually fully understand which makes it sound really smart, complex, and deep. But really it's ricocheting between an ode to classic shounen power systems and a straight up recreation of them with a new coat of paint.

And that's fine! It's cool to get inspiration from philosophy and mathematics and physics, it's fine to use that inspiration without having a deep theoretical understanding of the concept, and jjk is nothing if not an ode to and a new iteration of the essence of the shounen genre.

But it doesn't mean the author's explanations of that power system--in the text itself or in additional materials--make any more coherent sense than the quantum physics in marvel movies. Trying to make sense of this stuff is a futile effort because it's not fully developed to that scale, and I think that leaves a lot of people either filling in the gaps themselves and misremembering that as text, or deciding the author is actually way smarter than them and they would need a lot more information to understand it, which is not true, because it doesn't actually make sense.

Complex ideas can be explained at very accessible levels in very simplistic ways when they are deeply and fully understood. If someone actually knows more than you, they won't make you feel like you can't understand the things they know. If they do, it's because they don't understand it well enough to explain it.